Policy By Jury

Ok – this is a thought cast into the void.

Earlier this year, I did jury service here in NZ. Never done it before. New experience etc.

Anyway… turn up on the day… get name pulled out of hat… didn’t get rejected by lawyer… found myself in the jury room with the other 11 jurors.

They all seemed a bit thick to be honest – I come from the sort of town where people wear wolf t-shirts UNIRONICALLY. It’s the sort of town where anyone with any get-up-and-go, gets-up-and-leaves… So there was this selection of stereotypes (old ladies, young boof-heads) who grunted at each other, and made spectacularly inept attempts at conversation and there just seemed to be a lot of grunting and untogetherness going on. As I say, a bit thick.

The trial only lasted 3 days – the guy got off (he didn’t do what he was accused of)… but after a day or so, a remarkable transformation took place.

Everyone became smart.

I mean really smart… really sharp – capable of taking apart the nuances of what was going on, seeing past the stereotypes and the pre-conceptions… it was utterly humbling… and was possibly the single most illuminating thing I’ve seen this year.

I think what happened was “context”. People are used to being in a kind of low-level conversational context where grunting and saying something obvious about the weather provide a kindof acceptance-protocol. But if you put them in a context where they’re expected to be smart – where they’re given evidence and a mandate to “figure out what’s going on”… they become very sussed, very quickly.

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This is the opposite of the way voters are treated.

Voters are treated as though they’re completely and utterly stupid – lowest common-denominator, emotive, evidence-agnostic bollocks. We’ve got an election happening in NZ in a month or two – it’s all empty promises, empty slogans with NONE of the parties (with the possible exception of The Greens) even attempting to address issues that seriously need addressing.

Voters are treated as though they’re fucking stupid, and they vote as though they’re fucking stupid.

Now I’m not talking about treating voters as though they’re intelligent, I’m talking about Taking Power Away From Politicians – if a law needs to be judged, do it by Jury… with proper evidence, and access to proper expert opinion and experience – because we’ve seen what politicians are like, and it’s pretty clear that the ones that have the honesty or competence to “govern” are vanishingly small (again with the possible exception of The Greens, and a handful of Labour people).

And who wants to be “governed” anyway? It’s a peculiar colonial-era notion.

I’m not just talking about NZ (I come from more than one country), I’m talking about anywhere.

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Now there obviously needs to be checks and balances built into this… because “referendum politics” has been an utter fuckup elsewhere. The power of the broadcast media needs to be taken into account… or maybe not, because part of the reason the broadcast media is so effective at getting people to make bad decisions, is that people are effectively isolated. Alone in front of their TVs, patronised and dumbed-down.

This needs to happen in concert with Evidence-Based-Policy, and policies with TTLs… so if they don’t achieve their measurable results within the given time, they’re automatically repealed. It also needs to be built with the biases and weaknesses of the jury system accounted for (you learn about these in 1st-year psych)… but in the words of Jon Stewart: “if government suddenly became inspiring… and moved towards people’s better nature… and began to solve problems in a rational way rather than just a way that involved political dividends, we would be the happiest people in the world to turn our attention to idiots like, you know, media people”

Blurry, and you’ve seen it before. Watch it again, it’s even more relevant now than it was when it was made.

Anyway – I think we should see if Policy By Jury works – because I don’t see any evidence that “parties of the establishment” are capable of doing what Jon wants them to, and what we (really badly) need them to.

Just a thought like.