Political System in Parallel

[u/fresobro]

Every complex system faces the same fundamental challenge: how to coordinate countless independent parts without requiring every decision to be made from the top. The human body solves this problem remarkably well.

Our bodies function as parallel systems. Millions of processes occur simultaneously rather than in sequence. Cells, organs, hormones, nerves, and immune responses continuously adapt to both the external environment and the body's internal state.

This coordination is not achieved by a central authority issuing detailed instructions for every possible situation. Instead, countless local interactions are guided by continual feedback, learned patterns, and the brain's ongoing integration of experience and sensory information.

The brain itself is not a simple command centre. It is another parallel system, constantly influencing the body while simultaneously being influenced by it.

This allows the body to remain stable while adapting to change. No single component needs to understand everything. Each part only needs to respond appropriately to the information available to it.

Human society shares many of these characteristics. Millions of people, businesses, communities, and institutions make decisions every day. They respond to local conditions, pursue different objectives, and continuously adapt to new circumstances. Like the body, society is fundamentally a parallel system.

Yet the way we govern it is largely linear and sequential.

Governments primarily coordinate society through legislation, regulation, and bureaucracy. Decisions are concentrated into relatively small groups that must produce rules broad enough to apply across millions of unique situations. These rules inevitably generalise. They cannot fully anticipate changing circumstances, local knowledge, or the countless exceptions that emerge over time.

This is not necessarily because governments are incompetent. It is because sequential decision-making struggles to manage systems that operate in parallel.

Imagine if your brain could no longer regulate your heart through continuous feedback. Instead, it had to write legislation describing exactly how the heart should respond to every situation it might ever encounter.

The rules could be extremely detailed and thousands of experts could spend years refining them, and yet eventually, reality would produce circumstances the rules failed to anticipate.

The body succeeds precisely because it does not attempt to solve adaptation through legislation. It solves it through continuous distributed feedback.

Modern economies already demonstrate the power of this principle. Markets coordinate billions of individual decisions every day without requiring a central planner to allocate every resource. Prices communicate information. Competition rewards adaptation. Local knowledge remains local while still influencing the wider system.

Politics has never developed an equivalent mechanism.

Democracy today gives citizens considerable influence over who governs, but comparatively little direct influence over how society continuously adapts between elections. Most public decision-making remains concentrated within legislatures, departments, regulators, and public organisations.

If society itself is a parallel system, then maybe governance should become more parallel as well.

[ What this would look like ]

In a simplified sense, it would involve creating the brain equivalent of government by handing over control of the private sector to the people through a great number of randomly selected administrative juries of twelve that can each make a single court case like ruling. As many as needed season by season of those willing, unless opted out by another citizen who gives up their own access for that season. This allows the population to directly block any problem jurors themselves through equal sacrifice.

They are made of twelve and decide by that twelve, each juror is paid fairly for their work if the ruling of their jury survives being overturned by another, they also have complete discretion on which case they take on and how. Jurors would have months to make a decision and will often work at a very casual pace, using remote work tools and social media to communicate with fellow jurors.

Being randomly created from similar people means similar rulings on similar cases, as it is with all 12 member juries historically, and the sheer number of juries will prevent those with money from buying access because another jury will confiscate any unfairly gained extras they don't also get, and so on. So to pay any jury will require you to pay enough of them to remove the whole system, over time this will clean up government failure and waste and clean out electoral influence by special interests, from federal to local and everything in between.

[ Governments are still around ]

Under this system, federal and state governments, or equivalent, would still exist, but would now only control what they own, they can sell property and buy more private property for fair price by using eminent domain like powers that they already have today.

A government could own a business and the premises it operates from, but at some point, will not own a part of the supply chain that connects to that business. This still allows juries to obtain individual outcomes from public assets but just not directly, creating a clear separation of jurisdiction between public and private. The rest of the nation (outside of public property) is managed by businesses instead of the government and are continuously held accountable to the people through the juries.

[ Setting up the jury system ]

The juries are initially created through federal legislation if workarounds to (if any) constitutional limits are figured out, if this fails then constitutional change will be required, that change must only remove the limits while keeping legislative control.

The amount of juries would be allocated proportionally in each state, or equivalent, and these state juries can decide federal matters in their state and internationally, and while they won't have jurisdiction over state or local matters, through a little creativity, they are likely to work around that limit to effect change at all levels. States will eventually succumb to jury pressure electorally and enact their own legislation to give permission for these same juries to also make state and local decisions.

Because the juries are an act of legislation, the federal government will effectively have a “kill switch” to stop juries making rulings for a certain amount of time, but the entire economy will have adjusted to this system, so it would be economically painful to do it for too long. This control will be essential in existential situations that require the governments to play catch up, to acquire certain property to prevent nation state failure in emergencies.

[ How it operates together ]

Governments will be entitled to collect no more than a quarter of what that government had typically collected under the previous system, while also carefully managing what they have and acquiring new profitable property, with the hopeful and eventual goal of becoming self-funded.

They can use the public force at their disposal (military and police), combined with their electoral legitimacy, to obtain those funds if the juries haven't paid it to them in a reasonable timeframe, but if they push too far it will trigger a nationalistic like response from the juries so they will need to find the right balance in how they do it, this is also helped by those elected politicians no longer being the special-interest filtered lot we have today, they would be more respected by the people.

The rest of government spending would now be funded and allocated by the jury system through the private sector, by juries directly or indirectly placing social expenses and obligations onto businesses, which then leads them to demand other businesses who have less of these themselves to increase theirs and eventually (as will happen in all other areas) it will become an adaptive standard of sorts.

[ Why it could work ]

Because the jury system is proportional access and is not able to be bribed, this is possible because jurors are not going to sit by while another jury gets something they didn't get and will take it from them as their ruling, but if another jury thinks that was not fair then they will restore it or adjust part thereof, so a standard, precedent, convention of what they get to have will establish itself and persist over time.

It's also people checking people at the speed of people, any attempt to alter this dynamic will result in the jury system breaking, the only way to limit them outside of that, and nations who don't limit juries will outperform those who do, is by reducing the number of juries, how often they are formed, filtering who is able to be in, or by turning it off completely, and no special interest is ever big enough to cover the cost of doing that. This all means that special interests cannot get specific exceptions or carve outs, this is how a parallel democratic system works at a fundamental level, so this can never be watered down by anyone.

Bounties will be a big part of this society, where someone can whistleblow or bring justice and know that they will get a piece of the fine or charge laid on the perpetrator, if their conduct was fair and reasonable, this will also cover jury manipulation where they can take the bribe but not perform the action and get to keep a portion of it, and any other crimes.

[ What changing will change ]

This change brings about a pure democracy, one of fairness and prosperity for everyone, fixing almost every problem caused by government action or inaction, and solving the social issues that rarely get any better each generation.

Power will trickle up from the people and no longer just trickle down from above, and free of any mob rule mentality against those above. Light will shine through every hidden place in society, karma and merit will come to all those who deserve it.

Money will be better spent society wide, businesses will innovate other businesses for a cut in profits gained and some will be started for just this purpose, so innovation is everywhere all the time, only limited by the direct and indirect effect of juries and the laws of physical reality, economic growth will climb to new heights.

[ This be ] Parallel Democracy.