What is a Kakistocracy and is America Becoming One?

Kakistocracy (from the Greek kakistos, meaning “worst”) is a system of government in which a planet, nation, or administrative region is run by its least competent, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.

This is not to be confused with democracy, where the moderately incompetent are elected by the somewhat informed, or aristocracy, where the incompetent inherit their positions through the time-honored tradition of being born. In a kakistocracy, there exists an almost supernatural ability to elevate precisely the wrong person to precisely the wrong position at precisely the wrong time.

Earth has flirted with kakistocracy throughout its history, though earthlings rarely call it by its proper name, preferring euphemisms like “political crisis,” “administrative challenges,” or “well, at least it can’t get any worse” (it can).

The remarkable thing about kakistocracy is that it requires more effort than one might imagine. Random selection would occasionally produce a competent leader purely by statistical accident. True kakistocracy demands a systematic filtering process that screens out intelligence, experience, and basic pattern recognition while championing confident incompetence and the ability to blame others for one’s own spectacular failures.

A Galactic Example: The Fall of Blissteron VII

The textbook case remains Blissteron VII, a mineral-rich planet in the Crab Nebula whose democratic government spectacularly transformed into a kakistocracy over a period of three generations.

The Blissteronians, having achieved post-scarcity economics and near-immortality through medical science, grew bored. Seeking entertainment, they began electing leaders based on their performance in their equivalent of Earth’s reality television programs rather than tedious criteria like “policy positions” or “not being completely barmy.”

The rot set in properly when they elected Zax the Unqualified, whose campaign slogan was literally “I Know Nothing About Government and I’m Proud of It!” Zax appointed his childhood friends to run the planetary defense grid, the economic council, and most catastrophically, the reality settings for their planet-wide simulation systems.

Within eighteen months, Blissteron VII had:

• Accidentally declared war on itself (three times)
• Replaced its currency with collectible trading cards featuring Zax’s face
• Set the planetary gravity to “random” because someone thought it would be “more dynamic”
• Outsourced its entire government to an AI that turned out to be a chatbot designed to order sandwiches

The planet’s eventual rescue by the Galactic Civil Service required seventeen years of paperwork and a strongly worded letter.

The lesson, which Earth might want to write on a sticky note somewhere visible, is this: competence in government may seem dull, but incompetence in government is only entertaining until the gravity stops working.