I fully expect to come back to this post with plenty of Lemmy-tastic comments along the lines of "The people are tired of experts", but left-leaning instead of right.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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The "pilots" were chosen by pretty much the process depicted on that cartoon.
Choose people by being popular and saying the right things and you get salesmen types rather than experts.
This is why Education is so important to make Democracy work - well educated people can much more easily see through the bullshit as well as being more aware of the implications of the choice they're making, so tend to chose better "pilots" even thought the one weakness of Democracy in the modern age is that it's pretty much a choice based on perception and hence tends towards being a choice-by-popularity: the better educated are far from immune from bad choices but are a bit better at evaluating what candidates tell them and put some more effort into it because they're more aware of the importance of that choice.
Granted, for actual pilots one probably wants some kind of non-voting process that selects them, but if by "pilots" we mean "those leading a country", such methods are not Democracy, they're Authoritarianism and invariably they too do not select the "pilots" on competence at "piloting" the country, but rather on other personal abilities (like being the best ones at climbing the ranks in a Party, or at managing the support of violence specialists such as the Military)
I have a saying: "You can never trust salesmen or politicians, and to be fair politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge."
I'd say a lottery based on merit would be appropriate to choose leadership in certain areas for a reasonable duration. Determining merit could be a sticky issue if misapplied though, and could lead to some of the issues we deal with now.
Perhaps people could vote on a pool of experts for the final decision, with each expert advertising the solutions or progress they hope to achieve during the term of their leadership. It could just amount to people voting on the methods each expert chooses to accomplish their goals, depending on how specialized the office is.
As for leading the country, I am unsure if such an office is necessary. I am personally not a fan of the centralization of power when society is this profoundly sick. We need to patch the leaks in our ship before we can worry about captaining it.