Equality by lot

Phil Wilson, a retired mental health worker, makes a pretty good, as well as entertaining, case for sortition on Resilience.org. Some excerpts are below, but the entire piece is pretty well written.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Can Sortition Save Us From the Zombies of Extinction?

If, like me, you live in the brain consuming fog of American culture, you might never have heard of sortition. Randomly selected citizens rather than ruling class proxies will make the important decisions in a future society that chooses to employ sortition as its fundamental political philosophy.

We need sortition to replace the poisonous, deformed contraption that we bizarrely call democracy. Let me try to explain.

Any available elective office summons demons, fiends and gargoyles from the burning sewage pits of hell – things with eyes pulsating, greedy and murderous. We want to keep these monsters calmly interred beneath the soil, and that can only occur if voting is treated like small pox.

Look at the wreckage surrounding us. We voted for it.

Most people who seek power in any political system are mentally deformed and broken – these are the people we try not to marry or even sit near at the pub, but we elect them with barely a thought.

We can’t have anarchy – we need a way to gather benign bureaucrats and harmless functionaries. We have seats in congress, seats in the senate, chairpersons and committee seats, and there has to be a method, other than voting for batshit, flaming, spirits of death – chosen by corporate goons. We need to simply match chairs with rumps. Give us body snatchers – blind ones with big nets.

Here is an empty congressional seat and there is someone sleeping rough on the street – that’s a match. We have an empty senate seat and a woman buying groceries with a baby perched in a shopping cart – yes? Why, in the interval between the kingdom of Pharaoh and the Biden administration, have we failed to tap into the inherent goodness of ordinary people? Well, yes, the Athenians understood – the only exception.

Women and men would fill seats according to their numbers. About seven senators would belong to the LGBTQ community, some fourteen would be Black, about nineteen would be Hispanic, five Asians – identity politics would be superfluous. Rather, all politics would die and rot like a horseshoe crab at low tide. Paradoxically, sortition is both utterly apolitical and the ultimate means of empowering the working class.

Now get this: about half of our body-snatched representatives would be making under forty K annually – people who are an illness away from destitution and homelessness. Twelve senators would have no health coverage just like the 12% of Americans who are uninsured and have no protection against illness. Can you say, “health care is a human right?” Those 12 hypothetical sortition selected senators sure as hell can.

I find it odd that there is almost no discussion about sortition on progressive platforms[.] Even as I write my own praise for sortition, I gravitate […] toward satire. There is something so fundamentally outrageous about sortition that we are inclined to adopt a comic air. No I am not joking. Sortition is a deadly serious matter.

For sortition to have a chance, hundreds of millions of people would need to be passionately on board. The fight for climate and equity is a battle for sortition. Right now there are probably a thousand people who can tell you who played nose tackle for the 1971 Oakland Raiders for every person who can define sortition.

That is a tragedy that will likely have terrible consequences. We are watching an entire planet being strangled under the jackboot of capitalism, and the solution is right in front of our snouts. Obviously, the CEO’s of Chevron, Google and Cargill would most likely prefer to have Stalin and Chairman Mao running the US government rather than allow a system of sortition. That is why we need it. But first comes the organizing.

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition |