Sortocracy is the form of meta-government whose purpose is to render it practical for consenting adults to form their own government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Introductory audio titled “Sortocracy’s Compassion” is available in two parts.

Part 1

Describes Sortocracy as an activity of civilized Man while

Part 2

describes Sortocracy in relation to the State of Nature, crime and punishment.

Why is this compassionate?

1) It protects people from the political imposition on them of bad social theories.

2) It teaches people with bad social theories the consequences of those theories.

3) It demonstrates the efficacy of good social theories so that progress in the social sciences is practical.

4) It reduces a major cause of war: the continuation of politics by other means.

What is the relationship between Sortocracy and Jury Nullification?

Jury Nullification occurs when a juror votes his conscience, or his interpretation of the Constitution over the law in the case before the jury. This role of the jury as supreme authority in the case before it comes from the jury’s origin in pre-JudeoChristian northern European tradition in which there were no kings as they existed after JudeoChristianization. The men of the community were individual sovereigns in the strict definition of “sovereign”.

This, then, is the connection with Sortocracy:

Local standards of society, as enforced by the jury of individual sovereigns from the locale, establish the social theories being tested in that locale.

As power became centralized by JudeoChristian theocracy, the social theories allowed were restricted to those permitted by the central authority of the Church and, ultimately, the Papacy. Protestantism was a reassertion of local autonomy in the interpretation and application of moral law, but it did not do away with the pattern of Royal decree that, while more local than the Papacy, was nevertheless not as local as the jury.

With the discovery of the New World, it was, perhaps, inevitable that the old, pre-JudeoChristian tradition of individual sovereignty would, bolstered by Protestantism’s emphasis on individual conscience, once again reassert the individual sovereign’s conscience as supreme in jury deliberations. This supremacy of the juror’s conscience was formally recognized by early judicial authorities in the United States. For example, first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Jay, told jurors: “You have a right to take upon yourselves to judge [both the facts and law].”

Then, as time went on and powers were centralized once more — this time in the Federal government rather than in the King or Pope — local self-determination waned until, finally, the Federal government arrogated to itself, with the support of the Federal Courts, so much authority that it became illegal for a farmer to grow feed for his own livestock according to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Of course, long before this travesty of “jurisprudence”, jury nullification had come under attack. The juror’s individual sovereignty is now so subverted by the arrogation by the courts that the jury selection process, confusingly called “voir dire” not only preemptively excludes potential jurors that might vote their conscience or judge the Constitutionality of a law, but threatens them with criminal penalties if they do.

It is instructive to examine the term “voir dire” in its original context when the pre-JudeoChristian juries of individual sovereigns engaged in review of potential jurors to determine whether or not they were, “peers”. Jury selection was, in that tradition, not a function of “The Court” since there was no “Court” as separate from “The Country” aka “The Community” aka “The Locale”. It was a matter of whether an individual was honored by his peers to sit with them as enforcers of the community’s integrity.