Back to the Future for a Real Democracy

Join us at this Sunday meeting at Conway Hall where Brett Hennig will talk about a different way of “doing” democracy through sortation or random selection. We are running this meeting in conjunction with the Conway Hall Ethical Society because it fits well into our Future Democracy theme and the other events we are holding.

Democracy, like all powerful terms, is a slippery word to get a grip on. What is the essence of democracy? What are the ideals? Brett Hennig will take us on a voyage revealing democracy’s intriguing and complicated history to explore these questions and discover how we got to where we are. This trip will lead us all the way back to ancient Athens, where they used rotation and random selection (also called sortition) to allocate almost all of their political positions.
He’ll then take a massive jump back to the future to see how the rediscovery of sortition in modern democratic experiments shows us, incredibly, the way to fix the broken system we have inherited and to institute a real democracy. And, something you wont believe, this would spell the end of politicians. Who wouldn’t vote for that!

Recent TEDx speaker Brett Hennig is a director and co-founder of the Sortition Foundation, whose aim is to promote the ideas developed in his recent book The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy and to institute the use of stratified, random selection of individuals to form our government. Before co-founding the Sortition Foundation, Brett wore a variety of hats: as a taxi driver, a software engineer, a social justice activist, a mathematics tutor, and the primary carer of four boys; he finished his PhD in astrophysics just before his first son arrived. He has spent the last several years investigating and researching network forms of democracy and is flying in from Budapest to present what will form the basis of this electrifying event, which is also sponsored by GlobalNet21 and London Futurists.

Please note this meeting is free to Conway Hall and GlobalNet21 fully paid members but for others there is a charge of £3 (and £2 concessionary fee.)