If, like me, you live in the brain consuming fog of American culture, you might never have heard of sortition. Randomly selected citizens rather than ruling class proxies will make the important decisions in a future society that chooses to employ sortition as its fundamental political philosophy. Sortition has such a microscopic presence in the filing cabinets of American political thought that I once believed that I had invented it. But it wasn’t me – give credit to the ancient Greeks. The Greeks did not conceptualize sortition to be the cornerstone of degrowth – they simply recognized that a political class impeded Democracy. We, however, must understand that degrowth and sortition cannot exist independently – they must join together, become a single force.
We need sortition to replace the poisonous, deformed contraption that we bizarrely call democracy. Let me try to explain.
Any available elective office summons demons, fiends and gargoyles from the burning sewage pits of hell – things with eyes pulsating, greedy and murderous. We want to keep these monsters calmly interred beneath the soil, and that can only occur if voting is treated like small pox.
May we all be safely delivered from the voting booth, from the ballot box, from corporate punditry – please protect us from the rot oozing up from the the political depths. If the mutant powers of the ballot box can be stilled, those hourly speeches about border security will fade and evaporate as if we all awoke at once from the same nightmare. George Carlin told us decades ago that he doesn’t vote – but George made it into a personal decision. Maybe I should call myself a radical Carlinist – nobody should be certified to vote in my view. Look at the wreckage surrounding us. We voted for it.
You should not be allowed to vote for the lesser of two evils or for the prince of peace. No one should have the right to vote green, blue or red. No libertarians, five star movements, center right coalitions, National Socialists, and – sure as hell – no Democrats or Republicans! Most people who seek power in any political system are mentally deformed and broken – these are the people we try not to marry or even sit near at the pub, but we elect them with barely a thought.
We can’t have anarchy – we need a way to gather benign bureaucrats and harmless functionaries. We have seats in congress, seats in the senate, chairpersons and committee seats, and there has to be a method, other than voting for batshit, flaming, spirits of death – chosen by corporate goons. We need to simply match chairs with rumps. Give us body snatchers – blind ones with big nets.
Here is an empty congressional seat and there is someone sleeping rough on the street – that’s a match. We have an empty senate seat and a woman buying groceries with a baby perched in a shopping cart – yes? Why, in the interval between the kingdom of Pharaoh and the Biden administration, have we failed to tap into the inherent goodness of ordinary people? Well, yes, the Athenians understood – the only exception.
Random selection can be a beautiful thing. The NBA lottery allowed the San Antonio Spurs to sign Victor Wembanyama. Sometimes random chance goes wrong – like when one embryo becomes a tortured factory farmed chicken, and another becomes Elon Musk. Still, the laws of probability give us a fighting chance to muddle through the sixth extinction.
We should procure our leaders in the manner of stray dogs being ushered to the pound. One day you are as free as the wind, and the next day you are bound, cuffed and mandated to serve a two year term in the house of representatives. You don’t want this fate, but maybe you love democracy and your country – or maybe you don’t. It doesn’t really matter.
You were chosen to keep a sociopathic criminal from seeking election on a party ticket – successful candidates get voted in and destroy the world just as sure as the Chicxulub meteor smacked down the non avian dinosaurs. We have giant space rocks and we have petroleum lobbyists and narcissistic candidates running for office. Take your pick. Mass extinction involves a multiple choice answer, and the electoral system and the cosmic meteor can safely be chosen together – all of the above.
This method of snatching random strangers and dumping the victims into decision making institutions is, as I have already explained, called sortition – a rather uninspiring label for the most revolutionary idea ever conceived. Sortition is currently employed as an occasional adjunct to electoral systems, a way to create an interface between the members of the public and the ruling class, but it could easily fill the void in a system that sent the ruling class packing. Citizens’ assemblies resolved the abortion issue in Ireland. Extinction Rebellion has demanded that sortition be utilized to determine climate policy.
What would the members of a political body look like if we chose them via sortition?
Women and men would fill seats according to their numbers. About seven senators would belong to the LGBTQ community, some fourteen would be Black, about nineteen would be Hispanic, five Asians – identity politics would be superfluous. Rather, all politics would die and rot like a horseshoe crab at low tide. Paradoxically, sortition is both utterly apolitical and the ultimate means of empowering the working class.
Now get this: about half of our body-snatched representatives would be making under forty K annually – people who are an illness away from destitution and homelessness. Twelve senators would have no health coverage just like the 12% of Americans who are uninsured and have no protection against illness. Can you say, “health care is a human right?” Those 12 hypothetical sortition selected senators sure as hell can.
A sortition based society would create a vast feedback loop with cascading consequences that can scarcely be imagined. Political parties would decay and their dust would be blown away like tumbleweeds. Why would we need parties and billion dollar campaigns if we can kidnap our rulers for free?
Think tanks would have no purpose and neither would cable news conglomerates. You can’t brainwash voters if they don’t exist. Sortition is derived from a very simple assumption – the vast majority of ordinary people are not psychopathic predators, whereas most people seeking office run along a continuum between the Boston Strangler and Donald Trump. Voting has lead us to a swamp of pure quicksand.
Once sortition becomes the law of the land Harvard could be leveled and the grounds used to grow soy beans and alfalfa. If we imagine that the future governor of Massachusetts might have first been a clerk working in a cannabis shop, who then needs to shell out a half a million for a Harvard diploma? You could then use Harvard buildings for public housing and even for storage. Having worked for decades with unhoused people I can vouch that most can’t afford storage for their few possessions. One of my clients lost a baseball card collection (that may have been worth thousands) on the day that he was evicted.
Ivy league storage can remedy some of the horrible aspects of America’s antipathy for affordable housing.
Perhaps if our leaders gained positions of authority via random selection, affordable housing might be an essential priority. After all, some randomly selected representatives would be couch surfers or living in tent cities. We can’t end homelessness until the unhoused hold down their just portion of congressional seats.
One thing is for sure – under sortition, the Ivy League would be done educating tomorrow’s leaders. Fifty six of our hypothetical, randomly chosen senate members would have no college degree, and nine of them would have no high school diploma. Karl Marx, if you are reading this shoot me a text. Would sortition indirectly create “the dictatorship of the proletariat?”
In any case, a Harvard storage facility or sweet potato farm would not be creating more Henry Kissingers to make genocide into an academic science.
I find it odd that there is almost no discussion about sortition on progressive platforms, at least not serious discourse. Even as I write my own praise for sortition, I gravitate, like the writers at Current Affairs, toward satire. There is something so fundamentally outrageous about sortition that we are inclined to adopt a comic air. No I am not joking. Sortition is a deadly serious matter.
I have always been highly skeptical of those who talk about a rapprochement between the left and the populist right, but if such a fantasy needs to look for a unifying principle it ought to be sortition. For sortition to have a chance, hundreds of millions of people would need to be passionately on board. The fight for climate and equity is a battle for sortition. Right now there are probably a thousand people who can tell you who played nose tackle for the 1971 Oakland Raiders for every person who can define sortition.
That is a tragedy that will likely have terrible consequences. We are watching an entire planet being strangled under the jackboot of capitalism, and the solution is right in front of our snouts. Obviously, the CEO’s of Chevron, Google and Cargill would most likely prefer to have Stalin and Chairman Mao running the US government rather than allow a system of sortition. That is why we need it. But first comes the organizing.
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Instead, Biden with his zombie ideas, plans to continue shuffling along even as the world is engulfed in carnage.- Jeet Heer
Sure! Abandon meritocracy.
Especially when choosing your heart surgeon or lawyer.
DEI or die
The equity path to skills, certifications, wisdom, knowledge and understanding.
Random picks but not excluding the 68% Christian majority?
While I certainly agree that what generally passes for “democracy” in our world really isn’t democracy at all, and that it is a dumpster fire of a mess, a true dystopia, I’m not in favor of sortition. And I doubt very many people would be in favor of sortition.
My alternative vision for real democracy is to replace what I call “centripetal” power dynamics with “centrifugal” power dynamics. Centrifugal power dynamics are those power dynamics which concentrate power into points of position atop hierarchies. Centrifugal power dynamics do the opposite, which is to say that they empower everyone to directly participate in decision-making, etc.
As far as I can tell, this shift from centripetal to centrifugal power dynamics requires a reversal of the trend of Bigness, which is to say centralization. For example, in the USA, Washington D.C. would be pared way, way down as a center of power, while local neighborhoods would become empowered in all kinds of ways which they are not under centripetal power dynamics. What this does is replace representational “democracy” with direct democracy of a sort not requiring sortition. It places all of us into egalitarian decision-making dynamics. In my vision, almost all political decisions would be made of, by and for neighborhoods and villages, at the smallest local scale.
Some villages and neighborhoods would use modified consensus decision-making processes. Others would perhaps choose majority voting. And it is my view that so long as people can freely choose where they want to live, local communities at a “human scale” should be free to decide how they will decide things together.
The next scale up would be the immediate watershed, and the next scale up from there would be the bioregion. Villages and neighborhoods situated within these would have some sort of confederation at these larger scales, but the primary scale is the village and neighborhood, because that’s the scale where direct democracy is most viable.
Small is beautiful. Big is ugly.
Hey, James! I am not sure that this statement is either true or relevant – “And I doubt very many people would be in favor of sortition.” Most people have no idea what sortition is, and until sortition organizations and advocates succeed in injecting it into mass consciousness, we have no idea how the concept will ultimately resonate with the public. Clearly, those who hold power within the corporate media, have little interest in giving sortition a platform. There are a great many things that you and I probably favor that the majority do not – socialism for one (for me). If most Americans see socialism unfavorably (I don’t have the latest poll numbers on that issue) that has nothing to do with my being a socialist. What percentage of people favor degrowth, or even know what it is? Most commonly held views are a result of corporate media power – what Chomsky calls manufactured consent.
I also feel that there are downsides to decentralized government. We all know that states rights have lead to vicious suppression of women’s rights, voting rights, the rights of sexual minorities and the persecution of refugees and immigrants. I also don’t believe that decentralized forms of government necessarily address the issue of the toxic psychology of those who seek power. If neighborhoods are the scale that you wish to focus on, what is to prevent the biggest, loudest, most sociopathic thug from intimidating the neighborhood. To my knowledge, sortition (and nothing else) addresses innate psychological tendencies we all have (to a degree) to surrender to force.I believe that climate – being a global issue – will ultimately need some form of centralized coordination, but I am not holding my breath. I know that the issue of small, decentralized farming is a big issue on this platform, and my gut instinct is to support the idea that factory farming is an unsustainable catastrophe. However, I do not have the agricultural knowledge to unpack the issue of food production.
I do agree that there are many ways to improve government without sortition – ranked choice voting and multi-party coalition government would free us from the treadmill of electing any inadequate Democrat in order to forestall fascism for one more election cycle.
Is sortition a likely solution? Definitely not. As long as the most powerful forces seek to keep things as they are, the forecast is for more of the same. Would sortition work? Right now sortition is a thought experiment, but more people ought to be familiar with sortition enough to do their own thought experiments.
BTW, Pooshoodog is my (Phil’s) Disqus handle. Thank you for commenting!
I loved this, the snarky style, but also the core idea. However, it doesn’t mention that there WAS a people’s assembly to deal with climate–two in fact, one in France and one in Scotland. I read that the one in Scotland was betrayed when the rulers broke their promise to implement the findings–I don’t know what happened in France but they were apparently quite careful to select representative individuals, had the scientists address them to start, then let them debate. Not surprisingly, to me, they came up with serious, radical proposals. But whatever happened to that? I read about each of these ONCE. A few years ago. Obviously the corporate media is not going to breathe a word of this–sortition would totally screw up their cozy arrangements–but why hasn’t alternative media talked about it?
Thank you for the kind words. I know that sortition has a higher profile in Europe than stateside and It is well publicized that XR has made sortition into a major part of its platform. I was not aware of the instances you mention from Scotland and France. I suspect that the the use of sortition as an adjunct to traditional government, means that citizen’s assemblies can only make non-binding resolutions. I am fantasizing about a government of randomly chosen members invested with the authority and power of a normal legislature – as yet, an almost unimaginable development.
You ask about why the alternative media does nothing to promote sortition – I have an anecdote from this week that may give some light to this question. I submitted the above piece to a large, well known leftist platform that has posted my stuff recently, but they hedged on this one, saying that it wouldn’t land with their readers and I pushed back saying, as you just did, that sortition deserves a platform and then added (maybe a bit hyperbolically) that sortition is the ultimate expression of leftist ideals. My editor didn’t like that at all, and rather irately said that the left has too much work to do coping with an enemy that is strong and relentless. No, he said, sortition is not an important part of leftwing thinking. This platform has never posted a single piece on sortition.
I can speculate about a few reasons – sortition has none of the glitzy narrative things that we love. It does not reference revolution, class struggle, or socialism (although I believe all of those things are subtly embedded in the likely manner that sortition would play out).
The more disturbing thought to me is that the left has been dominated by people with bloated academic credentials. Leftist platforms mostly feature the musings of Ivy League luminaries – we have Marxist economists, Marxist historians, Marxist anthropologists, Marxist psychologists, but few, if any, Marxist steamfitters or hotel clerks writing on the left.
How many egotistical academics are eager to cede power to janitors and short order cooks? Incidentally, there is a great piece here https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-21/technology-ecology-and-the-commons-huber-and-phillips-barren-marxism/ by Thomas Smith detailing exactly the sort of over indulgent academic masturbation that I am complaining about. Well worth the effort.
citizen assembly is not sortition, they are rather an advisor capacity vs a form of govt. unfortunitely it is often confused to the detriment of actual sortition.
“…hundreds of millions of people would need to be passionately on board.” “But first comes the organizing.” These are the same caveats expressed by degrowth movement folk, who, like sortition folk, seem content to explore an interesting thought experiment, implying political plausibility but offering no plausible roadmap for achievement. Degrowth and sortition both require the complete deconstruction of our entrenched global governance & economic structures. But when I rightfully ask OK, what’s the plan? – there are just crickets.
Degrowth wants state control & enforcement for drastic mandated reduction of both production and consumption, the authoritarian solution. Sortition wants governance in the hands of randomly selected legislators, the quasi-anarchy solution. A quick look around makes it abundantly clear that the chances of any of this happening voluntarily & without violence are zero.
So my question is: what’s the point of lingering on in generalities about what-if scenarios that have no plausible path forward? ” Sortition is a deadly serious matter.” ?? No, it’s not. It is, as you say, a “fantasy” – that stops at the water’s edge, So again, what’s the point? What’s the plan?
“Sortition wants governance in the hands of randomly selected legislators, the quasi-anarchy solution.”
“Quasi -anarchy”?? I believe that quasi-anarchy (your term conveys a transparent contempt for the common folks who would be running a government far more rationally than the one we now have) is a good description of allowing big oil, the armaments industry and industrial agriculture to have unfettered capacity to smoke the planet to oblivion. But I would leave out the quasi!
The one point you raise that I agree with is that there is no plan. There is no viable left in America, no coalition against fascism, so yes, we are up shit creek.
There can’t be a plan until enough people can agree on a policy platform…….of course, crickets result….. as far as accomplishing the desired outcome. Lots of crickets are a necessity until people can work together to overcome anti-democratic, installed power.
Generalities, which you are dismissive of, are a necessity in creating democratic and accountable solutions in a complex system. People at this point have difficulty agreeing on generalities separate from specifics. Why be surprised or dismissive? More useless action without an intelligent plan is and has been a constant obstacle – a tradition.
But we already have crickets of a different sort claiming that the established plan is legitimate. That is going nowhere as well. The installed autocrats, and their heavily funded state, private sector and media backing, viciously insist that there will be no fundamental reform of authoritarianism. That is their plan. Again, why be surprised that pro-democracy people have great difficulty finding a way forward faced with an army of indoctrinated, aggressive drones operating the state machinery and a violent culture that protects the wall and socializes conformity?
Before there is a plan, there will be no plan. That is not inherently bad. Get used to it. Contribute to finding a way forward without dismissing the necessity of intelligent design in generality and specifics. That is how democracy and freedom work.
Nice unpacking! After the corporate apparatus achieves its strangling grip on both the government and the massive systems of brain washing, critics of alternative ways of governing complain that there is no path forward. One needs both a sense of irony and a sense of humor.
“Degrowth wants state control & enforcement for drastic mandated reduction of both production and consumption, the authoritarian solution.”
I believe that you have somehow failed to acknowledge that the authoritarian solution has been in play for the entire human phase of industrialization. The oligarchs and corporations have violently seized control of governments and initiated a reign of terror – well documented in the history of war and strategic genocide. I am hoping that you are not the sort to argue about the glories of freedom and free markets. The sham of free markets has lead us to our moment – a grim realization that we are playing the endgame with few pieces.
All political conflicts are matters of narrative strength. Degrowth is a thought experiment without, as yet, a “plan.” That is how narrative works. Can advocates of degrowth compete with the gazillion dollar oil industry propaganda empire, to gain narrative parity and amass a movement commensurate with the task of overthrowing the suicidal state. Probably not.
But climate will cause our systems to implode. We are careening toward fascism, but some of us continue to offer narrative resistance. Degrowth, if you don’t arrogantly dismiss it is deeply rooted in antiauthoritarian rhetoric. Thoreau and Emily Dickinson were philosophical pioneers of degrowth – hardly authoritarians.
I agree with you that the issue of force will, at some future point in time play a role, but force and violence are not always the same.
Firstly, appreciate the righteous anger which accurately recognizes the entrenched corruption and forceful authoritarianism. Your irreverence for establishment political economic norms is fully appropriate. Well done. Freedom from nonsense.
I am new to the idea of sortition but appreciate some of its merits…..it is an antidote to the established party machinery, propped up by wealth, legacy media, corporations and social manipulation, designed to maintain authoritarian power of a minority over the majority. This machinery is omnipotent currently, and is an impenetrable obstacle to the systemic change we so desperately need.
I also agree with your view that there does seem to be many good hearted individuals, unlike those long in power. I would prefer to have a homeless person rather than an establishment politician make key decisions about housing, access to affordable food and health care. Our leaders have failed and will continue to fail, wrapped in mythological stories.
We must channel each other – lol……i have said a number of times that i would trust a homeless person and welcome engaging with them as opposed to having to spend time with Trump or Biden.
Further, the randomness of sortition is both its strength and weakness. Equality is a strength…admirably so. But randomness is also a weakness. Randomness explicitly lacks some of the wholesome and skilful characteristics people would like to see in those making important decisions. Randomness also lacks the necessary political economic narratives required for systemic reform. However, i see your point….would it be any worse than the extremism now in power? Not likely.
I hope people can work together to create the political economic solutions to the imposed doctrines of authoritarianism. Sortition has some great features to recommend it. As a result, those in power will never permit sortition nor any other political equality objectives to remove authoritarians from control. A class based society further entrenches conflict classism while holding firmly to power.
Give’m hell. I’d give randomness a try rather than our long term confinement of 100s of years which is spiralling into a predictable future already collapsing under its corruption and social violence.
With respect to the larger problem of democratic reform, as a longtime electoral reform advocate I can attest that the typical reformer glosses over the small matter of the actual choices on the ballot. Adopting a system that gets us as close as practicable to the ideal — that every voter gets a rep of their choosing and every rep represents the same number of voters — inclusivity and equality both — doesn’t solve that problem… though it will certainly establish better incentives for all participants.
However, solving even electoral representative democracy’s core institution — the vote — is unlikely until the obvious but — like the elephant — ignored myth under which our present system operates is dispelled.
— — —
And there is no more important myth to dispel than the myth that a single elected individual represents the point of view and interests of everyone in any one district. It just isn’t so.
This myth “is credible only if we accept the proposition that a voter can be adequately represented by a person who is a declared opponent of the policies of the candidate preferred by the voter. Every single-member-district system allows only the voters forming one group* in each electoral district to have as their representative the candidate they choose. The others are effectively unrepresented in relation to matters about which the parties differ, and these, according to the parties, are matters of importance.” The Basis of the Authority of Government: Ensuring Consistency with the Will of the People — J.F.H. Wright 1983
Do not confuse or mistake electing representation with jury selection. Jury members are selected such that their biases are considered negligible or can be put aside in their deliberations. Juries are intended to be faithful stand-ins for everyone… their peers. On the other hand, political candidates are canvased on their biases (as well as their other attributes – knowledge, experience, critical thinking ability… hopefully) with the assumption that those will be taken into parliament and inform their contributions to the debate and their decisions. Even activities that one might reasonably assume to be performed without bias – the ombud roles – will, therefore, inevitably be touched by bias too.
Electoral democratic representation doesn’t end with the ballot count… it begins there. Voting isn’t ceremonial, it’s purposeful. The purpose (point, object, etc) of voting is inextricably entwined in the act of casting a ballot and the right to do so. But there is a profound disparity in legislative power between voters who have a voice and vote in parliament via a rep of their choosing throughout the life of each parliament, and those whose vote did not produce such representation. Suffrage is only one side of the electoral coin. The other should be matching inclusion and equality commensurate with the faithful translation of electoral intent into representation for the life of the next parliament. Currently, these are grievously mismatched. — (excerpt from advice to the proponents of the Charter Challenge for Electoral Reform.)
Of course sortition is largely a form of jury or citizens assembly. Juries and CAs are dependent upon susceptible to the larger framework in which they operate: the way they are charged, the framing of the questions, the assumptions of action to be taken upon arriving at a verdict.
I’ve closely observed two CAs on electoral reform — in BC and Ontario. The first, I would call a success, the second not so much. But for both the conclusion they reached was put to a referendum making the effort moot.
On the other hand, the chap who ran a parallel student CA during the OCA has made a business of helping folk mount citizen assemblies to address particularly vexing questions.
In other news, after a long career as a political science professor, Vaughan Lyon of Trent University (coiner of the term “partyocracy”) wrote something of a summing up book called “Power Shift – From Party Elites to Informed Citizens” in which he argued for what he called “constituency parliaments” — bodies of ordinary citizens (elected, not “sorted”) which operated in parallel and provided advice to the usual suspects… our legacy legislatures. In conversation he liked the idea of a more representative legislative body (I was advocating STV) but emphasized the need for citizen investigation and debate. I think he’d approve of the idea of sortition to populate these constituency parliaments.
Again, the absurd myths we perpetuate keep us from moving forward and, I’m afraid, will continue to do so until we experience something on the order of a mass epiphany. Unfortunately we’ll fall over the edge of the climate cliff long before that happens. Unless… red pills for everyone!
I applaud this post. Meritocracy (capitalism, communism, whatever) is a fool’s errand, because no matter how good its intentions, or even initial instantiation, may be, once it solidifies into a fixed target the psychopaths will home in on it like flies to feces, and because they are far more adaptable (and numerous) than any institution ever could be, they will always win in the long run. As the Chinese Communist Party will eventually discover …
Sortition, together with localization (think small), essentially seeks to emulate evolution: Keep trying random variations on a theme until you find something that works, and then hope it out-replicates the rest (which is never a given). As our very existence attests, it can work, but only on a big planet over long periods of time, and as we all should know by now, we no longer have either.
Perhaps our only hope is that we develop a DNA test for psychopathy, and that one of those ephemeral meritocracies springs up just in time to institute it effectively. Because I do not agree with the author that “the VAST majority of ordinary people are not psychopathic predators.” They’re probably not the majority but they are not a very small minority either, especially since we’re talking about degree rather than kind, and both culture and nurture play a big role (don’t forget what Hannah Arendt said about the “banality of evil”).
Otherwise, I guess we’re back to the evangelicals’ dreams of divine salvation here on Earth … but if that were in the cards, it would’ve happened long ago.
Good comments! I have been thinking about meritocracy and the mythic, deceptive role it has in the popular vision of US politics. The terms, qualified and unqualified, are tossed recklessly about as if politics were a technical skill like algebra, basketball footwork or rhythmic execution of violin passagework. It might well be that meritocracy, as a concept, is a secular version of eugenics – a means of rationalizing unfair hierarchies to people who might be squeamish about overtly racist justifications. I view our political figures as being almost pure expressions of social privilege.
“Psychopath” is a popular descriptive term that never makes an appearance in the DSM (the official diagnostic list for mental disorders). The only DSM term that roughly coincides is antisocial personality disorder. The exact percentages of antisocial disordered people in the general population is unknown. I have seen estimates of under 1% up to 4.5%. There are no studies that I know of alleging higher numbers. I don’t believe that this disorder represents a stumbling block for sortition.
There are scientists who believe that antisocial behavior might have a genetic basis in up to 50% of cases. My son is way more interested in this stuff than I am, and he told me that lower economic level sociopaths are less likely to have genetic markers and more likely to have suffered trauma. These people are likely to wind up in prison. A study in Nature set the estimates of antisocial personality disorder in prisons at 10-30% (a pretty wide gap suggesting it’s a wild guess.) I am not sure if anyone has a firm grasp on the exact means of confirming genetic markers.
Estimates of anti-social behaviors in corporate CEO’s run at about 20%. Almost surely this would be higher among national politicians. Lying is to a politicians what velocity is to an MLB pitcher. Here is a quote to consider:
““Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Its a bit hypocritical of me to quote Dr. Stout after opining that Harvard ought to be transformed into a sweet potato farm. I would guess that when you look at fascist politicians, the rate of sociopathy begins to approach 100%. The Republican party would probably outdo Death Row in San Quintin in this metric. Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz – in a better world – would become lab rats for Martha Stout.
Studies of Nazi behavior (I.E. The Milgram experiments) looked to examine willingness to follow orders rather than psychopathy. Arendt was a political philosopher and not a psychologist. It was claimed that a number of psychologists examined Eichmann and deemed him to be normal. I don’t know if this has been confirmed, and I doubt if any psychologist up on these concepts would fail to label Eichmann as a sociopath today. Arendt, however, made a more important point – the infrastructure of genocide depended far more on dispassionate bureaucratic routine than it did on human emotion.
In the Nazi hierarchy the top figures were all psychopaths, and we see the same collection in the Republican party. Nazis believed in eugenics as Republicans (and Democrats) believe in meritocracy. No sortition in either worldview.
BTW, I worked in community mental health for almost 4 decades in very poor neighborhoods. Many of my clients had prison histories, yet I never had a single person that I would comfortably call a sociopath. I did see a few who made it to upper management in my agencies – that is a different matter.
The DSM-5 term is “callous-unemotional” (CU).
As a retired mental health worker I am now free to ignore the new terms that trickle into the DSM. In the spirit of true confession, I was pretty lax about continuing education in my working life. However, according to online sources, CU is an additional descriptive term for those dx with “conduct disorder” – a diagnosis only given to those under 18. Still, it sounds like a great term to label most politicians, so long as clinicians don’t have to use that dx to bill for Lindsay Graham’s therapy sessions.
Thank you. Given your background in mental health, I expect you’re already familiar with Chris Hedges, a NYT reporter turned minister who’s work a lot with prisoners?
I will also hazard a guess that one of the best indicators of “psychopathy” is how much time a person spends thinking about money, perhaps multiplied by their net worth. Someone should probably put something like that into the DSM …
I am a fan of Chris Hedges. Someone came up with the term “pathocracy” to describe the US political system. Politicians, in my view, are a front for corporate actors. Our elected officials go back and forth between government and corporate systems. The boundaries between the two are nonexistent.
As a recovering politician (20 years as a lawmaker) I fully endorse this take on sortition. I have studied and written extensively about sortition, which is taking off around the world (not in the U.S. yet). I urge interested people to check out my book being released for free in emailed posts. You can see all of the chapters so far and subscribe here. https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elections?r=cvh3h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Hi James,
Unfortunately most of what we imagine to be ideal or even useful are just private fantasies. I am speaking for myself. My ideas about sortition give me respite from the understanding that the world carries me along like a piece of straw riding atop a tsunami. The virtues of sortition comes from a very dark place for me. I believe that many people who want to have a position of authority are potentially dangerous. Sortition is the only way that I can imagine for people to attain power without scheming and desiring to claw their way up the ladder. This is true in any organization – a church, a gang, a paramilitary organization or a charity to buy wheelchairs for quadriplegics, a village council. However much delight I get from my utopian dreams of sortition, I realize that the forces of power have no intent to allow sortition to take shape. That goes for my other dreams too – socialism, equity, peace, simplicity, degrowth….etc. Like yourself, I too struggle to square my ideals with the bleak, ominous world looming over us.
I know that I posted the link at the beginning of the piece, but here is the link again to the Sortition Foundation: https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/
I wish this organization had a more flamboyant style of PR. Sortition needs to be exciting – but then again, it is called sortition.
Hi Phil (Pooshoodog) –
“I also feel that there are downsides to decentralized government.”
Well, since you’re advocating for sortition, I figured I may as well fantasize about how I’d like governance to function. I distinguish between government and governance, for beginners. And I’m not much of a fan of government, which is what states do and have. I don’t like or want states of any kind, since they belong to the dominators who run, rule and own the world.
Communities can be self-governing on the basis of democracy, but democracy, to my way of thinking, is about governance, which is the larger set of which government is a subset.
Each local community (village or neighborhood) would have to guard against bullies, each in their own way, as they independently decide.
Anyway, I’m dreaming as much as you are. The truth is that we’re all heading into global ecological, political, economic and social collapse … as the climate system is coming entirely unravelled much faster than was predicted, and this will mean all of the basics, including food supply, will become exceedingly difficult to maintain. As much as I’d like to see us handle the demise of our present civilization intelligently and with kindness and compassion, it’s getting harder to keep dreaming that we can or will.
I find sortition a very ungraceful way to try and enact democracy. But I’d not keep you and your neighbors or fellow villagers from using it. I think we need to let go of Bigness and external controls on people’s lives. Government has been a failure, utterly, and I’d rather do without it.