In the continuing struggle of technocrats against society a variety of methods to eliminate democracy and skew systems of governance toward technocratic domination have been proposed. Consider National Juries.

The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …

The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day.

This is an old idea that surfaces from time to time. The key attribute of such a system is that the number of people is drastically reduced so that it becomes possible to control their minds. Isolating them from society and controlling their information inputs allows their views to be shaped.

Good decision making requires far more than the carefully crafted advocacy of candidates for office as input to the decision processes. It is very often the case that none of the candidates or the information selected by technocrats address the valid and significant concerns of society.

More here. This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept. Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?

My guess: aside from status quo bias, it just doesn’t feel like the political ideal in the back of our minds – how our nomadic forager ancestors long ago would meet every few months to make major band decisions. All 5-15 men could talk, they wouldn’t break until they’d all had their say, decisions were by informal consensus of all, and dissenters could leave the band.

My guess is that the defects in this system are apparent but difficult to articulate. People are rightfully suspicious of technocrats who have so little grasp of social systems due to their narrow intellectual development, and so reject such proposals even if they can't explain precisely what seems distasteful about them.

I'd state the problem differently. The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors like any other sales pitch arguments for and against various policy proposals are dishonest, intended to confuse and stampede buyers into making bad decisions. It's obvious that reducing the number of buyers and subjecting them to more intense sales pitches will not help.

The underlying issue is that the vast majority of such policies are not intended to help society, they are just what the politicians and bureaucrats want to sell for their own benefit. It's their business. It's no different than the behavior of a manufacturer selling widgets of some sort or a service business selling some sort of performance product. They try to create desire for their particular products with marketing strategies, in a context of a consumer culture trained to seek out things to consume.

A better approach to bad decisions is to make fewer decisions, just as wiser purchases are made when they are less frequent. We need less politics not more if the objective is good governance, but it isn't. The objective is to grow the business, sell more product. By analogy it's like a sport - say football - that makes money not only on the contests but also all of the associated merchandising and infrastructure - everything from before and after contest consumption of food and beverages to parking fees and broadcast revenue. There are lots of jobs at stake and huge amounts of revenue. The difference between politics and football - or automobile racing or reality dating shows or movies about "smart" people chatting wittily while trying to figure out how to have sex with one another - is the all of society is burdened by the outcomes of essentially meaningless contests.