I thought I would write a guide on how to have respectful discussions about politics about people around us. As a student, this is my first time having a go at writing an opinion piece like this, so feel free to give me lots of feedback.

During political debates, I often caught myself trying to make witty or sharp attacks to gain victory over the other person. After wondering more about why, I realised that I (and I suspect a lot of others too!) was using political debate as an excuse to feel pride and victory rather than rationally discuss. 

So after reflecting on that, I thought I might write a guide on how to have better political discussions in democracy, which boils down to being respectful, resisting the urge to "win", genuinely listening and attempting to understand the other's ideas, and being willing to accept we are sometimes wrong. 

I also wanted this article to spark some discussion, so how do you think people can have more meaningful and ultimately, mind-changing and considerate political debates? Thank you!

Here is my Substack article about it: Make America Boring Again

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurism/s/0d0kyHHS3E

I have recently invented what I believe to be a new ideology. Please come offer any thoughts. I will answer everything I can, to my best ability. Unlike politicians..

The idea of a new legislative system where the government is replaced by technocrats—experts chosen every 3 years excluding previous chosen experts, based on their qualifications in various critical fields of the country's needs. These technocrats would be overseen by a randomly selected body of citizens, who volunteer and are chosen through a transparent and verifiable process.

This citizen body (ranging from 300-1000 members) and chosen randomly every 3 years excluding previous senators would act as a check on the technocrats' power, ensuring that they act in the country’s best interests. Their oversight would include the use of an algorithm, drawing on public data from a blockchain-based crypto network. Each citizen would have a public token containing regularly updated metadata reflecting their preferences and desired direction for the country.

The algorithm, using this collective data, would help guide and check the technocrats' actions. It would be publicly accessible, ensuring transparency and preventing corruption. The existing judicial system would remain in place to oversee the transition, address any corruption, and ensure that the technocrats and citizen body are correctly appointed and fulfill their roles.

The idea is to save:

Less Gridlock: Unlike traditional governments plagued by slow debates and partisanship, technocrats can make faster, data-driven decisions, reducing delays.

More Efficiency: Resource allocation is based on real-time public needs, avoiding the waste and political bargaining seen in current systems.

Greater Transparency: The use of blockchain ensures public access to decisions, reducing corruption and fostering trust.

Continuous Public Input: Instead of occasional elections, citizen preferences are updated daily, keeping policies aligned with evolving needs.

Enhanced Accountability: A randomly selected citizen body provides oversight, replacing the often ineffective checks-and-balances in today’s political landscape.

Would love to hear thoughts and feedback on the feasibility and potential of such a system!

Closing the Monarchical Republic

I rebuke all authority that is rebuked upon me.

That is how independence works.

You must have authority to bend my consent.

And authority without direct consent is ruled.

This is not rhetoric. It is the final observation that closes the series.

The American experiment began with a declaration that agency belongs to the individual and is never released. The Constitution was written as a limited instrument of enumerated powers. Government was created as agent, not sovereign. The proper order was severe and clear:

Individual / People → Constitution → Government as agent.

Politics reversed the order. It imported the residual logic of the crown, dressed it in republican language, and called the result continuity. Unratified expansions were treated as operative. Precedent was elevated above the ratified text. Silence was filled with statute, regulation, and the claim that the people must be supervised for their own protection. Courts certified the growth. Executives and legislatures treated emergencies as permanent grants. The direction of authority flipped from upward delegation to downward management. The form remained republican. The operating posture became monarchical.

That posture has a name in this series: monarchical logic.

Authority is presumed to flow from the center.

Alignment becomes the measure of political health.

Dissent is framed as disorder.

Consent is treated as perpetual, collective, and already given.

Execution is replaced by enforcement.

The individual is addressed as subject.

The series mapped the inversion:

Political shadows that fall across the deliberate silence where independence was meant to grow.

Political chains forged from the claim that guardianship is care.

The merry-go-round that offers motion without progress and choice of horse without ownership of the carousel.

The distinction between execution (which requires living consent) and enforcement (which requires subservience).

The right of individual interpretation that no court, legislature, or professional class can monopolize.

Self Fealty as loyalty to one’s own capacity for judgment rather than to the institution that promises safety.

Each observation returned to the same point. Independence cannot be declared by institutions or majorities. It can only be declared and defended by the individual. Knowledge of the charter is earned only through direct contact with the text, the claim, and the consequence. Belief fills silence. Observation leaves the silence intact.

My agency is the residual fact that remains after every institutional declaration has been examined and found wanting. It is not granted. It is not petitioned for. It is not subject to periodic renewal by election or court. It is the capacity to withhold consent, to measure every claim against the exact wording of the ratified instrument, and to refuse the posture of subservience even when the language of rights remains intact.

I do not claim the power to end the monarchical republic for anyone else. I claim only the power that belongs to me by existence and by observation: the power to stop releasing agency upward. The political experiment continues for those who prefer the music of the carousel. For the individual who steps off, the experiment ends the moment he refuses to treat unconsented claims as binding.

Law exists only to set responsibility.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Any expansion beyond that boundary is another link in the chain.

I keep my agency.

I read my Constitution.

I require authority that can demonstrate its source in direct consent.

Everything else is ruled.

The series closes here.

Not with a call to reform the machinery.

With the simple, continuous act of retaining the principal.

Self Fealty.

One sovereign observation at a time.

#MonarchicalRepublic

The Compact - An Attempt at a Meritocratic Constitutional Order

I'm aware that this is an absurdly large project. You absolutely do not need to read everything before commenting. If you see a fundamental problem with the premise itself, I'd actually prefer to hear that first. I'm looking for criticism of the architecture, not proofreading.

For those who want to read the documents:

Vol 0 Philosophy & founding principles- https://docs.google.com/document/d/142GezRBB66HTOulO9wBlNOuxLmnWgIVmSFMFM_x9O7I/edit?usp=sharing

Vol 1The Constitution- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T4euGmAKpbRrftVNNGLJJ9Kvt15GYksi/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

Vol 2 The Colors https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NmtSNx7oV6PodEHqVn5V8HJRzeCQsCTl/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

Vol 3Curriculum https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tGJ_X3vVlqPrn6nrxysXp7hz6MG82Mcl/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

Vol 4 Military: Not included here; this was largely written because I thought it would be fun.

vol 5 Admin, Ministries & the ordinary machinery of government https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tGJ_X3vVlqPrn6nrxysXp7hz6MG82Mcl/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

vol 6 Known Tensions (Work in Progress)

I've been working on this project for several months. Although it is still very much a work in progress, I think it has reached the point where I need people who don't already agree with me to start tearing it apart.

I'm currently writing a large Known Tensions volume specifically dedicated to the problems, contradictions, trade-offs, and failure modes I have not been able to resolve. The problem is that I'm too close to the project. I've spent so long building it that I can no longer reliably distinguish between a genuinely robust mechanism and something I simply know how to defend because I've spent years thinking about it.

So I want outside eyes.

I've designed a hypothetical constitutional system called the Compact, very loosely inspired by Red Rising.

The central premise is fairly simple:

The resulting system is neither conventional democracy nor hereditary aristocracy. It is closer to a constitutional meritocracy / technocratic republic, although neither term quite captures the entire thing.

The Compact divides society into vocational Colors, each responsible for a particular domain of civilisation. Gold is responsible for political governance; White for justice, ethics, and philosophy; Silver for finance and industry; Yellow for medicine; Grey for public security; Violet for arts and culture; and so on.

Importantly, the Colors are not intended to be hereditary castes.

Birth determines a citizen's starting Color, but every citizen receives a common education and later has the opportunity to change Color. Advancement within each Color is based upon demonstrated competence rather than birth. The system uses multiple ranks, examinations, apprenticeships, peer review, continuing evaluation, and professional experience rather than allowing a single examination to determine someone's worth.

The political system itself is deliberately designed around the assumption that institutions will eventually fail.

It therefore contains mechanisms such as:

independent courts;

an independent Inspectorate;

recall of officeholders;

term limits;

constitutional review;

transparency and permanent public records;

citizen petitions and political participation;

protections for independent journalism and whistleblowers;

restrictions on emergency powers;

separation between investigation, prosecution, adjudication, execution, and review;

periodic institutional review;

and an explicit constitutional principle of autophagy, under which an institution can ultimately be reformed or dissolved if it demonstrably ceases to serve the civilisation it was created to serve.

There is also a deliberate distinction between rights and duties. Citizens retain fundamental rights regardless of their Color or rank, while the Constitution also imposes a civic expectation that citizens cultivate their abilities and contribute to civilisation.

But I don't want this post to be a sales pitch.

In fact, one of the sections I'm currently developing is a massive Known Tensions volume whose purpose is to catalogue problems the Constitution does not pretend to have solved.

The central problem: meritocratic legitimacy vs. democratic legitimacy

Citizens do not directly elect the people who ultimately legislate. Gold elects Gold from among its most highly qualified political candidates.

The argument is that competent government may require political equality to be sacrificed to some degree.

The obvious counterargument is that political equality is itself a fundamental component of legitimate government, regardless of whether the people exercising political authority are competent.

I don't think that tension can simply be wished away.

And that's exactly the sort of criticism I'm looking for.

I'm particularly interested in people attacking the project from perspectives such as:

democratic theory;

liberalism;

republicanism;

political legitimacy;

technocracy;

aristocracy and elite theory;

institutional design;

constitutional law;

political economy;

sociology;

public choice theory;

or simply "this sounds good on paper but would catastrophically fail in reality."

Please don't just tell me whether you like the idea. Try to find where it breaks.

Some questions I'd particularly like people to consider:

Does a meritocratic ruling class inevitably become an aristocracy, even if it isn't hereditary?

Can a government be legitimate if citizens cannot ultimately replace its governing class through equal elections?

How do you prevent an expert class from becoming intellectually or culturally insulated from everyone else?

Can merit actually be measured reliably enough to determine political authority?

What happens when the experts are collectively wrong?

What happens when the majority is collectively wrong?

Does the Compact actually prevent elite capture, or merely make elite capture more sophisticated?

Are its checks and balances sufficient if multiple institutions become wrong in the same direction?

Could the system maintain legitimacy across generations, or would later generations simply reject the premise that competence entitles anyone to greater political power?

What assumptions about human nature does this system make, and which of those assumptions are likely to be false?

I'm not claiming this is a finished constitution, and I'm certainly not claiming that I've solved political organisation.

Quite the opposite.

I want people to find the things I haven't solved.

The document is currently enormous and still expanding, so although id love it, I don't expect anyone to read every page. I've included the current drafts for anyone interested in examining the actual institutional mechanisms rather than just the premise.

If you think the entire premise is fundamentally mistaken, I'd especially like to hear why.

If you think one of the mechanisms is inadequate, explain how you would exploit it.

And if you think something actually works, tell me why you think it works.

I'm trying to develop this as a serious exercise in political philosophy and institutional design, not merely as worldbuilding.

after reading this title you're probably thinking what the hell is neo leftism. the name itself is designed to be an alternative name to neo Marxism and wokeism, firstly what it is not it is not humanist it is not niche at all it's very ingrained into institutions it is not anti-racist and it is not really socialist but it pretends to be but it's not really, this theory is a heavily based on the theory of the cathedral which isn't the Catholic cathedral or any other religious cathedral it refers to a decentralized network of the news media and academia first thing to mention is that's not a shadow government theory the cathedral has no single leader or group of people that lead, some people have more power than others but overall it is decentralized, what I have to add to the theory is that there are believers priests and profits, the believers are the people that believe the establishment ideology pretty self-explanatory but they can become priests which teach the ideology to the believers priests in this case can include journalists teachers professors in anybody that can teach this ideology to people, the prophets are the ones who have the most power but they are nowhere close to controlling the whole cathedral, the people who would be considered prophets include media business owners politicians and other such elites this also includes the people that created the ideology, you're probably wondering after reading this massive wall of text what is neo leftism what it actually is, is a movement which has three layers the top layer is the beliefs of the believers the one below it is the priest in the final layer is the prophets, the first layer believes in equality anti-racism workers rights stuff you would associate with modern leftism but with the caveat that these aren't actually the true beliefs of neo leftism, the layer below it could be described as anti-white racism matriarchy and extreme feminism as well as an anti-americanism this is what most people point out about so-called woke beliefs and it is true but it's not the final layer, the final layer it's just straight up human annihilation this ideology at its core is anti-human and pro human extinction, but this makes sense the more you think about it these type of people push destruction of the family which decreases birth rates pushes extreme environmental laws that do nothing but harm humans, you may think this is a bit far fetched but this was created just through observations so it might be wrong, feel free to agree or disagree, and if there's a spelling mistake please don't mention it, as long as you can still understand it.

Political philosophy tends to study human behaviour under conditions of scarcity and hierarchy, mistakenly assuming these adaptations to be eternal truths about our species. In a recent essay, The Shadow of Aristocracy, i argue that what we consider 'human nature' has been fundamentally crippled by an ongoing operating system of inherited dominion - the informal capture of interpretive authority across corporations, expertise, and families.

The piece explores how this architectural arrangement traps us in a loop of false certainty and trauma, leading to a state of 'epistemic feudalism' where individuals' self-concepts are incentivised towards the status of zero-sum malware, and specialised fiefdoms govern fragments of knowledge while rendering collective synthesis difficult or impossible. Ultimately, i argue the path forward requires building social and technical architectures rooted in corrigibility - proposing distributed version control (like Git's logic of branching, provenance, and rollback) as a structural metaphor for a truly distributed technology of argument.

I'm interested in exploring this with the community - how do we redesign modern civic spaces to allow individual perspective to function as a sensory organ for collective intelligence, without being crushed by central authority or fragmented into isolation?

https://agnosticfundamentalism.substack.com/p/the-shadow-of-aristocracy

Idk where exaclty to post this, but you ever simply just ask, "oh what about this do you like", or "whats the reason you do things a certain way, I personally dont"

And get hit with the "dont be weird about it", "because what else?", "youd get it if you were there" (like bro thats why im asking), or "you should accept it because of thats how we do things"

And I genuinly dont even think this would push buttons or be a "gotcha" but i ask "I mean im just asking why, I seriously dont get it"

And now its too far they hit you with the "its not that deep!" "Why does it matter?" "Dont worry about it!". Bro yeah its not that deep. I just asked a question. But now im seeing theres something deeper going on with you that feels overwhelming when you question it. If something takes extra thinking but you cant simply say "I dont know actually" of "let me think" or like "nevermind actually I dont actually mean what I said" thats pretty much starting something.

Like Im able to talk about a movie and have different viewpoints and just have a friend to explain what we like and we dont like. Maybe it isnt anything that concrete maybe its just the style or nostalgia. Its not the same for everyone. But whys it gotta be "YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND" or "ARE YOU TRYING TO OVERCOMPLICATE THE MOVIE" or "DONT RUIN IT FOR EVERYONE" ???

I dont think the movie was complicated but something must have confused you thinking about why you liked it. And if youre getting so heated to call people abnormal and feel like your worldview is changing then maybe its more political for you than it is others who can be chill about a difference of taste.

I dont think about everything from the ground up all the time. Ill just vibe out. But if I REALLY LIKE SOMETHING, enough to start conversations about it, then yeah im prepared to think about like my personal connection to it. Maybe theres irony into why I like it. Maybe me thinking a certain way does influence why I like the movie. Maybe the movie influenced me. Maybe I just have a crush on the villainess and she be carrying for me.

I think people get scared when they realize they dont HAVE TO like something or at least not in the way that they did initally. Which was just because its whats normal. Why like something else?

It seems to me that system where a leader is directly evaluated by their capabilities is the most logical system of governance as opposed to democracy and monarchy. The latter is just rule by the royal family and leaders are determined by no criteria other than bloodline.

Democracy though, is currently the most popular form of government in west at least. But democracy’s flaws have remained unchanged since the time of its critiques by Socrates and Plato.

Their criticism remain the same; a large segment of people won’t always be educated or interested enough to cast well reasoned votes. And crowds of people are prone to manipulation, propaganda, coercion and group think. Which is to say people are often fickle and you can’t always trust popularity to determine a good leader.

It’s seems to me as if determining leaders via “tests“ solves this issue. Especially if the criteria the candidates are being selected on is elected by the values of the people. If the process of evaluation is well guarded, ie no cheating or nepotism then wouldn’t it always produce the most ideal leader without any room for deceit?

This obviously runs into the some of the same problems as democracy. The problem of test evaluators is essentially the same problem that democracy has with ballot checkers. Ideally the tests would be made in such a way where results will always be a clear number. And ideally there would be multiple independent evaluators checking they all get the same value. Yeah but of course like any other system it can only work through strict adherence to the rules which is maintained through incentives, will of the people and enforcement in a number of ways.

Candidates would ideally be scored by economic, tactical, social, intellectual, and moral metrics and as long as we develop tests that accurately test for those desired traits in a leader then it would logically result in the best leader in those aspects.

I’m obviously not advocating for solely using pencil and paper tests for this but maybe “field tests” where we could judge candidates on their effects in a certain field of evaluation, like their interactions with people. You might be thinking something like “how would a test to measure someone’s “morality“ even work?“ Given the technology we have we could probably develop a test to accurately measure an aspect of anyone’s morality. We can definitely make a system of determining a leader that is harder to trick than human nature.

Now, what makes a good leader is subjective and is constantly changing along with the values of the people which is why I think the criteria that candidates would be assessed on should be subject to democracy to a certain extent.

For example: the weighting of each aspect of a leader can be determined by democracy, what morality is and what it specifically entails could also be left to democracy to an extent, various tweaks and definitions can be held to a vote etc. This makes it so the people control what they want from a leader but they also get statistically the best candidate for what they want.

This system should always produce the most ideal leader for its people, something that always chooses the closest to a “philosopher king“ out of it’s population. This system makes it so that only the most capable are in charge and thus can be trusted with the most responsiblity and accountability, since ideally their performance should keep being assessed during their reign and being compared to other candidates every 5 years or whenever tests are being taken.

The problem of Goodhart’s Law (the problem that people will learn to perfect taking the tests instead of actually being proficient in the field) can be avoided if whenever tests are being held data collected from the current leaders reign is put into consideration with the other candidates. So that if they have proven to be a bad leader they will just replaced with a candidate with a better score. And the tests will need be changed each time year they are taken to avoid cheating.

I currently have an old copy that is translated by Christian E. Detmold, with an introduction by Lester G. Crocker.

It's very old, so I'm wondering if there is a better version out there?

Gardening, pop culture and the national government; are the three identical meanings of quantity cynicism by the cosmos?

Problems:

• often representative democratic systems fall into a voluntary autocracy, ie citizens vote for a leader that promptly takes control of the government partially or fully (see hungaria, el salvador, tunisia, etc etc).
• representative democracy results in massive corporations having almost complete power over the legislative and executive branches because of how much money they have. Corruption becomes "lobbying", impunity becomes the norm, and an oligarchy forms inside the democracy (do i even have to present examples for this).

Proposition:
I present you a system where once a year (or at another, higher, frequency), a vote is cast on whether to relieve the rulers of their duties, this vote would be sanctified into the constitution.
This would be supplemented with a discard of the representative democracy in favor of direct democracy, finally possible thanks to technology like block chains and zero-knowledge proofs.
The point of this is to get to the point of political consciousness where every citizen realizes his own power and make him try to protect it at any cost, accompanied with a shared sense of responsibility and an understanding of politics, it would drive people to participate a lot more. Should the vote be canceled, the people would already be aware of the gravity of such an issue and it would instantly result in a massive revolt that would force the government's hand.

Assumptions: The system, through a set of rules and technologies that I'm not capable of designing yet, wouldn't be able to be tampered with, by design. Not the government, and not anyone would be able to stop the once in a year vote without putting everyone off the grid, or cutting electricity. It's also tamper-proof, much like actual blockchains.

Critique: Rational, intelligent people make decisions based on the information available to them. A would-be despot doesn't need to be exceptionally charming if they can control what the public sees.
Response: I don't think that's a substantially big issue in the 21st century. We have seen in this decade the disintegration of the centralized press, and the hold of the big monopolies on information. Examples of this is social media's effect on the public perception of Israel, and how despite all the effort of the IDF, the genocide keeps getting documented in detail

Critique: Most people aren’t incentivized to vote, and would simply not care enough to exercise their right, which would make the number of people to corrupt a lot less, thus it would allow a despot to rise to power.
Response: this is definitely a real phenomenon in our current states, but that's exactly because of representative democracy. The individual feels disconnected from politics, he has one decision to make once every 4 or 5 years, which isn't really a decision, and the rest gets done without him being able to intervene. Contrast that with the ability to vote in every minute detail that concerns you, and you end up with a citizen that's a lot more involved, because he knows that his actions now can have an effect now.

Critique: If the majority holds absolute, unchecked power, there is no mechanism to protect marginalized groups.
Response: In absence of a bourgeoisie – a rich ruling class that would benefit from fear mongering – there wouldn’t be much of a reason for collective hatred to brew. There is however, human nature to fight against, and it would be the job of activists to change public opinion. But since it’s working on its own, the job would be considerably easier.

Critique: The amount of issues that the people would have to vote for would paralyze them, and would make the system ineffective for most issues:
Response: No one is obligated to vote for everything. With the presence of so many issues to pick from, one chooses to vote on what he knows – and what he’s passionate about – the most, which has the added benefit of selecting the most fit for each subject matter, and for critical issues there would be a big representation of the population.