X-factor style once-a-week Political Voting System

#1

My Taoist master once told me a story about a valley town that was being flooded by heavy rains. So the town people got their “best” brains together and decided that the best plan of attack was to build a wall of sand bags just before the village near the bottom of the valley. A Taoist master comes along and sees all the frantic work being done and so he climbs to the top of the mountain and moves one rock a few feet and leaves off on his way to the next town.

The small rock he moved diverted the flow of the flooding waters away from the village and safely into a nearby river.

Here’s the moral of the story - Are we able to focus on one small change that would then give us the ability to implement Meritocracy worldwide?

I’ve done my calculations and I think the small rock is an X-factor style once-a-week Political Voting System for the people. It’s about time politics catches up with junk entertainment don’t you think? The voting every 4-years thing is becoming a very offensive joke.

At a frequency of every 4-years they can change what the people vote for, they did it recently in Greece this year! The people voted to default on the IMF loans and after a few weeks of jerking off their own politicians reversed the peoples decision and did the exact opposite. Similarly in Australia the ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard once said “there will be no carbon tax under her government” and then a few months later she implemented a carbon tax. The Woody Harrelson doco “Ethos” (free on youtube) in the first scene shows many politicians saying one thing then the exact opposite a short time later.

Now let’s speed this up from voting every 4-years to once-a-week voting, sure they could weasel out of this or that but at that frequency the people would get what they want 90% of the time.

What do you all think? Could this be the small rock that diverts the flood?

#2

Let me explain further…

Mathematical analogy: Our society right now is a two-tier society where there is one set of mathematical formulas (legal laws) that apply to the rich, and another set of mathematical formulas (legal laws) that apply to the poor. If you have the money you can afford to keep appealing a court case to higher and higher (more corrupt) courts. All it takes is more money, for those born rich it’s nothing and if anything they get a “suspended sentence” or a “reduced sentence”. The trick they play to the media is in the fact that at first they pass down a sentence that’s a few years long, but in reality they get out in a matter of months. “Got 5-years, out in 3-months, fooled 'em all didn’t we?”…

Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis: The two-tier society tries to keep the thesis and anti-thesis apart and separate, so that they never become a synthesis. For example: Democrats VS Republicans, Labor VS Liberal, Capitalism VS Communism, Thesis VS Antithesis - never coming together in Synthesis by design! We need multiple synthesis to take place to reach a better world. We can do this by speeding up time, the cycle of voting.

Musical Analogy: harmony and discord, I made a song using 12 different scales all in the one song. It came together with minimal discord and was mostly harmonic and beautiful. Most musical theorists would say that is impossible, that’s simply because they haven’t simplified the musical theory formulas down to the basics. If you do your research dissonance only applies to polyphonic tones (tones being played at the same time), along with the memory of what was recently played in the last bar or so. With a 4-year voting cycle we feel or “hear” notes of discord, yet months go by and there is enough distractions and forgetfulness in the mean-time to forget every time one has been fucked over by their politicians. But by increasing the tempo of the notes and creating some overlapping notes it is impossible not to recognize dissonance as soon as it is heard.

Visual Analogy: Voting every 4-years is like a video that only changes frame once every 4-years. If we speed the video up to show a new frame every week, it is much harder if not impossible for human memory to forget every time he has been lied to.

Military Analogy: Your opponent has one chink in his armor, with one powerful directed thrust you win the battle. Could this be the one move that wins the War?

Medical Analogy: A small cancer on the body is about to spread into the entire blood stream and lymphatic system, only with weeks remaining the surgeon cuts out the small grape-sized tumor and saves the person life. Could this be the one thing infecting the whole system? How many laws are there? One estimate said about 200,000-laws!! Who has the memory to remember that many laws, show me one judge or one citizen! The rich don’t worry because they don’t have to remember the laws and they don’t have to follow them, or you getting it now?

The root of Democracy: it comes from the Greeks and it has very little to do with today’s Shamocracy! Firstly, they didn’t elect politicians who could easily be bribed or black-mailed (today’s legal political donations = bribes, pedophiles, etc…). What they did have however was a random selection of citizens that was rotated regularly, and the citizens (not politicians) voted on all the laws. Hence I close my case, for democracy to come full circle we basically need to go back to its roots while making the use of modern technology eg. phone, sms, and internet voting. We don’t need the politicians, we never did, the fact that we proxy off our votes to them is pathetic and very sad.

#3

It’s a novel idea and certainly interesting to contemplate, but I don’t see it working in practice because people would quickly forget and tune into the real X-Factor, leaving it in the hands of militants who will vote every week for “their guy” zealously.

Unless you have ideas in mind to keep most of the population interested in voting every week then I’d focus on figuring out the mechanics of “meritocratic voting”: people with qualified opinions voting on qualified leaders.

Open Source Political System
#4

Open-Source projects do this. The code, designs and rules are open for all to see, that’s the democratic part of it. Now the meritorious part of it is in the fact that only people who have skills in that area will submit potential solutions to specific problems. Then each competing solution is compared by it’s efficiency and speed.

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Open Source Political System
#5

I think a highly participatory democracy with low barriers for participation, but with a system of delegation as more people get involved and as the problem will work, so you get people living in a neighborhood to come together and make decisions about common issues that they face and collectively manage their local environments. I think you could get this to work in a local sense by having:

  1. secure online systems where people can go and debate and talk about different things in their areas in between community assemblies as well as do anonymous voting to allow people to easily vote with a minimum of social pressure influencing the vote and;
  2. regular community assemblies which would comprise education, so the people can learn about science, history, economics and everything else to allow them to be informed citizens, decision making to create and debate possible strategies to deal with local problems, and a more social aspect to foster and create a community that everyone feels they can be part of (unless they have been deliberately excluded due to destructive behavior) and provide incentives to encourage participation. This sort of thing could be hosted in a modified library so the people can easily access information required to make an informed decision. The library would be modified in the sense that it is a council, a community center for social events and education and a center of social and political activity in each neighborhood.

By having people participate directly in democratic process you allow for them to be transformed by it.

This is for local levels of just over a few hundred people. To deal with larger numbers of people, larger resources and more complicated problems, you could merge these community assemblies together and have each assembly elect delegates to the next level up. The point of a delegate is for them to takeover dealing with and deciding how to deal with a problem when you do not possess the expertise or interest to deal with that specific ‘genre’ of problems. They would also be subject to immediate recall. At this level it would be broadly equivalent to the size of a local council responsible for several thousand people. For each level up, delegates from the lower level elect delegates to go up. To keep this accountable once you get to areas the same size as a city or larger, delegates have to be ratified by the population that they would make decisions for, and all decisions would have to be available and easy to find for all citizens. The criteria for being eligible to run as a delegate is what can be made really meritocratic ( ie delegates for economic planning has a finance degree, delegates for the environment is an environmental scientist, and so on).

Naturally this kind of system leads itself towards complexity but would tick all the boxes and be made meritocratic, democratic and fairly corruption proof quite easily. A side effect would probably be the construction of lots of libraries, including truly massive ones once you get to provincial and national assemblies. XD

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