The Missing Genre: Why Political Philosophers Should Be Writing to get Netflix deals

Political philosophy has an engagement problem.

The genre of sci-fi is an enormously successful and impactful way for the general public to think about metaphysical and moral issues. Star Trek directly influenced the design of iPads, cell phones, and people today were prepared to discuss AI because of sci-fi. Even before artificial wombs have been invented, the theme of ectogenesis has been in literature for quite some time, in Brave New World, in The Matrix, and in a novel by Helen Sedgewick called The Growing Season.

Over the past few decades, political philosophers have generated an extraordinary range of proposals that radically rethink how societies could be organized: epistocracy, sortition-based systems like lottocracy, post-national governance, algorithmic coordination, and more.

These are very important proposals. The philosophers who advocate them have thought very seriously about their benefits and problems, and these should all be serious alternatives to all of the political arrangements that have populated this Earth before this time. Yet outside of academic circles, almost none of these ideas feel real. They do not get discussed by political pundits, they do not get discussed by journalists, students outside of graduate-level seminars in political philosophy do not get excited to get together to talk about them.

They’re not on TV, in movies, they’re just not in the culture. Science and even ethics has solved this problem with fiction. Science-fiction isn’t a genre that just describes new technologies, they ask people to imagine what it is like to inhabit worlds shaped by them. Religious theology and fantasy novels are not about tenets, but about what worlds are like inhabited by metaphysics entirely different from the manifest image people see every day. Their entertainment value is why people love talking about these issues.

This is what we need for political philosophy, a genre of short story, novels, screenplays, etc that is like sci-fi, poli-fi, only it is not fiction with a political theme, of which we have an abundance. It is a genre of fiction that treats political systems themselves as the primary speculative variable in a fictional narrative.

One way to see the gap between sci-fi and poli-fi is to ask a basic question of any piece of fiction:

What fundamental constraint is being altered?

Malcolm Gladwell famously thought that in fiction about law enforcement, or the procedural, you just alter two variables and you get the four major genres. The first variable is the moral quality of the justice system, the second variable is whether the hero is an insider or outsider.

1. The Western-there is no law and order. An outsider appears and imposes it on a lawless place. Jack Reacher is a Western.

2. The Southern-Law and order exists but is corrupt. It is selective; going after black people for instance and letting white people off the hook. A hero who is an outsider appears and fights the corruption from the outside. John Grisham novels are Southerns.

3. The Northern-Law and order and the justice system works as it is supposed to to deliver justice. The hero or heroes are all insider law enforcement doing a noble job. Law and Order the TV show is a Northern. You simply do good detective and prosecutorial work and the bad guys get put away.

4. The Eastern-Law and order exists but there are bad apples inside, and there is a whistleblower on the inside, and the insider takes out the trash.

In science fiction, what is materially possible is the variable altered. Physics and technology is the variable. Change one physical or technological thing and you get a piece of science fiction.

In fantasy, metaphysics is altered. You have immortality of certain kinds, magical spells or demon/dragon/human chimeras who have discontinuous memories.

Science fiction and fantasy are well-developed because they know what to keep fixed and what to vary to systematically explore the human consequences of that variable. Science fiction and fantasy involve protagonists that are more or less psychologically just like us in the actual world. They have goals just like us. Characters within the world who are navigating it against the backdrops and constraints that the physics, technology, or metaphysics, present as opportunities and obstacles. The alternative physics or metaphysics are experienced by characters as real and natural in the same way we take, say, representative democracy, or authoritarianism, or monarchy, as real and natural. These fictions don’t just introduce a new element, they build worlds where that element structures everything. And then those of us outside of those systems can let our imaginations fly about what it is like to be in such a world. That is the pleasure of sci-fi.

Political philosophy rarely gets this treatment. Political fiction critiques existing systems (dystopias), or dramatizes familiar structures like elections or corruption or dynasties.

Political philosophers should do something more ambitious, such as create and sustain a genre about radically different political systems and show people how it feels to be inside of them, the very kind of thing that engages people when they watch Sarah and John Connor confront the iterations of Skynet over the course of the last 40 years. We should invent Poli-Fi, and make it as sloppy and interesting as sci-fi.

Lottocracy is a perfect start. This is an idea I’ve been seeing a lot in recent years from friends in the field like Jason Brennan and more recently Alex Guerrero. It is the idea that political power should be distributed by random selection (sortition) rather than elections.

In academic writing, this appears as arguments and empirical data, about representativeness, about models of deliberation, with critiques of elections and all of their pitfalls. These arguments are of significant interest to political philosophers and should be of interest to more people, except ordinary people all still trying to survive until the next political news cycle. They have no time for political philosophy.

But instead of considering what the best arguments for lottocracy are, how about we begin by doing something that the public is more likely prepared to engage with: what would it feel like to live in a lottocratic society? What are the human conflicts that emerge in them? How might an eight-episode Netflix series, or a short story, involving a small business owner, unfold as she is selected randomly to be a legislator? What would she do with her business? What team of lobbyists would suddenly descend on her looking for political favors? Does she meet the team of other people selected? Does she get drunk with power over the course of her years as lawmaker? Would it be a comedy or a thriller?

There’s a reason science-fiction has had such a big influence on technological imagination. It allows us to simulate consequences before implementation, allows us to simulate all the different range of consequences, and we also know that they are simulations, they are fiction. The reason we’re in the particular stage of debate about AI we are in is only because of the uncertainty of where we’re headed. We’ve been prepared ahead of time for both the utopian and dystopian possibilities and are imaginatively prepared to engage with them precisely because of sci-fi.

Speculative political fiction could do the same for governance. Fiction makes abstract systems emotionally legible in all of its many facets, something very important if we want people to engage with our ideas.

If you are a political philosopher working on a non-traditional system like lottocracy, I’d like to issue a self-serving challenge. Write one piece of fiction. Use sci-fi as the model. It would be good for reception of your work, and it would be good for philosophy. And if it is successful, you better bet that teams of aspiring fiction writers will be taking your courses or coming to you for ideas to develop more.

This is a seriously untapped resource. Who knows, you might even get a Netflix deal.