Equality by lot

Went to see The Doors biopic (highly recommended) the other day and was surprised to catch Jim Morrison saying something like “We don’t need an elected president, we need a jury democracy”. As this was the prelude to the notorious Miami concert rant nobody picked up on it as it was overshadowed by the resulting obscenity trial.

Morrison was famously well-read but it was more Rimbaud and Nietzsche than Herodotus. This would suggest that sortition-based ideas might have been circulating in the student radicalism movement at the time of the Vietnam war protests.  Can anyone cast any light on this, and did anyone else catch Morrison’s remark in the movie?

Filed under: Sortition |