Modifying the weakness of democracies

James Madison said qualifications such as those of wealth, of birth, of religious faith, or of civil profession do not define what he meant by a natural aristocracy. But this does not or should not mean that genetics are not involved in defining a merit based natural aristocracy for any political system. We cannot rule out genetics even as those who make the social effort to cultivate and perfect certain traits and capabilities are likewise involved in defining a natural aristocracy.

Raymond Cattell had an interesting way of modifying the weakness of democracies, which tend to end up with the legal robbery of haves by have nots. The idea is to modify the weakness of democracy with a healthy form of meritocracy. Cattell based the selection of merit on his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure, with such things as his empirical studies of Culture Fair Intelligence Tests to minimize the bias of written language and cultural background in intelligence testing.

Cattell, a British and American psychologist known for his psychometric research put it this way: majorities in democracies can tell you what they want, then an elite selected by comprehensive testing of merit can help you actually get what you want, rather than having the ill-informed, greedy, power hungry, corrupt, selection process of most democracies, which define their elites.

Getting the reconciliation of the individual and the group right means, among other things, discerning the difference between creative social individuals and creative antisocial individuals, which modern psychometric testing can help with (was Hegel social and Nietzsche antisocial?) This assumes the sociobiological knowledge of the biological origin of most of our social behavior. Cattell's tests work quite well in telling us much about social and antisocial people (as long as there is room for outsiders to fall through the cracks, which, being outsiders, they often do.)

The bottom line for me in thinking about the group and the creative individual is to let individuals and outsiders freely create with no strings attached, that is, philosophers, artists, engineers, scientists, or whoever, but in the end the judgment has to come down to understanding and judging the difference between the social and anti-social works.

The related subject of ethnostates and an ethnopluralism of ethnostates also seeks to conservatively modify the weakness of democracy by advocating a way to deal with the growing variety of ethnic groups in America with very different genetic pools and different agendas, which could be done by adapting the Constitutional separation of powers and states to develop ethnostates, in harmony with real kin and ethnic-centered human nature, and then protecting them with a defensive federalism.

These ideas conservatively reform what we have now rather than having destructive radical revolution from the left or the right.