Dreaming of Something Better

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 13

I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

We’ve spent several chapters (and weeks) talking about the ways the American political system doesn’t fit the current age. In the penultimate chapter, Dator ties this theme together with the rest of the book and lays out a vision for embracing the Dream Society in how we govern. He outlines 12 governance design steps and attempts the first four. This work begins by eschewing modesty: he wants to create a governance system for the entire solar system. He’s confident that it won’t be adopted, seeing it as groundwork for a future opportunity, but I would have loved to see a scalability plan.

Dator’s values shine through in this effort. He defines democracy as a system allowing “each person affected by the action of an entity, a continuous and equal opportunity to influence the actions that entity” (p. 217). His proposals thus include equal distribution of political power¹, with AI-mediated conflicts². He identifies a key governance challenge as balancing our deep desire for safety/control/order with our desire for freedom/novelty/chaos³.

Some of Dator’s institutional designs align with Roman Krznaric’s ideas in Chapter 6 of History for Tomorrow: sortition (picking a small group of decision-makers at random, like jury duty) and citizen assemblies (everyone can vote on proposals before enacting). Dator proposes linking these by having the deliberative bodies shape rules, and the assembly decide. In some ways, this is more connected to ancient Athens and medieval Switzerland than to a Dream Society present/future.

But plenty of Dator’s ideas and proposals are, in fact, tied to new and strange futures. Some aspects of his proposal seem “out there” (and I have a high tolerance):

• He proposes a solution to the problem of unwillingness to shoulder the burden of democracy: allowing people to delegate their authority for any governance activity to anyone else at any time, and revoke it as desired. I’m confident those rules could leave us in a similar place to today: most people invest their authority in a leader who represents their needs and makes them feel empowered.

• All laws (or whatever these governance decisions are called) exist in text and audio-visual format to suit a Dream Society. Unfortunately, Dator doesn’t follow his own advice and give us any pictures or videos.

• He leans hard into transhumanism, assuming we’ll soon be a species that dies only by choice, kept alive by swapping out parts as needed, and as a corollary gender becomes temporary/optional. Modest proposal: should we plan a democracy that works even if the whole Bryan Johnson thing doesn’t work out though? Also families are replaced by a personal board of directors that you can interchange at will.

• He reframes law as a process for mediating conflicts between individuals and/or⁴ freely associated groups, sensitive to the different interests of each. A logical conclusion is that the law will differ by group, undermining human rights projects, from the French laïcité to compulsory education to campaigns against FGM.

• The governance is deeply non-violent: no police, no military, with decisions “influencing” but not controlling actors. I really try to understand this concept from Dator, Rianne Eisler, etc, but I can’t. Isn’t violence a dominant game theory strategy when interests diverge? Doesn’t the guy with the biggest board with the biggest nail get to impose his will on everyone? Even if 99% of us don’t want society to work on domination (maybe especially if), don’t we need systems to accommodate the outliers?

Overall, this chapter invigorated this old poli-sci major’s heart. Over the last decade, and especially since reading Krznaric’s discussions about democracy, I’ve been thinking along similar lines about radically re-imagining governance at the state level⁵. My ideas are broadly similar: a mix of sortition and citizen assemblies, a way to give them reliable information, and mechanisms for remote participation⁶, etc.

There are important differences. I didn’t have a system for delegating responsibility, and my approach is fully compatible with a system that still employs police and has a recognizable justice system. I really want to see if people can self-govern in a way that’s less dysfunctional than what we have now. Isn’t that what the states are for - to serve as laboratories of democracy where we can try new things? I’m too busy to work on all my passions, and this one is toward the top of my “can’t quite get to” list⁷.

But! Dator claims that his system is based on the principles of quantum mechanics. It’s not as bad as the standard polymath taking the words of quantum mechanics and connecting them to society — hey subatomic particles can stay entangled at a distance, that’s kind of like love! particles are actually just vibrations of strings connecting everything, see I told you The Secret was true! — but I still wasn’t convinced.

I do believe we create institutions based on our understanding of the universe, but unlike the Newtonian physics/determinism metaphors that animated thinking about society in the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think quantum mechanics ideas have penetrated (or will penetrate) public consciousness as more than a weird exception to the rules of reality. Maybe systems thinking or chaos theory are better candidates for a core paradigm, and these have a lot to teach us about decision-making under complexity and uncertainty, dominant features of life today. In any event, Dator’s governance suggestions are good seeds for the imagination, but you’ll have to do a fair amount of coloring between the lines yourself.

1. Though surprisingly little space is devoted to exploring political rights for non-human actors, something that’s already happening and I explored in my interview with sci-fi author and futurist Karl Schroeder. He mentions respect for all life and the environments that sustain them, including artificial life, but how do they stand up for themselves?

2. Tuned by the democratic body, but this gives scary influence to the AI mediator’s designers.

3. I have an unhealthy love for connecting dualities; in an Adlerian sense, these strike me as similar to “belonging to self” and “belonging to others”, our deepest needs (many other psych folks frame this as safety and love).

4. Not on topic, but if you haven’t yet you should definitely watch Andor. Some of the best television available today.)

5. As I understand Oregon law, an amendment basically replacing the whole constitution could go to voters if 8% sign a petition.

6. The whole scheme would rely on an appropriate suite of open-source software that people can trust to do the work fairly.

7. Plus, actually doing something about it would be orders of magnitude harder than designing it. Maybe someday though.