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How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this

How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?) Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D

gampleman 10d ago
Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light. For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc. So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse. Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher). So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
- rickydroll 10d ago
  Look at the National Guard model. I'm also thinking that if we made it a regular thing, like the draft, employers could be required to hold the slot open for the person after they've done their tour of duty. However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.
- soundnote 10d ago
  Jury duty used to work: As immigration continues apace, it will fail. Lee Kuan Yew had to end jury trials in Singapore because as he notes, in a multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion"
  - phtrivier 9d ago
    Do you have a link to any study about that ? That would probably not happen in Europe, but at least in the US, ethnicities can be studied, so any bias could be visible statistically ?
jrflowers 10d ago
We have a system that does that. That’s how we do jury duty. We use sortition to decide important things every day
Ygg2 10d ago
That's not how it was usually run, but say in Ancient Athen's the council that decided was whoever was at the council at that time.
krapp 10d ago
>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0]. Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
- phtrivier 10d ago
  I meant "unwilling people are forced to _exercise_ power". I don't know that it's the case in any representative democracies - people literally _compete_ to access power.
  - krapp 10d ago
    Ok. That would be weird. Presumably if you have power, you have the power to just quit or resign. Given how much effort people put into getting out of jury duty I can only imagine how something like sortition (which I think is what you're describing) would work. Would it be like military conscription, where you could go to prison if you're AWOL? If so, who really has the power in that scenario? And there's also the problem of competence. Forcing some random to act as Secretary of HHS is more likely to get us an RFK type than someone who knows what they're doing. But then vetting candidates with some kind of voir dire like system is just voting, except only a few people get to do it.
    - jjav 9d ago
      These are all problems. On the other hand we know for sure from centuries (millenia?) of evidence that allowing the people who most crave power to be the ones who seek and obtain said power, is a recipe for disaster as well. It is interesting to brainstorm what could be a better system. I think clear qualifications should be required. So to use the HHS example, it would have criteria to be a doctor, certain years of practice, perhaps practice in several specialties for breadth, some research experience, some administrative experience. You'd want to make the criteria narrow enough that only mostly truly qualified people meet it, but also broad enough that at least tens of thousands of people do qualify for the role, so that someone can't just easily fine-tune their resume to assure themselves a spot. It needs to be impossible to game. I don't have the answers, but clearly we can do better than the current system where only power-hungry psychopaths choose to travel the road to obtain the vast power they crave.

gampleman 10d ago

Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light. For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc. So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse. Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher). So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.

rickydroll 10d ago
Look at the National Guard model. I'm also thinking that if we made it a regular thing, like the draft, employers could be required to hold the slot open for the person after they've done their tour of duty. However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.
soundnote 10d ago
Jury duty used to work: As immigration continues apace, it will fail. Lee Kuan Yew had to end jury trials in Singapore because as he notes, in a multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion"
- phtrivier 9d ago
  Do you have a link to any study about that ? That would probably not happen in Europe, but at least in the US, ethnicities can be studied, so any bias could be visible statistically ?

jrflowers 10d ago

We have a system that does that. That’s how we do jury duty. We use sortition to decide important things every day

Ygg2 10d ago

That's not how it was usually run, but say in Ancient Athen's the council that decided was whoever was at the council at that time.

krapp 10d ago

>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0]. Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

phtrivier 10d ago
I meant "unwilling people are forced to _exercise_ power". I don't know that it's the case in any representative democracies - people literally _compete_ to access power.
- krapp 10d ago
  Ok. That would be weird. Presumably if you have power, you have the power to just quit or resign. Given how much effort people put into getting out of jury duty I can only imagine how something like sortition (which I think is what you're describing) would work. Would it be like military conscription, where you could go to prison if you're AWOL? If so, who really has the power in that scenario? And there's also the problem of competence. Forcing some random to act as Secretary of HHS is more likely to get us an RFK type than someone who knows what they're doing. But then vetting candidates with some kind of voir dire like system is just voting, except only a few people get to do it.
  - jjav 9d ago
    These are all problems. On the other hand we know for sure from centuries (millenia?) of evidence that allowing the people who most crave power to be the ones who seek and obtain said power, is a recipe for disaster as well. It is interesting to brainstorm what could be a better system. I think clear qualifications should be required. So to use the HHS example, it would have criteria to be a doctor, certain years of practice, perhaps practice in several specialties for breadth, some research experience, some administrative experience. You'd want to make the criteria narrow enough that only mostly truly qualified people meet it, but also broad enough that at least tens of thousands of people do qualify for the role, so that someone can't just easily fine-tune their resume to assure themselves a spot. It needs to be impossible to game. I don't have the answers, but clearly we can do better than the current system where only power-hungry psychopaths choose to travel the road to obtain the vast power they crave.