Self-Governance via Rejection

This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.

In discussion the concept of self-governance, I proposed that we need to think about more than just leader selection. In this, I aim to dive deeper into the question of rejection as a key tool of self-governance. To do that, we need to explore whether the citizenry even knows what they want.

In 1958, 95% of the citizenry was dead set against interracial marriage.

In general, pollsters often find that the American populace is conservative — as in wary of change. This is different from Americans being intellectual conservatives or members of the Republican Party. Major changes to the country often don’t garner enormous popular support before they are enacted.

But sometimes these changes gain support pretty quickly once they happen. In one generation, a majority went from opposing to supporting interracial marriage. Today, 55 years since Loving v. Virginia, only a rump 6% disapprove. Support for gay marriage has changed at a similar speed: going from 30% in the 1990s to 70% today.

You could easily spin this story to say that the citizenry is fundamentally progressive — and plenty of progressives have tried. The citizenry seems to love when things improve and show strong support for some changes.

But I think both of these stories miss the mark in a way that’s common in tech startups.

Successful startups are obsessed with something called Product-Market Fit. It's a businessy shorthand for saying the customers not just like but are willing to spend money on the brand new thing that you're making.

Naive startups take their idea and go and ask people if they like it. Really naive startups ask people what they want to see in it.

The brilliant or well informed don't bother. Instead, they know that customers have no idea what they want until they feel it in their hands. But they sure know what they don't want.

The idea that we are fundamentally conservative or fundamentally progressive is, I think, a mistake. Instead, I want to propose that we simply don't know what we want.

We discover what we don’t want by living through it. Some things we learn to like and others we look to reject as we experience them.

The phrase self-governance conjures up images of participation and contribution. Whether that makes you shudder as you imagine PTA meetings or feel inspired thinking about 12 Angry Men, it is likely that you're imagining that you can affect the outcome. That everyone's voice can be heard.

But we know what happens when we get the massive scale of American democracy: the craziest voices are the loudest. The richest voices have the most influence. We don't end up with the situation where everyone can contribute in the way we hope.

So instead of imagining that self-governance at scale is the same as self-governance at small scale and just adding more people, perhaps it’s better to think of self-governance at scale as being about citizens having a chance to reject the things that don’t work. Today we only get one lever to reject bad ideas: we can “throw the bastards out.” Unfortunately, in our current system we often have to vote for crazier people to do so, and either way we always seem to get new bastards.

I call this philosophy of governance governance by rejection. A simple version of it is the parliamentarian Vote of No Confidence. In the Parliamentarian form of governance, the MPs can bring down the government by voting against them without specifying who they’re voting for. Imagine if we got to vote against our representatives, and if they got voted out, other people would have to run. Our current extremely high incumbency rate might well drop precipitously.

And there are other models. In an ideal market environment, when the customers don’t like a product, other people build better ones and the bad product fails. Products that we like make their creators wealthy and give them leeway to take bigger risks with their next idea. Imagine if we could find a way to let people try things in the governance arena too, and then we rewarded or punished them based on whether it worked out.

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