And that “hat” would be big enough to hold the names of all the
city’s ratepayers and from that would come the nine people who would be our
city councillors.
The idea that we should use what is really a lottery to
choose our city councillors would be as equally effective as voting for our
preferred person.
Should you question or
doubt such an idea, and you may well be correct, but often reason is worse than useless and sometimes the
most rational choice is little more than a random stab in the dark.
Michael Schulson, an American freelance writer, who covers
science, religion, technology, and ethics
recently wrote in Aeon magazine about “sortition”
saying that someone, somewhere, or something is always playing dice.
Sortition (the random choice for anything) is not new as it
was practiced by the Athenians in ancient Greece to choose those in charge of
governing committees; magistrates, a role they
could not hold more than once in their life, putting paid to career
politicians.
Of course, the field in those
times had been narrowed somewhat as you needed to be a property owner and male,
two things that would not and should not be among the criteria today.
Of course, sortation
is alive and well in our society today and it brings with it responsibilities far in excess of whatever you might encounter
as a city councillor – using what in effect is a lottery system we appoint
people to juries and hand them the power to infringe on the life of another,
even to the extent of sending them to gaol.
A cursory glance at history
illustrates that even rational and reasoned choices can go horribly wrong; the
values of some elected are often not what they seem, and because of their
actions people can die and society can pay an alarming cost, both economically,
structurally, and emotionally.
Shifting to a dice-like decision-making
process might seem objectionable to many, but surely anyone prepared to have an
honest and objective look at what exists and brings people to power who are loaded
with obligations to causes and ideologies that are frequently foreign to the
common good, must admit that what we have is really oligarchy rather than
democracy.
Sortition or election by
lottery, would not be without its problems, but who could argue that what
exists is problem-free.
Writing on the ABC’s The Drum,
Ian Dunlop said: “What if all the stuff we complain about in regard to our
politicians - that they are unrepresentative, that they are out of touch, that
they are in the pocket of various vested interests, that all they are really
interested in is getting re-elected - what if all those problems are actually a
by-product of voting itself?”
He referred to Belgian
historian, David Van Reybrouck, the founder of the G1000 Citizens' Summit, who
doesn't want to get rid of voting altogether, but does want us to think about
other ways of deciding who governs us.
Reybrouck, he wrote, wants to
replace traditional democratic voting with a combination of voting and
sortition. That is the drawing of lots.
And so rather than voting in October for whoever we want on
the council, maybe we should just cast
our lot in with luck – it’s simpler, cheaper, and in nearly all instances, more
effective and doesn’t bring with it personal and ideological baggage.
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