In an ideal society, who should we give authority to? Why should checking and balancing exist if "the people" possess the capacity to ruin society with errs in judgment or poor ideas?
The answer to this is simple: based on both hard logic and empirical observation, we pragmatically formulate models of ideals which we rigorously test -- not for rightness or wrongness, but for usefulness, as in components of a system. Then, after peer reviewing the results while continually checking for superior alternatives, we adopt these ideals for implementation by default. In essence, society will be ruled not by elites, not by no one, and not even by everyone, but by ideas. This, if we are to label it with a name at all, is idearchy. Anarchy strips everyone, especially government elites, of power; omniarchy grants everyone power; idearchy grants power to logic and logic alone.
Testing ideas shifts our focus away from agents. If I agree with a Christian that sadistic torture is unacceptable, am I now a Christian? Of course not. Likewise, just because a Christian is against sadistic torture does not imply that he or she would make a good leader. We're all subject to individual faults, so instead of inefficiently taking any one of us as a bundle of ideas, why not assess the ideas individually, and let them 'rule' us through unbiased, rigorous testing and peer review? No idea should ever be coupled to another simply because it runs on the same hardware.
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