From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 14:25:05 MDT
Technotranscendence wrote:
The sortition experiment would be a good one to try, though I fear it
will only be of limited help in taming the worst aspects of democracy,
since ultimately it does nothing to reduce government power or to set up
an alternative self-reinforcing, self-limiting system. After all,
there's little to stop a sortitionist or even a demarchist government
from issuing emergency powers -- the "Crisis and Leviathan" scenario we
see all too often in the growth of government -- and thereby quickly
obviating its limitations -- as we see, e.g., with Congress giving war
powers to the President, thereby obviating a check on executive
warmaking powers.
### Yes, you are quite right here. If the MP's chosen by sortition, and by
extension, the population at large, do not care about their own freedom,
there is absolutely nothing (not even the perfect anarchy) that would
prevent them from losing it. I think this is a fundamental problem, which
cannot be solved by any political means. The only solution would be to
irrevocably change the physical structure of the universe, so that any
sentients would be able to ignore the actions of all other sentients, and
would be unable to affect others without their consent (this was explored by
Greg Egan in "Diaspora", where some polises were designed to provide exactly
this feature to their inhabitants).
Still, I think demarchy (with no legal way of modification of the
meta-elements of the system, like the division of powers, or duration of
duty in the parliament, without a universal vote) would at least assure that
the population would lose freedom *only* with their own full consent.
Whatever happens to them afterwards, they earned it.
Rafal
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