Would you vote for yourself

In my understanding of Athenian democracy, all citizens got involved in the process. You didn’t have representative democracy like we do now. So why do we continue to remain unreasonably attached to the notion that the everyman sits in parliament?

In the modern world, a good governor needs to know a damn many things. They need to be up to date on technology, economics, social theory, health policy, environmental science, social and cultural change and a host of other issues. To this end, a governor probably needs to be quite smart and thoroughly well educated. To an extent, they probably need to be a professional governor in the way that we have professional lawyers, administrators, plumbers and the like.

Why then is there is a large artery of literature in this country suggesting that it is good to have people just like the average citizen in parliament? Would you vote for yourself?

I’m sure some alarm bells just went off. How can we protect the democratic process if we have an elitist system of government that is impenetrable to the average citizen?

Well for starters I’d like to acknowledge that it is a good question, and something that will need to be worked on over the next century. Some things that spring to mind include having a media that reports in depth rather than through sound bites, and a better base-line of education, which will require increased investment in public schools.

But before we start saying that it is impossible and undemocratic, let’s acknowledge that we already have a representative democracy, and that it is not such a big step to move from voting for the average, to the exemplary. Essentially, what we need to do is stop saying ‘that bloke/Sheila is just like me, so I’m going to vote for him/her’ to ‘that Sheila/bloke is the best qualified, and I trust him/her, so they’re getting my vote’.