It just seems really stupid
It's a way of doing representative governance in a situation where you need centralization and insulation from corruption.
It's like sampling in statistics, you can assume that if you do it enough, it'll represent the population as a whole, which is important if you're trying to meet their needs.
Going by memory, I think he made this argument in favor of a lottery system over council system:
Suppose you have hierarchy of direct democratic councils in which each council votes and then sends a delegate up to the next level. To use a simplified example, there might be 100 councils of 10 at the bottom level, each sending one delegate up to the next level where there are 10 councils of 10, each sending one delegate up to the final level where there is one council of 10 which will make the final decision.
If the population is split 40:60 in each council at the bottom level, then obviously the minority view will be completed eliminated by the time you get to the second level. And even if the minority has a majority in some councils at the bottom level, it's unlikely they will make it to the top since most of their sympathizers will have been eliminated in the other councils, since it's winner take all. So there's a tendency for a council system to filter out opposing views, even when the majority isn't enormous. The larger the hierarchy (and any real system would be much larger than the example above) the stronger this effect would be.
This isn't a problem if you take a random sample. I kind of like the idea since it allows direct democracy without everyone having to spend all their time in meetings. :grillman:
