Equality by lot

Democracy is the paradise of which the unscrupulous financier dreams. —Georges Sorel.

Corruption is a heartbreaking problem, because it is so enervating, insidious, invisible, and seemingly intractable. There are regions and nations where it is so pervasive that they are halfway to being “mafia states”—Russia is one example, and Ukraine is (or was) another. The parasitic top dogs siphon off wealth and prosper at the expense of the poor and of the vitality of the economy, which wouldn’t be happening under a true, all-seeing Demiocracy—i.e., if the common man, or Everyman, were really in charge.

Africa is the worst victim. Gaining independence and a one-man, one-vote democracy did not make Africa free and self-governing. That is to say, independence did not usher in true democracy, but only DeMockery. It empowered the Political class and other Pathological P’s, not the common man. Members of the political class, there as everywhere, put their personal interest first, their party’s interest second, and the people’s interest third—a distant third. The kleptocrats prospered and misgoverned, leaving most Africans poor, despite the continent’s natural wealth.

De-colonization raised false hopes, because the worm of corruption was in the bud—which was a crying shame. A terrible cynicism and hopelessness can result, if no thorough-going alternative to DeMockery can be imagined.

It’s a dirty old world.
It’ll make a man cry.
All the do-nothings live.
—God a-mighty now—
And the good people die.

Patrick Sky, Nectar of God

This question, Why Evil men often prosper, and Good men suffer adversity, has been much disputed… as it hath shaken the faith, not only of the vulgar, but of Philosophers, and which is more, onto the Saints, concerning the Divine Providence. —Hobbes, Leviathan, part II, chapter 31.

[John Adams believed that] men are equal in their common passion for reputation and superiority, which he made into a secular equivalent of the Christian doctrine of original sin. —Ronald Lora, Conservative Minds in America, 1971, p. 21.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. —Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 5, scene 1.

But the ever-recurring question that evening was Who? Who started it? Who is to be blamed and punished? … I was emphasizing the point that society really offers a prize for evil-doing: money, position, power ….

“What we want to know [said the bishop], is who founded this system, who started it, not only in San Francisco and Los Angeles, in this or the last generation, but back, way back, in the beginning.”

“Oh, I think I see,” I said. “You want to fix the fault at the very start of things. Maybe we can, Bishop. Most people, you know, say it was Adam. But Adam, you remember, said it was Eve, the woman: she did it. And Eve said, no, no, it wasn’t she; it was the serpent. And that’s where you clergy have stuck ever since. You blame the serpent, Satan. Now I come and I am trying to show you that it was, it is, the apple.” —Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 1931, p. 574.

[Political reform] consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. But political government, i.e., government by professional job-hunters, would remain in fact … and its nature would … be unchanged. —H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection, 1955, 182-83.

Mencken is talking about the same “root” of political evil as Steffens: “the Apple” of grab-able power, which attracts the grabby and corrupts the rest. (“When a man casts a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” —Jefferson.)

Demiocracy would, I suspect, garner at least a nihil obstat (“no objection”) from Mencken, because it replaces professional jobseekers with less objectionable amateurs and semi-professionals; and because it replaces DeMockery’s  tempting “apple” with lesser rewards—I.e., with offices that have 90% less power, and thus are less dangerous in the wrong hands—and which also are less attractive to them.

Mencken himself later, in 1926, put forward his own solution (sortition), writing:

I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now. —in “A Purge for Legislatures”, online at https://equalitybylot.com/2018/10/06/mencken-a-purge-for-legislatures/.

But that method is too simplistic, as I contend hereafter, and as Mencken seemed to acknowledge in his conclusion:

I have launched my proposal that it be extended upward and onward, and the mood of constructive criticism passes from me. My plan belongs to any reformer who cares to lift it.

I think Mencken would have favored Demiocracy with a benedictory chef’s kiss. Here’s a presumptive pat on the back from another source:

Competition for power must somehow be regulated or institutionalized. —W.G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory, 1969, p. 2.

Where it is not regulated, unsavory types rise:

It sometimes seems that all too many of the people who survive in politics—as in so many other areas of Indian life—are blustering, aggressive, corrupt types, people who trample on the rights of others. —Ved Mehta, “Letter from New Delhi”, New Yorker, 87-1–19, 58.

A true African liberation would put the common man—that is to say, groups of ordinary-citizen Everymen—on top, in catbird seats over every government department and official. 

Every organ of the collectivity, brought into existence through the need for the division of labor, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes consolidated, interests peculiar to itself. —Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1915, p. 353.

Then, with the aid of their investigators, prosecutors, and sergeants-at-arms (as many as needed), plus rewards for whistleblowers, malefactors would be detected and ejected.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking. —H.L. Mencken, “Sententiæ: The Mind of Men,” 1914, in A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1949, p. 40.

Most people are good only so long as they believe others to be so. —Henkel, in The Viking Book of Aphorisms, 141.

So, awareness that a PE or its investigator(s) is watching and might pounce will deter most politicians from most forms of corruption.

Only as empowered insiders can Everyman accomplish this. This requires a narrow/deep democracy—one in which the citizen-electors are assembled in small, topic-focused, ever-attentive groups.

Corruption cannot be expunged by a wide/shallow “every man” democracy (DeMockery), because in it the electors are outsiders—Distant, Diffused, “Disinterested,” Disaffected, Distracted, Divided, and subject to the machinations of the Pernicious P’s.

An early detection of abuse is the direct interest of government … merely as a system intending its own conservation. —Edmund Burke, The Philosophy of Edmund Burke, p. 171.

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