Who should rule?

This question has been pondered for several thousand years. Over time, we have found different answers to this question: direct successors of a god, the wealthy, the landed, the Arians, the Brahman, the party, the noble, the strong or nobody at all. Are we any closer to a good answer yet?

Wars have been – and to a lower degree – are still fought over this question. Yet, it has probably been mostly futile. Well, at least if the goal were to advance civilization. What I believe to be a huge contributor: human beings.

I hold it to be inevitable that any system of rulers becomes corrupt, if it persists for too long. The prevention of nepotism has been a major driver in the evolution of systems of government. But it does not seem that we have found a system of sustained rule, which does not succumb to its lure.

The fact that we haven’t found a system that is resistant to corruption, if the same people have stayed in power long enough, does not mean that there is no such system. But I consider it to be a good enough reason to think about alternative approaches towards the question of governance. It’s not “who will make things better“, but rather “how can we make things better“.

Karl Popper probably framed the more relevant question best: “How can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence?”. Democracy has proven itself to be a quite robust form of governance that tries to answer this question. Alas, it seems that people have lost some amount of trust in the democratic process. From Minsk and Moscow, to Beijing and Washington, allegations of election fraud run rampant. I have recently written about some fixes for this, by securing the vote with technology.

From the perspective of Popper’s criterion, it is important to be able to iterate governments and test the ideas they propose as fully as possible. Interestingly, this makes compromise legislation and coalition governments look extraordinarily bad: nobody ever voted for a compromise legislation or the coalition; not a single voter was ever swayed by the ideas, theories or explanations of the compromise policy.
Coalitions test ideas that were never proposed for a vote and, if they fail to materialize beneficial results, do not falsify the ideas of the coalition partners directly, because they have not been tested in their pure form.

“How can we detect and eliminate errors?” is the fundamental question that progress is about. Do you think our current mode of testing policies via huge general elections that affect hundreds of millions is the best way to gather such information about what policy works? Do you think that anything remotely close to such a question is answered, when you are allowed to mark your favorite candidate on a ballot every x years?

I am not convinced it is. I think we need smaller, risk-limited tests. Maybe on a county or city level. We need many different tests in parallel. And I think we have to get rid of a class of politicians and parties that block progress, once they found themselves a comfortable spot near the feeding troughs of the system.
Randomized selection of legislators seems to me like the superior system. Of course it has to be tested first and there is no support for the idea. Yet.

Another possibility I have been pondering is “Government as a Service”. A complete legislature and competent executive branch with the appropriate administrative IT infrastructure being called in by the people of a city as an option to reboot their system. Their task would be to uproot corrupt networks of people, which are seemingly inevitable to spring up, if people are allowed near power for long enough, and to get the economy kick-started again.
This government, which would be strictly temporal, could be a default option on a star voting scheme. If there is too much discontent during elections, voters could choose it to get a restart. Of course, you would need to secure the integrity of the election first, otherwise a corrupt local government could prevent this option from being taken indefinitely.

Obviously, there are a lot of questions regarding that idea. Where does the police force come from? Where do these competent legislators come from? Would they leave after the allotted time period? How much of the local laws could they revert? Would they have the capacity to prosecute all alleged corruption claims? Could they handle organized crime? How do we prevent the “GaaS” from being staffed by organized crime? Or become corrupted itself? I am not entirely sure about answers to these questions, but would love to hear your ideas about it!
“Traditional” approaches in that regard are more focused on building entirely new cities, like the seasteading idea. Charter cities are probably closer to the question, although they are more focused on bringing sustained development to destitute places and not on “rebooting” a city. But I am pretty sure something can be learned from their experience and from experimenting with them.
As all ideas, this should be tested in a small setting. I am almost certain that there are enough places that would volunteer for this option, if it were given to them.

My working hypothesis is that competition in the realm of governance should lead to better outcomes, like it does on average in most “industries”. I think this holds true not only for cities in the developed world; the inhabitants of entire continents could benefit from better forms of government and better governance.

Finding a solution to this organizational, technological and procedural question of how to govern and how to test ideas more rapidly, might be one of the most important drivers for progress for the 21st century.

The real question is not “Who should rule?”. It implies that, if we only could get that one person to rule, we’d be fine. It’s a goal oriented approach.
The real question is: “What’s the right system to make sure we are fortuitously failing forward?”

Let’s get going!