WetnessPensive

WetnessPensive t1_jaagiqj wrote

Reply to comment by colintbowers in The world should be governed by people with intellectual thought and people should listen by New-Shop-7539

We have studies that show that what passes for "democracies" are in fact highly anti democratic (in the sense that the laws they pass overwhelmingly favor a oligarchic minority, and uphold an exclusionary regime of property rights). So that's not really a good example.

The OP's post made me think of some kind of Star Trek future. Or maybe you could have an education system in which a computer selects the smartest people in various fields, and then randomly selects a group of them to lead for a set time, upon which they're replaced by another random selection.

You can even combine this with things like citizen's assemblies, or forms of participatory democracy. ie, the Big Brain Geniuses meet with randomly-chosen citizens to work on legislation, and if convinced by the Big Brain Geniuses, the citizens rubber stamp the legislation and push it up the chain to be enacted as law. This creates a kind of check on authoritarianism or on the Big Brain Geniuses steamrolling the populace.

And actually, some of this stuff has been tried in various countries to good effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette). What typically stands in the way of these methods being implemented is the usual thing: moneyed interests.

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WetnessPensive t1_jaae3w6 wrote

Reply to comment by LoWkEyPyRaT in The world should be governed by people with intellectual thought and people should listen by New-Shop-7539

Great point. Humans still legally rape babies and own slaves. Laws do not curb bad human behavior, and we have not used legislation to protect people and criminalize anti-social acts. There has been no human progress over the past few centuries, and enacting more laws, rules and legislation to make the world fairer is not possible, because of human natur- oh wait. I'm an idiot! The "human nature" argument is nonsense!

I'm reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke story, where he pointed out how you can create a fair, just economic and political system with a simple USB drive containing a word document full of societal rules. In his story the USB drive would go from planet to planet, and be codified by people on these planets as their new societal laws. Rules, the story argued, guide how socioeconomic systems behave, and these systems in turn shape people. ie- you want a better world, you get smart people to push smarter laws.

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