The 8 rules started out of frustration and maybe a bit of fear. In 2006 and 2007, I was living in Paris started getting more and more concerned about global warming. Some documentaries and some scientists were making it sound like the issue was not rising sea-levels, but more catastrophic change.
I can't remember exactly, but perhaps one thing that contributed to my fear was the Youtube called The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See. In this video, some guy uses Pascal's wager to present the risks of global warming. It's very persuasive and I still haven't changed my mind. Since then, despite climategate and the climate-hoax theorists, I've become even more convinced that we're playing with fire at an inconceivable scale.
I started discussing it with my colleagues. In France, lunch is often a kind of social event. Even work lunches. The French tend to stop business and discuss other things. I got to discussing my fears about the environment. What my friends told me is that politicians have no interest in changing the status quo. Who wants to impose special taxes and levies that are unpopular, losing votes, to save the planet?
Damn. Even if we could get very strong public opinion in favor of the drastic change necessary to control global warming, representative government dependent on votes would never implement the change. Our democratic system could eventually kill us.
We need to change the way government works first. The simple desires of the public could not be the sole driver. We needed a government liberally salted with brains and persuasion and something more complex than representation.
At the same time all this was happening Wikipedia was growing like mad and I saw better organized free news as one way to change people's minds. I wanted Wikinews to succeed the way that Wikipedia had. I thought that it needed more structure and democratic control to succeed. But I realized that democracy would create a news site full of stories about pop-artists instead of keeping track of the spread of malaria. We needed the malaria stories, not the Madonna stories.
At one point I suggested on a talk page that perhaps we needed some sort of voting, but voting that was weighted towards ability, rather than popularity. Someone responded that I sounded like I wanted a meritocracy. This was the first I'd heard of "meritocracy". And even though I think the responder was being negative, I thought it sounded great. That's when I started looking into other forms of government.
What is necessary to give the experts the authority to implement change, yet retain democracy?
How would a small village have done it? You wouldn't get the innkeeper, the most popular guy, to tell you how you should manage your sheep pastures; you'd get your best shepherd. How would you know who that is? Well you'd ask your other shepherds. Well that doesn't seem very democratic though. So how could you bring democracy into it?
If I was Joe Public in this mythical village, and I wanted a say in it, but I wanted the best person for the job, I'd think about the people I knew who knew anything about shepherds, and ask them who should do the job. In fact, I'd more or less "delegate" the decision to them. They know more than I do, so they should decide.
It sounds almost like "proxy" voting. You proxy your vote to someone else. Then that person could proxy yours and theirs to another, and so-on. At a fine grain level, on any particular problem, it could lead to the really good people working on the problems for the community. Interesting, but how can I prove that it's the right way to do things? I've got the solution, now I needed to get the requirements.
I started looking more deeply into the problem.
Instead of climate change, I started discussing political theory with my friends. I didn't go out and buy a book or surf blogs. I tried to go back to basic principals and work it out myself.
What is democracy? Where does it come from? What makes democracies work?
Over the course of a few friendly debate / lunches with my colleagues, I soon came to realize that there are very few concepts that are important, and that are often forgotten, and need to be considered when talking about government.
Of course money and capital always enter into it, but I tried to abstract them out. Here they are, for better or worse.
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