Everyone tells me street names when giving directions like they don’t know I’m a landmarks only kinda girl
More you might like
The method of governance embodied in the kleroterion, which dates back to the very establishment of democracy, is called sortition, meaning selection by lot, as opposed to election by vote. The Athenians believed that the principle of sortition was critical to democracy. Aristotle declared that: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.” But along the way, sortition – and the even more exciting possibility of actual banishment – has fallen out of most democracies’ toolkits.
[…] Some fascinating psychological research underlies the subversive possibilities of sortition, which is best summed up by the phrase “diversity trumps ability”. This is the theory that solutions to knotty problems are best found by starting from the greatest number of different viewpoints and experiences – that is, from as wide a selection of people as possible. The cognitive diversity of such a group – which is not the same as racial or gender diversity, but is highly correlated with it – leads it to different and potentially more effective solutions. This is notably counter to the belief, dominant in electoral systems, that there exists a mythical best person for the job, capable of engaging with any number of different areas of policy. It has been found in multiple studies that random selection from a large group produces better answers to complex problems than the appointment of a narrow group of experts, making sortition a quite revolutionary idea if we choose to take it seriously.
We spend our days hoping that somebody, anybody, will come up with solutions to the issues we face; but nobody is coming to save us. There is no appeal to a higher power here. We have to build our own alternatives – and that really does mean all of us, from those on opposing sides to those who have had little or no political voice or representation until now. (In ancient Athens, as previously noted, the suffrage was limited to adult male citizens, and looking at the current make-up of parliament and corporate boards it doesn’t feel like we’ve actually improved that much. Real change will look very different; the optics are just a start.)
James Bridle, How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens (via luxe-pauvre)