1: A parliament stacked with proponents of [insert political viewpoint here] is a possible (if unlikely) outcome of truly random selection. It's no biggie - but just remember that truly random selections can produce outcomes that don't seem random (aka "OMG my iPod can read my mind!").
2: The people that actually end up on a jury (as opposed to being selected for jury service) are anything but random - once the defence and the prosecution have winnowed out the ones they don't like the look of.
]]>What bits of the human condition would you need to pave over and route around to make it work? What are the pitfalls? How would the system break or be exploited by those seeking power? Would the end-result be worthwhile? Would the end result be a society we'd even recognise as human any more?
]]>I'm asking what a functioning representative democracy would look like.
And, I suppose, I'm getting at the point that perhaps the beigemony we see is a feature not a bug.
Could it be that, given human tendencies towards clannishness, semi-hereditary cliques, and corruption, that the least worst state is an ongoing "management" of the beige though periodic and neverending rounds of reform and - if things get really bad - revolution? With the understanding that you're never going to reach the utopia your reform or revolution seeks, and that the best you'll ever do is to keep the shade of beige tolerably benign to a relatively large section of the populace.
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