Besides, complete equality in all decision-making is anti-meritocratic. You don't earn being right on a topic just by stepping into the room. Conversely, though, anyone could be right—credentials don't make you right, either. Arriving at a good answer by a sound process: whoever you are, that makes you right this time.
If democracy means "The larger population has the best questions and the best answers, because it has all the available information," then I'm for it, because that's a true statement. No one's got even a hundredth of everything known. But take the entire population, and it knows everything known. The total crowd has all the brains. And it has all the heart.
The tricky bit is how to extract the best answers from all the answers.
Good democracy is less about "one man, one vote" (though universal suffrage would be a good thing) than about needles and haystacks. The needle's in there. How do you find it and get it out?
You just might have picked up on my belief that how we've been doing this is suboptimal in a big way.
I know that rubs people's patriotism the wrong way, but it has to be said.
I'm far less interested in convincing you of a particular answer than in getting you to ask the question, and often: How can democracy work better?
