Following on from Saturday’s piece on Superdemocracy, some readers wondered how it would affect representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West.

Representative democracy is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

But, as Churchill implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of Pop Idol, televised, beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, ” is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information, while being blissfully ignorant of the complexities of every case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders in the name of the People.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to these hick-town dilettantes and amateur actors who rise to the top of election process.

That’s where Superdemocracy comes in. Superdemocracy occurs when decisions are taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. It is almost always situated many levels lower than the norm in both the political and business environments.

Using Superdemocracy as a principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the robber barons of power, and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Here then is the natural way for the West to meet the challenges of China and India and the other nascent superpowers. The world’s wealth needs to be held largely by the most sophisticated nations, who have at least some wisdom in determining its dispersal.

The current danger is that — like the discovery of oil in the Middle East — massive industrial growth in non-democratic regimes, will bring great dangers to us all in the 21st century.

So, are you a Superdemocrat? You simply have to be.

Now read Part 3.