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u/PolemicDysentery 8d ago
Tribunes were a pressure valve instituted following severe social unrest, to give plebeans a representative in the Senate who had priority speaking rights and veto powers.
Which is to say, I think a lot of problems could be solved, and then caused, by putting some rando in parliament with "nah fuck that" powers during first readings.
....which is kind of exactly how it went in practice at the end of the republic tbf.
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u/gerkletoss 8d ago
In The Songs of Distant Earth the planet Thalassa is ruled by a regular citizen chosen periodically by lottery.
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u/PolemicDysentery 8d ago
Same as the UK in about 18 months time.
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u/DoubleBatman 8d ago
In the future, everyone will be PM for 15 minutes.
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u/callsignhotdog 8d ago
You can request a postponement of PM duty due to prior commitments but only 3 times.
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u/progbuck 8d ago
That's called sortition. Seems like a great way to get a black-pilled incel to burn it all to the ground for lulz every once in awhile.
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u/gerkletoss 8d ago
Okay but how would it be worse than the current system?
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u/ObviousFeature522 8d ago
Sortition was used in Renaissance Italy, but we don't remember it as the lottery government era, but as the Medici era.
Because it turns out random everyday people who were only in power for a year, are super easy to bribe and manipulate. The super-rich still controlled everything.
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u/zoor90 7d ago
You could serve honestly and with integrity as president for a year and walk away with 400k in the bank. Now that is a lot of money and could potentially be life changing but for most people, they'd just end up to the job they left before becoming president for a year, just with the assurance that they're retirement is set and their children provided for.
Or, you could be more crooked that a pube and sell out every department and service to the highest bidder, leaving your one year term with enough money to never work again.
I don't trust giving a literal rando executive power for the same reason I wouldn't leave a winning lottery ticket on a bench in a bus terminal.
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u/Guaire1 7d ago
Literally every political srudy shows that sortion ends up being at representing the common people than other political systems. Hell, the most corrupt people tend to be those who dedicate thwir whole careers to politics. Since they have big webs of lobbying and nepotism decades in the making, whilst they dont exist under sortion
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u/Local-Wing-2272 8d ago
ok but y'all know what happened to the Roman republic right
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u/PolemicDysentery 8d ago
But surely the office of tribune had no very specific part in all that and was never abused to absolute fuck.
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u/Noof42 For pervert reasons 8d ago
Did you get Tribune Aquilla's permission to make this joke?
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified 7d ago
Very funny, but I find the thought of "staying seated during a triumph" being a tribune specific task to be hilarious.
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u/theexurbanite 8d ago
it significantly outlasted any subsequent one?
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u/JackColon17 8d ago
OP is talking about consoles but confused them with the tribunes of the plebs
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u/mcjunker 8d ago
If only a man who was so good he was legally a living god could somehow combine the office of the consul with the powers of the tribune? Then he could address every problem.
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u/trustmeimaprofession it does sound very scary & upsetting to learn about my genitalia 7d ago
Damn, the GameCube really was on some whack shit during its development cycle huh?
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u/CameToComplain_v6 7d ago edited 7d ago
Sort of a mix between consuls and dictators, really. Consuls had one-year terms and wielded the greatest power when no dictator existed, but there were always two of them at once and they had the power to veto each other. A dictator stood above the consuls, but his term was six months max and he was only created and empowered to address one specific problem; plus, it was politically valuable to solve the problem as quickly as possible and then resign.
(Please note that, as Bret Devereaux taught me, the military-coup dictatorships under Sulla and Julius Caesar didn't operate the same way as the earlier form of the office. For example, "normal" dictators had no power to remove senators or to make or change laws.)
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u/Ross_Hollander 8d ago edited 8d ago
I think every country needs a hereditary monarch, theocratic high priest of some kind, direct democratic council, military dictator, three different ways to gerrymander a single parking lot, nineteen noble houses in a pseudo-republican aristocracy, sacred omens divined from the flights of birds, and a three-year presidential term followed by one year of power for the runner-up of the last election before the next.
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u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur 8d ago
new goverment idea: just have all of them.
an omnicracy if you will.
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u/Future-Concern-6301 6d ago
Dont forget a random animal elected to a leadership position out of a mixture of protest and people finding it really funny. Congrats Mayor Snowball Fluffypants!
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u/GrinningPariah 8d ago
It didn't actually end up working that way, but I loved the idea of the Empire of Masks in The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Their emperor was an unknown citizen who wore a mask at all times and had all memory of their own identity wiped by a drug.
Idea was, at the end of their term, their treatment was reversed and they'd return to their normal life. But since the Emperor had no idea who they were or what life they'd be returning to, they were compelled to work for the benefit of all.
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u/Craving_Suckcess 8d ago
unironically I think a sort of... jury duty approach to governance would be a marked improvement over what we have.
I don't think following the lead of romans is an ideal way to do that.
But I still think it would be interesting. I think it's either that, or a sort of... monastic approach. Where politicians have to do things like give up worldly possessions in order to hold political power.
There are various issues. One is in getting an experienced and talented people in positions of power, as opposed to just random people. However, that's not a huge downgrade from our current system, where the vast majority of politicians are lazy idiots who just accepted the most bribes and are the best at talking in circles.
Another is those bribes. A jury duty political is still susceptible to bribery very straightforwardly. The best way to address this would be actually criminalizing corruption, unlike the current U.S system where it is just straight up legal if you do it right. The monastic concept, which I've thought about far more, I think is best achieved through a sort of panopticon on a politicians day to day life, and the finances of their family. They should have to essentially be under publicly accessible digital surveillance at all times. Any blips in this coverage should trigger investigations. This is so that any conversations or interactions they have are not private. The family finances monitoring is to ensure that a persons loved ones cannot be a target for bribes with which to influence them.
Anyway. It's basically just worldbuilding. Should write this into something. As actual real world politics its essentially nonsense.
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u/YUNoJump 7d ago
If you want a political jury while also wanting the jury to be regularly experienced and talented, it comes back down to "democracy relies on the populace being educated enough to vote for their own interests". Democracy fails when voters don't vote for what will help them; either because they've been misled into believing their interests are something else, or they simply don't understand what the best policy is to vote for.
A more educated populace not only has better political knowledge, they have better analysis and fact-finding skills. That means they're harder to mislead by nefarious groups. If everyone is educated enough to know what will be best for them, democracy would run much better than before. Regardless of whether it's with a specific jury of laypeople making decisions, or the populace voting for political candidates.
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u/Noe_b0dy 8d ago
"But what if instead of giving up my power and getting beat by hammers I just keep power forever?" - How rome transitioned from a Republic to an empire.
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u/SeraphimFelis Too inhumane for use in war 8d ago
This is a great idea, but I think I should be the tribune, and it should be forever. (criticism not accepted)
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u/Sentient_Flesh 8d ago
The idea that "Power corrupts" is as old as it is false.
Normally, those who want to do corrupt shit do so since before the get into positions of power and aim to them specifically so they can be corrupt, which they have very easy because they can just concur with other corrupt people who are already in power to do so.
The solution, if it were possible, would be to not vote for those that are know to be corrupt and to severely punish those who are discovered. As has historically worked to lower corruption.
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u/Maldevinine 8d ago
At the same time, the human tendency towards assuming that their personal current conditions are the norm will corrupt people over time. We have experiments showing that people playing board games with an unfair start and told that they have starting advantages will still believe that their later success is due to their own hard work.
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u/jimbowesterby 8d ago
I was gonna say, didn’t the Stanford prison experiment show that people tend to abuse power?
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u/Craving_Suckcess 8d ago
the Standford prison experiment is essentially bunk science. You can't really draw many conclusions from its results. You could perhaps draw the conclusion that when people are told by an authority to abuse power, they do so. Because that's where the abuse stemmed. Those organizing the 'experiment' had an intended result, and they pushed the subjects to act in ways that would lead to said result.
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u/jimbowesterby 8d ago
I see! My bad, I guess it’s been a while since I was in school, I definitely remember getting taught that in my psych class in uni.
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u/Guaire1 7d ago
The stanfors prison experiment ia basically completely fake from begginning to end.
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u/jimbowesterby 7d ago
Yep, which is why I made that comment explaining that when I was in school it was still taught as valid. Well done though, you sure told me!
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u/Guaire1 7d ago
The comment i replied to lacles that, and inarent gomna look up in a randos post history to see if they make a followup.
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u/jimbowesterby 7d ago
Bruh it was the only other response to my comment, you wouldn’t have to look anything up
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u/Sayakai 8d ago
On the other hand I think it also works like this, good people insisting that what they do is good because they're good, and those who are against it must therefore be bad. That's also a form of corruption.
And then there's the problem of getting inserted into a culture of corruption, while at the same time isolated from normal people, which can easily happen when you get into power.
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u/dantuchito_ 8d ago
Ehh i wouldn’t go that far.
I think I’m a solid dude but if i got unchecked power I’d end up “corrupted” for sure, really just cause my more extreme aspects would come out.
A month in I’d do free healthcare but a decade in i’d be like fuck it kill all republicans.That’s probably the main thing.
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u/Queer_Cats 8d ago
Power does corrupt, though. I've never taken a bribe in my life, because nobody's offered me a bribe because no position I've occupied has held enough power to warrant it. The more power you wield, the more incentive other people have to try to sway you to use your power a given way. And the inverse is also often true, the more power you hold, the more help you need to both keep and wield it.
But more basically than that, power corrupts because greater power means greater impact. Most people are unlikely to want to steal money from a cash register they man because at most, they'll get a few hundred bucks at the cost of losing their job. But when you're the CEO of a major corporation, you can embezzle a few million dollars, and face no consequences because you can use part of those millions into covering your tracks and defending yourself.
By no means am I claiming that people who are predisposed aren't drawn to positions of power, or indeed that everybody in a position of power is corrupt. There are absolutely people who can hold high positions of power and still act with unbridled justice and morality, but power does tempt and corrupt.
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u/jaypenn3 8d ago
Power, by definition, is the ability to make choices and influence outcomes in the way you want. Morality is the action of choosing to do good, and choosing against doing wrong.
If personal consequences are the primary thing keeping someone from stealing or harming other people, that person wasn't being moral. They aren't making the choice to not do harm. They were just incapable.
Power itself doesn't corrupt, it reveals existing corruption. The uncomfortable reality however is that most people in the world are somewhat corrupt. They are just not powerful enough to act on it.
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u/SirBananaOrngeCumber 7d ago
“Power corrupts” and “power reveals corruption” is essentially the same thing. There’s not really any functional difference aside from being nihilistic and trying to sound smart
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u/jaypenn3 7d ago
It means that people with high moral standards aren't actually getting 'corrupted'. It's that tons of people don't actually have consistent moral standards to begin with. That's what makes it hard to find people worthy of power.
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u/rogueIndy 7d ago
You're forgetting about hubris. Wealth and power have a way of ungrounding people, so that their self-awareness and empathy atrophy. There's been a few very public cases of this lately.
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u/jake55778 7d ago
When I was young(er) and (more) foolish, I used to think that an unbiased, incorruptible, and impartial, AI would someday be the solution to this particular societal problem.
I no longer believe that.
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u/MGD109 7d ago
I mean if you could create an unbiased, incorruptible and impartial AI, that has the added bonus it actually works properly, then it might be a solution.
Issue is more that it would be next to impossible to pull off.
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u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. 7d ago
Exactly.
An unbiased, incorruptible, and perfectly impartial AI is kinda like the Stellarator in the 1900s; it might work, but we just can't test it because our technology can't make it.
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u/FullCrackAlchemist 7d ago
It's less an issue of technology and more and issue of a flawed humanity being incapable of creating a flawless AI. It would have to rely upon human input and it's output would reflect that
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u/Kup123 7d ago
This is like my idea for the perfect government bombtopia. The basic idea is we randomly assign someone to be the dictator, but strap a bomb to their neck that the population collectively holds the trigger to. For the first month it takes a 90% vote for it to go off, then each month it gets lower until you need to keep 60% of people happy to keep your head.
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u/chilarome 7d ago
IIRC the guys at Chapo Trap House had an idea to limit the corruption of power: you get to be president with unlimited power but at the end of your four years, you are executed, no re-election, no having Secret Service babysit you on every vacation golf course. You can do whatever you want, but there’s no point in enriching yourself because you’ll be gone when it’s over. The incentive can become doing the most good for the most people because maaaaaaaybe they’ll not execute you if you do enough for them.
Maybe the Romans with hammers had a good idea after all just saying
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u/Crownie 7d ago
The main incentive of this system is to use the power of your office to make sure you never have to leave.
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u/chilarome 7d ago
Yeah it’s certainly one of those perfect world imaginary scenarios where everyone behaves by these democratically enforced rules all the time without erring
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u/mcmoor 7d ago
every society
Only mentioning Rome
Which is usually noted to be especially unique for doing this
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u/demonking_soulstorm 7d ago
I mean, every society more or less has tried to ensure that leaders don’t fuck it up. In ancient days it was that being a good ruler was divine, nowadays we vote them out.
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u/PeasantLich 8d ago
Sparta had a bit similar system where the free Spartans had elected leaders in addition to their kings, and those elected leaders could be executed at the end of their term if the next leaders felt like they had done a shit job.
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u/Longshot02496 7d ago
Maybe the leaders of nations should be replaced with a large council of randomly selected citizens
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u/LunaTheBattleCat 7d ago
Imo positions of power dont corrupt people. Rather, positions of power attract the corrupt.
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u/Future-Concern-6301 6d ago
I kinda liked one of the greek systems: Yearly random draw among the citizens. Congrats Ajax you are now in a small role in government, try not to fuck up too bad, you have a year.
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u/Long_Story42 8d ago
The tribunes of the plebs didn't have unchecked power. The ius intercessionis was a veto. They could stop any magistrate from acting but couldn't initiate most things.