zomo-prl
09.09.08, 17:10
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "...anyone who deliberately aimed at the
job (of president) should automatically be disqualified..." (The
Songs of Distant Earth, 1986 p. 38), so the best way to choose
presidents, governors or mayors is by a lottery, and the only
persons disqualified should be those who deliberately seek a public
office, those under thirty or over seventy, incurably ill, mentally
ill, or those who committed grave crimes. It must be noted that
Clarke assumed that in a genuinely democratic society every one had
been educated to the limits of his or her ability. It must be
finally added that Clarke was an optimist, as he predicted the rise
of the first true democracy on Earth in New Zealand in the year
2011. As in the case of his other predictions, such as truly
intelligent computers and the ability for manned space travel (using
nuclear energy) up to the moons of Jupiter in the year 2000, he was
somehow too optimistic, but at least gave us some hope (a commodity
which seems to be now in very short supply, especially in case of
Lem in the final years of the twentieth century).
