Geographical determinism can explain the Swiss to some extent. Hill people are hill people, because hills are much more easily defended than anything else: they don’t have to worry as much about getting conquered or meddled with as, say, Poland. Why should the Swiss bother fighting for more land? The mountains aren’t going anywhere.

You can make your point without frothing, is all. Lutter certainly manages to. If you can’t be bothered to spend a few seconds composing a sentence with a minimum of style, grace, or wit, why should I be expected to host it?

This could actually be a test for political systems. Is it obvious who builds and owns the spaceship (not “mankind”)? Is it obvious who gets to go in the spaceship? Can everyone else understand the “selection” process? That the UN spaceship would be criticised for not being fair in its selection process is a strike against the UN as a coherent organisation.

The whole thought experiment is a beautiful demonstration of why “representation” is moronic. Imagine living in a world where not only are you impressed by your elites’ spaceship building skills, but you understand their desire to save their families and take the best people to fill various roles, and maybe you even want them to succeed because you’ve respected them your whole life. You have no expectation of surviving the apocalypse, since you can’t build a spaceship yourself and why the hell would anyone build an spaceship for you? And you certainly don’t care whether the spaceship contains a representative number of people of your race/gender/deviance. That’s a healthy society.

Societal failure modes include the spaceship builders sending a “representative” selection of people, selecting purely on merit (as opposed to including themselves and their families and selecting the experts they need), and sending the Swiss.

This gives some idea of the malevolence of “representative” politics. A benevolent society is one where I can understand things on a human scale and in human terms. I don’t expect everything to go my way but I can understand why things generally don’t. A malevolent society is one where everything is decontextualised by abstractions. Is this fair/unfair, equal/unequal, liberal/illiberal, representative, democratic? Does anyone really know? The only thing to do is to air your grievances and grab at whatever you can.