a brave new world

First I want to thank Joe for his kind post. I’m not sure I deserve such high praise but it still inspires me. For one of my classes I constructed the bare bones of a new form of government. Despite my best intentions, it still has some glaring flaws. Here it is:

Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst form of all governments, except compared with all other forms of government." I am creating a new form of government with some of that thought in mind. Democracy is not the worst form of government, but we can do better. When I look at governments I see waste. I see bloated bureaucracies in democracies, totalitarian governments, authoritarian governments, and many other forms. I see the least waste in true monarchies. There are other aspects of a monarchy that are unappealing, but there is much less waste. With this observation, I want to craft a new government that remedies the problems of monarchies.


There are two moments in history that can help us understand some problems with monarchies. They are the French Revolution and the American Revolution. These two revolutions had some major differences, but their main motivations were similar, they didn’t like what the monarch and his administration were doing, and they didn’t feel like they had a meaningful way to express their dissent. Democracies were seen as remedies to this problem, but they create other problems. If the citizenry is educated and motivated then democracies can work. In countries such as present day America where the majority of citizens are undereducated and understandably apathetic, democracy does not work. America has the highest standard of living in the world. This should mean that her citizens have the most leisure time and the best chance to become politically knowledgeable. If her citizens are unprepared to be effective members of a democracy, how can we expect any other country to have democratically responsible citizens?


What America needs is a system that doesn’t have a wasteful bureaucracy but also that doesn’t require its citizens to care about government to have a successful government. What we need is a government that creates “super leaders.” These leaders will come of age when they reach the age of 40. People will put blind faith in these “super leaders” because they will be the best form that the flawed human can attain. They will make mistakes, but they will do a better job than anyone else. In this system we will not be led by “regular” people in leadership roles, we will be lead by “super” people in leadership roles.


Let me take a moment to explain how we will create these “super” leaders. There will be infant IQ testing throughout the country, and 10,000 four year olds will be assembled. The parents will be told that their children will go through a grueling and challenging program, and that the vast majority will fail. But the top five will lead their country to reach levels of peace and prosperity the likes of which have never been seen in the history of the world.
Before the age of fifteen the children will be taught the languages of the world, the histories of the world, and the thoughts of the world. When they turn fifteen they will be placed in a poor ghetto with the amount of money that a worker in a ghetto makes in a month, and nothing more. They will be observed by a surveillance team for their own safety and to make sure that they truly live in the ghetto. They will then work in the emergency room of a hospital for a year, they will be a teacher’s assistant in a poor school district, and they will go to a rich suburban high school for a year.


When they turn eighteen they will choose whether or not they want to go on, with the understanding that it will be much more intense, and some of them will not survive. They will travel the world, and live in other countries in the same variations in which they lived in America. When they turn thirty-nine they will serve one year of active combat duty in squads of five. If no one in the squad of five dies in the course of the year, unbeknownst to the participants, a sniper from the program will kill one of them. In this way they will know the true cost of war. Not many will finish the program, but more than five will. A committee will have a file on each participant; it will contain their entire life, except for their name to avoid destructive politicking. Based on how well the participants completed the various challenges, a group of five will emerge, they will create a minimal bureaucracy to oversee their decrees, but all decisions will rest solely with them. The one area of the country they have no control over will be the program that created them. It will be treated like a foreign embassy, and the chosen five shall have no jurisdiction over it. Also the chosen five’s offspring will not be eligible for the program.



The immediate concern with this system is how is the committee that chooses the leaders is created. Perhaps the citizens can elect them, although then we won’t be much better off than we were before. The whole issue is that politically motivated citizens are an endangered species. Perhaps the committee has to pass some sort of test themselves to avoid corruption, but the problem of authority is just pushed back one level; who will administer that testing? I can’t come up with a solution to the problem, but I do enjoy the theoretical exercise of imagining a better future. Perhaps someone else has a solution to the dilemma of removing politics from selecting the group of five. I would love to hear some comments.