Our Greatest Need
Since 2016 the BANR Foundation’s learning community has explored promising developments in all six facets of society’s needs.
But it is now clear that society’s most urgent need is in governance.
To paraphrase Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, governance is the facet “to rule them all.”
We cannot meet our other societal needs without good governance.
BANR’s True Representation project is convening a politically diverse coalition of individuals and organizations to build a demonstration model of non-partisan large group decision-making.
True Representation is the bullseye of democracy.
True Representation demands that at each level in society people need to be truly represented in the decisions that affect them.
At BANR we agree with 20th century visionary Buckminster Fuller — to change the way things are we need to build models that will make old, failing models obsolete.
To that end, we are expanding the True Representation project to engage people in a collaborative effort to learn together and find practical ways to improve democracy.
Five Essential Conditions
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, named “best business book of 2004” by both Forbes and Businessweek, analyzes the necessary conditions for good large group decision-making.
My five takeaways from the book begin with two pre-conditions critical to establishing trust:
1. The group must have an agreed-upon and trusted process for converting individual opinions into a group decision.
- Unfortunately U.S. politicians do not trust; instead they routinely fight over both election and legislative processes.
2. The group must have trusted sources of reliable information.
- In this era of “fake news” and “alternative facts” the two major political parties in the U.S. do not trust each other’s information sources.
The three remaining conditions for good large group decision-making are:
3. The decision-makers must be diverse.
4. Decision-makers must have independence of judgment.
5. The decision-making process must be decentralized.
- U.S. legislators are not diverse — mostly white males over fifty with law or business backgrounds — who are pressured by “party whips” in every legislature to exclusively support the policies of their political party’s centrallized leadership.
Our legislatures do not meet any of the criteria for good large group decision-making.
Even with proposed reforms like term limits, election campaigns will still be funded by lobbyists and donors who have expectations about what they will get in return.
As one veteran lobbyist quipped: “Politicians would love to do the right thing — if only they could get away with it.”
The Lottocratic Alternatives
BANR, in its past blogposts and webinars, has often featured citizens’ assemblies and other decison-making processes that choose members by democractic lottery rather than by election or appointment.
The lottery is how the U.S. and others select juries for courts — a tradition that ensures diversity and fairness and has its roots in the ancient democracy of Athens, Greece where they chose ninety percent of public officials by lottery.
A 2024 article by Nick Romeo in the New Yorker reported on citizens’ assemblies:
“Many citizens’ assemblies follow a basic template. They impanel a random but representative cross-section of a population, give them high-quality information on a topic, and ask them to work together to reach a decision.
“In Europe, such groups have helped spur reform of the Irish constitution in order to legalize abortion, guided an Austrian pharmaceutical heiress on how to give away her wealth, and become a regular part of government in Paris and Belgium.
“Though still rare in America, the model reflects the striking idea that fundamental problems of politics—polarization, apathy, manipulation by special interests—can be transformed through radically direct democracy.”
In his 2024 book, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections, Alexander Guerrero details a hypothetical process for totally replacing elected legislators with citizens selected by lot to serve as decision-makers.
The True Representation Project
No, True Representation is not an experiment.
Deliberative democracy has been around for decades — long enough to prove its worth.
Rather, it’s a demonstration project.
We will show that convening groups of ordinary people to develop public policy is effective and inspirational — because we ordinary people cooperate in ways that our polarized politicians almost never do.
Watch this 8-minute video, “How to Restore Trust in Politics,” produced by The Economist magazine, about recent developments in citizens’ assemblies.
For more videos and readings go to BANR’s True Representation resource page.
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