I watched a TED talk titled: “What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people?” The title of this really pulled me in, it is a unique idea. But an interesting one because politicians are the leaders of our lives on local and national levels… but they don’t truly represent us. Politicians get a lot of hate, often are biased, and are career politicians not because they are passionate about improving society, but probably more for self-interested ideals. I always hear my dad yell at the TV and say “I should be in charge!” this TED talk explains that maybe.. that would create a more successful democracy.

Brett asks the crowd if they  “think living in a democracy is a good thing?” all of the audience raised their hands. He then asked:  “Who thinks our democracies are functioning well?” and all of the hands went down. He explains that the idea of democracy is ideal: equality, justice, fairness, security. But in practice, it is not working because the current political system is distorted by self-interest.

The speaker strives to answer the question: ”how should we live together?” How should societies organize themselves? This has been a question humans have been trying to answer centuries. Brett proposes a system based on Sortition, which is random selection. This idea at first glance is… absurd. Imagining myself as a politician is laughable. But he starts explaining and it begins to make a lot of sense. Sortition would allow the people in charge to represent the demographic, gender, race, beliefs, socio-economic backgrounds. Politicians would be 50% female, equally representative of race and income to the country as a whole. Every citizen would have someone similar to them in a leadership role. “This would simulate how we would all think if we had the time, the information, and the process to come to the moral crux of political decisions.”

Diversity can trump ability when faced with a wide array of societal questions and problems, he explains that these people chosen would become critical thinkers, “if you give people responsibility, they will act responsibly”

He explains that sortition was used in Athenian culture to fill the majority of political positions, they knew career politicians should be avoided and it was crucial to have the leaders truly represent the citizens. I think Brett is a leader because he identifies a problem and backs up to identify the bigger question. He is able to take a new and creative approach to assist democracies to function the way they are designed to. It opens up an entirely new way of thinking which I find very interesting.