Latest / Mechonomist Podcast / Elections are Not Democracy

Transcript

Elections are Not Democracy · Mechonomist Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, election season is upon us, and it looks like it's going to be a three-way race between
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Robert Kennedy Jr.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: So here we go.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Really, elections are not democracy.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're places for people who are power and money hungry to manipulate the population
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: in what is essentially a popularity contest.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: The state is so complex and impenetrable that the leaders of our country have no way of
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: actually explaining the policies that they're promoting to the population, and the population
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: doesn't really have the tools to understand them.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially, it's a popularity contest.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Among the worst people.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Among the worst people in our country.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there was the saying, Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst type
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: of government except for all others.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, elections are not even democracy.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Democracy is self-government.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The people govern themselves.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the best way to have self-government is by lottery.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Public officials should be picked by lottery like jury duty.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: They should serve for a set number of years.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: They should not be able to vote.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It should be a part-time job that they can do in their free time.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that would clear up a lot of the problems in our society.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: The policies would become much simpler because it would be lay people writing the policies
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: and designing the policies.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the expertise would be in solving practical problems, not in manipulating the process
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: in order to become rich.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And powerful.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it's likely that this would only work well in a highly decentralized society, not
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: like ours, which is very much a highly centralized empire.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if you had a small communities in which people basically took turns governing the
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: community, you would have a sort of participatory democracy in which regular every day people
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: governed themselves.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: That would be democracy.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: What we have now is not democracy.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's some sort of show.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a show.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a facsimile or a facade of democracy, but it's not people actually governing themselves.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's governance by the rich and the powerful who manipulate the election process in order to secure
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: those positions.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I see that we have two viewers on.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to recap what I said.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is election season and it looks like it's going to be a three way.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: What race between Robert Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump and Joe Biden?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: None of these are really.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Decent people or good people or moral upstanding people.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're all kind of manipulative, play in the game.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Trying to get power.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not democracy.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Democracy is community self governance.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And really, we shouldn't have elections at all.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't vote for people.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: But to win popularity contests, we should choose our leaders by lottery.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if we choose our leaders by lottery, then every lay people get to govern the community.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: It should be a part time job that they can do in their free time.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it rotates.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It rotates around with everyone in the community and everybody gets a chance to lead and govern
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: and make decisions for people in the community.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually a biblical type of process, a biblical type of governance.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Matthias set up a type of governance like this for the Jews in the Old Testament.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're going to do.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So as you watch the elections this year and you see what Biden, RFK and Trump say, you have to realize that their motivation is to augment their own wealth and power.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not going to tell the truth.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: None of them are going to tell the truth.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And everything that they do and say is in order to manipulate the population.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the system that we have set up, which a system that requires our leaders to manipulate the population is not a democracy.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's an oligarchy or a plutocracy or something like that.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: But it's definitely not a democracy.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: A democracy would be decentralized self-governance with the leaders of communities chosen by lottery.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll see you all next time. Peace y'all.
• 5:29
  Peace.