Superdemocracy is an idea I had a long while ago while musing on the optimum hierarchy for any organization. It’s really a variation on meritocracy — so despised by the postmodern crowd.

Imagine if you will the billions of decisions taken daily in businesses, agencies, governments, and other organizations up and down your country. Most of them will be made at nodal points where power has settled and accumulated over time and where empires are ruthlessly defended. In other words, they will be taken well above the level of optimum efficiency — the Point of Maximum Competence.

A little thought reveals that almost all decisions are made at points where the taker(s) are not fully aware of the complexities of the task. In today’s technical society, that disjunction is growing all the time.

If each decision is depicted as a small arrow, it’s not hard to visualize most of them pointing downward, albeit by a tiny amount. Day after day, these billions of small decrements add up to a massive efficiency deficit, which can only be supported by vast quantities of public money propping the whole edifice up.

Small businesses, by contrast, develop the expertise to avoid this tendency or they die, which is why they are usually the most dynamic elements in any economy.

Big businesses become more like governments as they mature, even creating social security and foreign affairs departments — look at Microsoft.

But government is the principal problem for Superdemocrats. In the UK, central government operates the highly technical National Health Service, with predictably dismal, and costly, results. It also runs the state schools, transport and other big areas of public concern. It now takes 43pc of the national income and employs 25pc of the workforce. In the world of Superdemocracy, we call this Decremental Drainage. The losses are fabulous and continual.

Let’s nail the problem then: governmental decisions are taken at the Level of Minimum Competence. In the UK, we also have the even more remote European level in Brussels — the Level of Maximum Incompetence. Why would any decisions beyond multi-cross-border issues ever be sent to Brussels?

What’s the alternative? Superdemocracy!

For a moment conjure up a vision of decisions being taken much further down the food chain at the point where all the complexities and variations of the case are fully appreciated. See all those billions of arrows beginning to point upward, albeit just a tad.

Jump forward a year or so and listen to that faint, distant rumbling of a tidal wave just visible on the horizon. It’s a tidal wave of MONEY.

Think I’m kidding? Look at any successful operation and you’ll see decision-making at the Point of Maximum Competence. Look at any failing organization and you’ll discover decisions being made well above those levels by fat cats ensconced in positions of conceit and self-delusion. There is no exception to this rule. Decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, will always rise to the top.

All decisions therefore should be taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. The CEO role should comprise nothing more than shaking the milk bottles all day long.

Of course, we need a decent algorithm to determine where that Point is in any organization. This is the next step.

Superdemocracy and representative democracy
Representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West, is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

But, as Churchill implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of Pop Idol, televised, beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, ” is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information, while being blissfully ignorant of the complexities of every case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders in the name of the People.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to these hick-town dilettantes and amateur actors who rise to the top of election process.

That’s where Superdemocracy comes in. Superdemocracy occurs when decisions are taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. It is almost always situated many levels lower than the norm in both the political and business environments.

Using Superdemocracy as a principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the robber barons of power, and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Here then is the natural way for the West to meet the challenges of China and India and the other nascent superpowers. The world’s wealth needs to be held largely by the most sophisticated nations, who have at least some wisdom in determining its dispersal.

The current danger is that — like the discovery of oil in the Middle East — massive industrial growth in non-democratic regimes, will bring great dangers to us all in the 21st century.

So, are you a Superdemocrat? You simply have to be.

To hell in a handcart
Why is it that politicians now try to protect us from what used to be called Acts of God?

In that great book, Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel asks a Zen master what Zen actually is. The master motions him to sit down on some sand overlooking a garden. They sit in silent meditation for three hours. Later the master points at the spot where he sat — it’s a perfectly formed depression with well-defined edges. Then he indicates where Herrigel sat — a much larger area with sand flung out untidily.

It was not your body that moved, said the master, but your mind. Your restless Western mind thinks that if you aren’t busy at something, the world will stop turning and chaos will take over.

But look, the grass kept growing, birds flew about in the sky, people went about their business. Nobody missed your presence, least of all the world.

When Presidents and Prime Ministers are sworn in, they should be made to read that passage. If they ceased restlessly interfering in our lives — and it’s much worse in Europe than in North America — Superdemocracy would be naturally present in society and most things would be done at the Point of Maximum Competence, or nearer to it than now.

Right now, the politicos and their armies of role-stealers are sending us to hell in a handcart.