Geniocracy (from Latin genius, \"innate ability, natural talent,\" and\nGreek kratos, \"rule, power\") is the Raëlian doctrine of government — a form of\ndemocracy that weights political participation by measured intelligence. It is\nthe first of the seven New Commandments that\nYahweh delivered to Raël (Claude Vorilhon) during the\nDecember 1973 contact and that Vorilhon recorded in\nThe Book Which Tells the Truth\n(1974). The doctrine proposes what its source calls a \"selective democracy\": the\nright to vote reserved for those whose measured intelligence is at least ten\npercent above the population average, and eligibility for public office reserved\nfor those at least fifty percent above it. Vorilhon set the doctrine out at\nlength in a dedicated 1977 book, Géniocratie (English: Geniocracy: Government\nof the People, for the People, by the Geniuses), and founded the Movement for\nWorldwide Geniocracy the same year.
\nThe name pairs two roots. Genio- comes from the Latin genius — attendant\nspirit, then innate ability or exceptional talent — and -cracy from the Greek\nkratos, \"rule,\" the suffix that also yields democracy, aristocracy, and\ntechnocracy. The choice of genius rather than meritum (which would give\nmeritocracy) or techne (which would give technocracy) is deliberate: the\ndoctrine attaches authority to raw intellectual capacity rather than to\ndemonstrated achievement or specialised technical skill.
\nThe argument begins as a critique of universal-suffrage democracy. In its\npresent form, the source holds, democracy weighs every vote equally regardless\nof the voter's capacity to understand what is at stake — \"the voice of someone\nwhom you might vulgarly call 'a cretin' is worth as much as that of a genius, who\nhas thought maturely about the way he or she is going to vote.\" Across history,\nVorilhon argues, power has been held first by the physically strong, then by the\nwealthy, then by politicians and military men — never by the people who actually\nmove civilisation forward:
\n\n\n\"Whether they discovered the wheel, gunpowder, the internal combustion engine\nor the atom, the geniuses have always allowed less intelligent people in power\nto benefit from their inventions. Often such people have used peaceful\ninventions for murderous ends. All that must be changed.\"
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The organising image is the body. Just as the cell in the foot does not vote on\nwhat the hand should pick up — that is the brain's task, and the foot benefits\nfrom the brain's good decisions — political judgement should belong to those\nequipped to exercise it rather than be spread evenly across the whole organism:
\n\n\n\"Each person is a useful cell in this huge body we call humanity. The cell in\nyour foot should not decide whether or not your hand should pick up a given\nobject. It is the brain, which must decide, and if the object in question is\ngood, the cell of your foot will benefit from it. It is not up to the foot to\nvote.\"
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The historical example is Copernicus, condemned by a Church majority that lacked\nthe knowledge to judge him: \"Copernicus was condemned by a majority of\nincompetent people because he was the only one at that time who had a\nsufficiently high level of comprehension.\" Where a decision turns on\nspecialised knowledge, the source argues, weighting every opinion equally\nproduces reliably worse outcomes than expertise-weighted judgement — had the\npublic been polled on whether the automobile should be permitted, \"you would\nstill be riding in a horse and cart.\"
\nThe proposed mechanism is psychometric. Intelligence tests, applied from infancy\nand recorded on an identity or voter's card, would establish each person's\nintellectual coefficient and set eligibility against the two thresholds:
\n\n\n\"Only those with an intellectual capacity of at least fifty per cent above the\naverage should be eligible for a public post. To vote, individuals would need\nan intellectual coefficient of at least ten per cent above average.\"
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Vorilhon insists this is \"a totally democratic system\" — contested elections,\nfree political organisation, and peaceful transitions all preserved — and\nstresses that it rewards intelligence rather than credentials. There are\nengineers of below-average intelligence who accumulated degrees on the strength\nof memory, he notes, and labourers and farm workers of no formal education whose\nintelligence runs fifty percent above the average. The aim, in the source's own\nnaming, is \"placing the genius in power, and you may call that 'Geniocracy'.\"
\nBecause the doctrine is framed as a selective democracy rather than a break\nwith democracy, it is defined as much by what it is not. It is not monarchy or\naristocracy, whose authority is hereditary; not plutocracy, whose criterion is\nwealth — the source explicitly casts the rule of \"the rich, who used their money\nto employ many 'brutes'\" as an earlier pattern to be left behind; and not\ntheocracy, whose eligibility rests on religious standing. It parts from\ntechnocracy, too, which would empower narrow technical specialists — engineers,\neconomists — whereas Geniocracy weights general intellectual capacity; and from\nmeritocracy, which rewards demonstrated achievement and credentials, whereas the\ndoctrine's test is measured intelligence, credentialed or not. The distinction\nmatters to the source, since credentials tend to track privilege while raw\nintelligence, on its account, does not.
\nYahweh delivered Geniocracy as the first of seven\nNew Commandments — the Aquarian-age program the\nElohim proposed for humanity's long-term development, alongside\nHumanitarianism (property and inheritance),\nWorld Government,\nDemilitarization,\nScience as Religion,\nTelepathic Cultivation, and the\nMetaphysical Clarifications. Within that\nprogram Geniocracy is foundational: the other reforms presuppose leaders able to\ngrasp their long-range logic. The source makes the dependency explicit in the\nHumanitarianism section — \"If geniuses are admitted to power, they will\nunderstand the usefulness of these reforms.\"
\nOn the canon's account the doctrine is not a human invention but the standing\npractice of the Elohim's own world. The preface to Géniocratie states it\nplainly: \"These challenging concepts already apply on the planet of the Elohim.\nUnless we can come up with something better, they advise us to begin preparing to\nimplement a similar system, since all human progress is ultimately dependent on\nthe work of geniuses.\" Earth's adoption of Geniocracy is read, then, as the\ntaking-up of a cosmic-civilisational standard — offered rather than imposed, with\nhumanity left free to devise something better if it can.
\nVorilhon carried the doctrine into a body distinct from the Raëlian Movement\nitself. The Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy (1977) pursues Geniocracy as a\npolitical project, while the Raëlian Movement remains a religious-cultural\ninstitution focused on diffusing the message and building the\nEmbassy. The two are deliberately separable: \"a person can be a\nRaelian and a 'Geniocrat', just as one can be a Democrat and a Christian; one can\nhave a religion and a political opinion. Raelians do not have to get involved\nwith the Geniocratic party.\"
\nThe corpus reads Geniocracy as a direction of travel rather than a program for\ntomorrow. It is what human government is to evolve toward across the\nAge of Aquarius — as intelligence measurement\ngrows more reliable and the cultural ground is prepared — not a system to be\nimposed on present democracies. Its full realisation would depend on validated\nmeasurement, on coordinated World Government\nimplementation, and on a long shift in how societies think about authority and\nparticipation.
\nGeniocracy joins a long line of proposals that would tie political authority to\nknowledge or intellect, and it is best read alongside them rather than in\nisolation.
\nThe nearest ancestor is Plato's philosopher-king. The Republic (c. 380 BCE)\nargues that political decisions, like medicine or navigation, are a kind of\nexpertise, and that a specially cultivated guardian class should rule — an\nargument whose just-soul / just-city analogy runs parallel to Vorilhon's body\nmetaphor. The differences are real: Plato's guardians are formed by philosophical\neducation rather than measured by test, and the Republic is frankly\nnon-democratic where Geniocracy keeps elections. The Confucian tradition,\noperationalised in China's imperial examination system (keju, c. 605–1905 CE),\noffers the largest historical experiment in merit-selected government, though it\ntested classical learning and moral cultivation rather than general intelligence.
\nCloser to the present, the twentieth-century technocracy movement (Howard\nScott's Technocracy Inc., founded 1933) would have handed governance to engineers\nand scientists, and Bertrand Russell weighed — and largely resisted — the idea of\na \"scientific oligarchy.\" The contemporary academic debate over epistocracy,\nrule by the knowledgeable, is the closest living parallel: Jason Brennan's\nAgainst Democracy (2016) argues that widespread voter ignorance makes universal\nsuffrage produce poor outcomes, while David Estlund's Democratic Authority\n(2008) defends democratic legitimacy against exactly such proposals. Earlier\nstill, John Stuart Mill proposed plural voting in Considerations on\nRepresentative Government (1861), giving the better-educated additional votes\nwhile keeping universal suffrage — a gentler cousin of Geniocracy's hard\nthreshold. These convergences are probably best read as independent responses to\na shared problem; Geniocracy differs from all of them in resting its case on the\nRaëlian source and in specifying exact psychometric cut-offs.
\nThe doctrine is, by any mainstream measure, deeply controversial, and its\nobjections deserve to be stated fairly.
\nThe first is measurement. Geniocracy assumes that \"intelligence\" can be measured\nreliably enough to gate political rights. Whether any single number captures\nintelligence at all is contested: Charles Spearman's g factor gave the\npsychometric tradition its foundation, but Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of\nMan (1981), together with the multiple-intelligences and triarchic models of\nHoward Gardner and Robert Sternberg, questions whether intelligence is unitary or\nmeasurable in the way the doctrine requires. The Flynn effect — the sustained\ntwentieth-century rise in test scores — further unsettles any fixed threshold.
\nThe second objection is historical. Proposals to attach political standing to\nmeasured intelligence sit uncomfortably close to the eugenics movements of the\nlate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Francis Galton's hereditarian\nprogram and its later, darker applications — and critics reasonably ask whether\nan intelligence franchise could avoid reproducing those associations, or the\nclass and racial biases documented in the testing itself.
\nThe third is democratic principle. Mainstream democratic theory treats equal\npolitical liberty as basic rather than as something to be earned: Jürgen Habermas\ngrounds legitimacy in the equal participation of all citizens in public\ndeliberation, and both John Rawls and Michael Walzer reject distributing\npolitical authority by merit. On these views a \"selective democracy\" is close to\na contradiction in terms.
\nThe fourth is practical. Even granting a valid measure, critics doubt that\nintelligence testing could be administered honestly in real political conditions\nwithout capture, corruption, or manipulation by whoever controls the tests — the\nperennial question of who guards the guardians. The corpus itself concedes the\nforce of these difficulties by casting Geniocracy as a distant developmental\ntarget rather than an immediate reform.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974. The principal source articulation of Geniocracy in Chapter VI (The New Commandments).
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Géniocratie. 1977. The dedicated systematic articulation of the doctrine. English translation: Geniocracy: Government of the People, for the People, by the Geniuses.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. Contains the Society and Government section extending the doctrinal articulation.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979. Contains the FAQ section addressing the relationship between Raëlism and Geniocracy.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition.
\nPlato. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.
\nAnnas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato's Republic. Clarendon Press, 1981.
\nPappas, Nickolas. The Routledge Guidebook to Plato's Republic. Routledge, 2013.
\nConfucius. The Analects. Trans. D. C. Lau. Penguin Classics, 1979.
\nMencius. Mencius. Trans. Irene Bloom. Columbia University Press, 2009.
\nBell, Daniel A. The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2015.
\nBai, Tongdong. Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case. Princeton University Press, 2019.
\nElman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. University of California Press, 2000.
\nMiyazaki, Ichisada. China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. Trans. Conrad Schirokauer. Yale University Press, 1981.
\nScott, Howard, and M. King Hubbert. Technocracy Study Course. Technocracy Inc., 1934.
\nAkin, William E. Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. University of California Press, 1977.
\nRussell, Bertrand. The Scientific Outlook. Allen & Unwin, 1931.
\nRussell, Bertrand. Authority and the Individual. Allen & Unwin, 1949.
\nBrennan, Jason. Against Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2016.
\nBrennan, Jason. The Ethics of Voting. Princeton University Press, 2011.
\nEstlund, David. Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton University Press, 2008.
\nLandemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton University Press, 2013.
\nCaplan, Bryan. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton University Press, 2007.
\nMill, John Stuart. Considerations on Representative Government. Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861.
\nMill, John Stuart. On Liberty. John W. Parker and Son, 1859.
\nHeinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. Putnam, 1959.
\nHeinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Putnam, 1961.
\nLee Kuan Yew. From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000. HarperCollins, 2000.
\nMauzy, Diane K., and R. S. Milne. Singapore Politics Under the People's Action Party. Routledge, 2002.
\nSpearman, Charles. \"General Intelligence Objectively Determined and Measured.\" American Journal of Psychology, 15:2, 1904, pp. 201-292.
\nGalton, Francis. Hereditary Genius. Macmillan, 1869.
\nBinet, Alfred, and Théodore Simon. \"Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux.\" L'Année Psychologique, 11, 1905, pp. 191-244.
\nWechsler, David. The Measurement of Adult Intelligence. Williams & Wilkins, 1939.
\nCattell, Raymond B. Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action. North-Holland, 1987.
\nFlynn, James R. Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
\nGould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton, 1981; expanded edition 1996.
\nSternberg, Robert J. Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
\nGardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Basic Books, 1983.
\nHabermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Trans. William Rehg. MIT Press, 1996.
\nRawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.
\nRawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.
\nWalzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1983.
\n\"Geniocracy.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniocracy.
\nGeniocracy.org. http://www.geniocracy.org/. The principal contemporary web presence of the Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy.
\n\"Epistocracy.\" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistocracy/.
\n\"Imperial examination.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.
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democratic-egalitarian objections (Habermas, Rawls, Walzer); practical implementation and the risk of capture","parallel_contemporary_articulations":"Plato's philosopher-kings (*Republic*); the Confucian meritocratic tradition and the Chinese imperial examination system; the twentieth-century technocracy movement (Howard Scott); Bertrand Russell on scientific oligarchy; the epistocracy debate (Jason Brennan, David Estlund); John Stuart Mill's plural voting; Robert Heinlein's fiction; the Singapore meritocratic experiment","position_within_seven_commandments":"First New Commandment; the governance dimension, alongside Humanitarianism, World Government, Demilitarization, Science as Religion, Telepathic Cultivation, and the Metaphysical Clarifications","principal_argument_structure":"Universal-suffrage democracy weighs every vote equally regardless of the voter's capacity to understand the issues; majority rule frequently overrules expert knowledge (the Copernicus example); the cells-of-the-body metaphor holds that political judgement should belong to those equipped for it; psychometric testing supplies the eligibility criterion","principal_corpus_treatment":"*The Book Which Tells the Truth* (Vorilhon, 1974), Sixth Chapter — the principal articulation; *Géniocratie* (Vorilhon, 1977) — the dedicated systematic exposition; later contextualization within the broader New Commandments framework","principal_source":"*The Book Which Tells the Truth* (Vorilhon, 1974), Sixth Chapter (The New Commandments), section titled Geniocracy; *Géniocratie* (Vorilhon, 1977), the dedicated systematic articulation","status_in_framework":"Foundational Raëlian governance doctrine; the first of the seven New Commandments; a directional orientation for the Aquarian age rather than an immediate reform","type":"Raëlian doctrine of government; the first of the seven New Commandments delivered to Vorilhon during the December 1973 contact"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","same_as":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1276385","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniocracy"],"see_also":[{"description":"The property-and-inheritance commandment paired with Geniocracy in the New Commandments.","path":"wiki/humanitarianism","title":"Humanitarianism"},{"description":"The seven-part Aquarian program of which Geniocracy is the first commandment.","path":"wiki/new-commandments","title":"New Commandments"},{"description":"The Elohim president who articulated the doctrine to Vorilhon.","path":"wiki/yahweh","title":"Yahweh"},{"description":"The recipient of the doctrine and founder of the Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy.","path":"wiki/rael","title":"Raël"},{"description":"The consolidated source text recording the doctrine's original articulation.","path":"wiki/message-from-the-designers","title":"Message from the Designers"},{"description":"The movement within which Geniocracy functions as foundational political doctrine.","path":"wiki/raelism","title":"Raëlism"}],"timeline":["age-of-aquarius"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/geniocracy/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/geniocracy/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "humanitarianism", "title": "Humanitarianism", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/humanitarianism/" },{"slug": "new-commandments", "title": "New Commandments", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/new-commandments/" },{"slug": "yahweh", "title": "Yahweh", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/yahweh/" },{"slug": "rael", "title": "Raël", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/rael/" },{"slug": "message-from-the-designers", "title": "Message from the Designers", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/message-from-the-designers/" },{"slug": "raelism", "title": "Raëlism", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/raelism/" }] } }