#chaocracy

[tendrilsofreality-blog]

Peter J. Carroll on Chaocracy

From Peter J. Carroll's Psybermagick

The Problem:-- 1. We have to delegate responsibility for government, as most of us have better things to do for most of the time. 2. Nobody who wants political power should have it. 3. De-electable bodies retain power largely by maintaining the interests of the stasis quo, and cannot act with the impartial wisdom that the luxury of time to govern could allow them to develop. 4. Elected bodies abrogate much of their power to people who act as monarchs, and then waste much of their time and efforts in factional infighting. Let us select a legislative body by purely random means. Let us reward those so chosen with salaries which put them beyond corruption. Let us replace one half of those chosen by random means every few years. A chaocracy will contain representative proportions of all ages and sexes. A chaocracy will have the assistance of a civil service to advise it. A chaocracy will free us from the conflict of party political ideology with conscience, and free us from the distasteful business of casting our votes amongst professional liars. Let a chaocratic government debate openly but legislate by secret ballot. Let the outcome of such vote act as the head of state rather than invest one person with this power. We trust people's lives to randomly selected juries as the only fair method, should we use any less fair method for a nation or a planet?

[tendrilsofreality-blog]

I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right. I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile