Our brain houses a very complex, mostly subconscious model of how the world works. We use this model to make our largely intuitive decisions like what to eat, whom to trust, how to vote and what is right and what is wrong. We have a capacity to rationalize consciously, especially when it is a collaborative reasoning that filters out extreme divergences in thinking. Single mind reasoning is often hi-jacked by our emotions.

Words give us an entrance to our subconscious mental model. Each word carries a mountain of connotations based on our previous experience with the word. We can’t separate the meaning from all these connotations. Sometimes it’s best to coin a new word as a new anchor for different, maybe better connotations. Democracy is a good example. It has largely positive connotations as the answer to making a better world.

I believe that our faith in democracy is unjustified. It is unjustified on two counts, one there is no underlying rationale that what the majority want is in any way “right” or good. Maybe less people will be unhappy and the danger of an uprising is less when the majority agree. Second, the mechanics of democracy are so flaky and so easily hacked that policies produce by current democracies don’t come close to reflecting a true majority wish even under the guise of democracy.

We need a new word as an anchor for connotations of an engineered politics. We are an intelligent species, we can create good government policy as we have created such phenomenal engineering policy. I suggest a new word, “engocracy”, engineering power. This word has no connotations now so we can engineer its meaning.

People are very sensitive to whom they perceive having power over them. It is one of the prime social constructs that fuels our acceptance of any evolution of government. The main positive that democracy has is that it gives the false perceptions the we are masters of our fate. Engocracy will need to earn that perception as well but the link to engineering rather than politics will help.

There is a strong vote for accepting engineering values by the large number of people who fly around the world in engineered aircraft and aviation infrastructure, there are no signs of rebellion even if they didn’t vote for the people who made the decisions. When that aircraft takes off they are great-full it was designed by engineers, not politicians touting democratic control.

We need to make that radical switch in thinking that good decisions are seldom made by politicians, but engineers have a legacy of good technical decisions but also the social decisions needed for a robust aviation infrastructure.

Engineers designed a machine that can fly, a strictly technical problem that engineers are good at. But the engineering concept of evidence based decisions, cooperation, no ideology, conformance to standards and certified expertise produced the required infrastructure of the aviation world. Engineers also produced the atomic bomb, a technical problem but the control infrastructure was left to politicians.

We need a political Kitty Hawk so show that Engocracy can fly at 100 feet for 3 minutes to boot strap our route to the 747 of good politics.