The Mound - #37 Choosing the Chosen One

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.

Rumour has it the Liberals' main talking points in the next election will be nuclear energy and immigration, which is funny because, when it comes to cultural assimilation, I call Dutton the 'Fusion Reactor'.

If you're anything like me, the above news inspired a kind of fear-stained fatigue usually reserved for the scariest of Sunday evenings, those late night considerations of the week and the work ahead that have you pretty soon pondering the practicality of faking one's death.

But we're no cowards, here at Good One. Nay. We have hope this time, because we have time.

Nobody wants to hate half of the country - so, forearmed with the issues most likely to tear us apart, is there something we can do before the election to prevent polarisation? Is there a way we can take the emotion out of the debate to come?

Here's how we fix it:

Ask any Australian at the pub and they're likely to concur that, during an election, most mainstay politicians' motives are hardly pure. At the very least, their words should be fact-checked and it's imperative for democracy that they are held to account. Enter: the media - which unfortunately is also subject to the biases of partisan politics, from within and without. So who is then left for us to trust? Is there anyone or anything we can trust to tell us what's cracking? TikTok? Christ. (?) (!)

There isn't one source of information in our modern world that hasn't been corrupted by exposure to, well, this modern world. So we can't agree on what's real. But perhaps we could agree on what a good, uncorrupted source of information might look like?

In Plato's Republic we learn of the philosopher-king, a person who's raised from birth, specifically for the purpose of leading a nation. Whilst this isn't very democratic, it does suggest a means of creating a pure source of information.

What if we used NAPLAN results to identify a promising, representative mix of children in Australia? What if we then relocated these children to something like a temple, smack-bang in the middle of nowhere, to be raised in isolation from the corruptive influence of modern media, microplastics, and McDonalds? At their home in the mountains, they are fed only books and documents approved by an independent body for their quite technical, no-spin presentation of the facts as we know them.

Upon their 18th birthdays and the next election cycle, these kids are then removed from their temple, wheeled out around the country to discuss concepts like the transition to nuclear energy, immigration rates and their impact on population growth. Because they are so revered, at this point closer to religious figures than informational sources, no civilian would dare ask them a question for fear of corrupting these angelic lil' geniuses with their shitty takes on literally anything.

What these chosen children actually to each other onstage is actually irrelevant; the main benefit of such a process would be the ritual of it all, that once every few years the entire nation would get to see a young person think through a problem or an issue - without agenda or pressure to conform, without malice - and be forced to note how far it is that we, the sullied, have thus fallen.

As for the kids themselves, they would only need to serve a single year or election cycle, becoming undoubtedly corrupted in the process of touring around the country. They would then be discarded, of course, free to explore our world and to lead the near-perfect, totally fine lives awaiting any and all child stars. And we'd thank them for their service.

You're welcome, Australia.