Abolish Politicians — Why We Should Just Put Random People In Office
Why do we have politicians? Please just think about this for a minute. Couldn’t you just select random people off the street and have them do a better job, or at least a less professional job of looting? This is in fact how democracy was supposed to be. Ask Aristotle:
It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.
Athenian citizens — all being equals — literally drew lots for most positions. Athens didn’t have a semi-permanent political class because that would inevitably become a ruling class, AKA an oligarchy. Which is what we have today. We just vote on which branch of the oligarchy screws us, and call it a democracy. Aristotle would laugh. They didn’t have the same value judgements attached to systems of governance as we did, but based on what we claim to value, we’ve fucked it all up.
We’ve just ended up with minority rule like the enslaving Greeks, except we’re hypocritical about it. They at least said that only rich men could be citizens, but once in you were equal. We say that almost anyone can be a citizen, but still end up ruled by rich men. We’ve improved the spirit of democracy but fucked the process all up.
