Lawrence Lessig talks about a fundamental corruption at the core of the U.S.’s political system. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland,” Lawrence Lessig begins today’s talk. “Of its 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester,” Lessig says.

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaimIn Lesterland, this .05% of the population is granted extraordinary power. Each election cycle, there’s a general election, in which the people get to vote, and a Lester election, in which only the Lesters can vote. “In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election,” Lessig explains. “So we have a democracy, no doubt, but it’s dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. It has a competing dependency—we could say a conflicting dependency—depending on who the Lesters are.”

The trick: the United States is Lesterland, only instead of the Lester election, we have the “money election.” As in Lesterland, to run in the general election, you’ve got to win with the funders first. The “relevant funders” comprise .05% of the population; in fact, Lessig says, just 132 Americans, or .000042% of the country, gave 60% of the latest Super PAC funds. So holding office has become about catering to the funders rather than the general public—and sometimes the funders’ interests run counter to everyone else’s.

Lesterland, then, provides a piercing allegory for what Lessig describes as our political system’s fundamental corruption. “The corruption I’m talking about is perfectly legal. It’s a corruption relative to the framers’ baseline for this republic,” Lessig says. “It’s a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption.”

To hear what we can do to correct this corruption, watch Lessig’s talk or read the companion TED Book, Lesterland.

Because we’re so moved by Lessig’s Lesterland analogy, below we’re rounded up more examples of allegories that have described — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes less so — political and societal problems.

1. Whether or not L. Frank Baum intended for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to be read as an allegory, it’s been interpreted as one for decades. Henry M. Littlefield wrote in 1964, “Dorothy is Baum’s Miss Everyman. She is one of us, levelheaded and human, and she has a real problem. For all the attractions of Oz, Dorothy desires only to return to the gray plains and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry … Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East’s magic Silver Shoes. Silver shoes walking on a golden road; henceforth Dorothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum’s ironic view of the Silver issue.” Littlefield continues dissecting the Oz storyline for its parallels to late-1800s economics and Populism, writing, “Baum created a children’s story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations … The relationship and analogies outlined above are admittedly theoretical, but they are far too consistent to be coincidental.”
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2. In James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, the Na’vi — an alien race — is threatened by invading Earthlings. It’s been analyzed as an allegory for a “surprising” range of situations, as Joshua Keating posted on Foreign Policy at the time, from the exploitation of Chinese citizens to the exploitation of an indigenous tribe in India to a justification of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
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3. The new documentary Room 237 argues that Stanley Kubrik’s 1980 film The Shining wasn’t just a horror film, but an intricate and meaning-laden work filled with “important and, in some cases, truly dark meanings,” per Bill Wyman on the New Yorker’s blog. What meanings, exactly? Less clear: as Wyman has it, the supposed allegories involve “the Holocaust (stemming from Nicholson’s German typewriter), the Apollo Space project, fairy tales, and more and more and more.”
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4. Perhaps the paradigmatic political allegory is George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which uses, yes, a farm full of animals to depict and critique the situation in 1940s Russia. “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole,” Orwell later wrote.
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5. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis depicts a city of “soaring towers of glass and steel” sustained by a working class “far below, in cellars and catacombs,” as David Edelstein put it in Slate in 2002. Although the film is sometimes seen as a Marxist appeal, Edelstein argues that it’s much more nuanced than that. “Part of what makes Metropolis such a complicated allegory is Lang’s fear of the fascism of the mob,” Edelstein writes. “Lang understood why the mob would want to tear the city down. But he also believed that the technology it embodied promised a better life for people of all classes, and that only the innocent would suffer in the course of a revolt.”

Lessig’s powerful talk brought the TED2013 audience to its feet. And he has so much more to say about how we can overturn this deeply entrenched system. In a TED first, on the same day his talk premieres, Lessig is releasing a new TED Book expanding on the ideas he presented on stage. In Lesterland: The Corruption of Congress and How To End It, Lessig takes on the deep flaws in our campaign finance system and lays out a plan for fixing it. As he says in the book’s pages: The American political system has been weakened by a corrupt campaign funding system, but we can change it. And the time to do it is now.

Here is how Lesterland begins:

Once upon a time, there was a place called “Lesterland.”

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaimLesterland was a lot like the United States. Like the United States, it had a population of about 311 million souls. Of that, like the United States, about 150,000 were named “Lester.”

Lesters in Lesterland had a very important power. There were two elections every election cycle in Lesterland — a general election, and a “Lester election.” In the general election, all citizens got to vote. In the Lester election, only the “Lesters” got to vote.

But here’s the catch: To run in the general election, you had to do extremely well in the Lester election. You didn’t necessarily have to win, but you had to do extremely well. Democracy in Lesterland was thus a two-step dance. The Lesters controlled the first step.

What can we say about “democracy” in Lesterland?

First, we could say, as the United States Supreme Court said in its remarkable ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, that “the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials” — for, after all, there is a general election. But the people have that influence only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. The people’s influence is ultimate. But it is not exclusive. Instead, the field of possible candidates has been narrowed to the field of Lester-plausible candidates, just as the field of candidates that citizens in the Soviet Union could select among had been narrowed by the choices of the Communist Party.

Second, and obviously, this primary dependence upon the Lesters would produce a subtle, understated, and somewhat camouflaged bending to keep the Lesters happy. For all candidates, both prospective and already successful, would know that they couldn’t gain or retain power without Lester support. Such bending couldn’t be too obvious, for fear it would trigger the votes of voters who resented the Lesters’ influence. (No doubt, there were some.) But neither could it be too subtle, for fear the Lesters would miss who their real allies were. Thus the Goldilocks principle of Lesterland politics: Not too little, and not too much. The best politicians were the best precisely because they practiced this balance well.

Lesterland is thus a democracy. But it is a democracy with two dependences: The first is a dependence upon the Lesters. The second is a dependence upon the citizens. Competing dependences, possibly conflicting dependences, depending upon who the Lesters are.

That’s Lesterland.

There are three things to see now that you’ve seen the democracy called “Lesterland.”

 (1) The United States is Lesterland.

Like Lesterland, the United States also has 311 million souls. It also has about 150,000 people named “Lester.” And it also has two types of elections: One, the traditional “voting election,” where citizens cast ballots. The other, a distinctively modern “money election,” in which the relevant “funders” give money to afford candidates the chance to run effectively.

Voting elections are discrete — they happen on a particular day, in a regular cycle. They include the vote in the general election; for a small portion of us, they also include the vote in the primary. In both cases, every citizen eighteen and older has the right to participate. And as the constitution has been interpreted, he or she has the right to participate equally. If the vote I cast for my representative to Congress is weighted more than yours (because there are fewer voters in my district than in yours), the Constitution requires the state to redraw that congressional boundary.

By contrast, the money elections are not discrete. They are continuous. Every day, throughout the election cycle, every citizen is in effect asked to contribute to one candidate or to another. That contribution is in effect a “vote” for that one candidate or the other. But unlike “votes” in the discrete elections, to vote for one candidate in the money election does not mean you can’t vote for another as well. Citizens are free to hedge their money votes in the money election by voting for both candidates in a two-person race, or as many candidates in as many races as they wish. The only regulation is that no citizen is permitted to give more than $2,600 to any one federal candidate per election, or more than $123,200 to all federal candidates and federal PACs combined in an election cycle. And finally, and obviously, while the Constitution has been interpreted to require equality in the voting election, there is nothing close to equality in the money election. The per capita influence of the top 1 percent of American voters is more than 10 times the per capita influence of the bottom 99 percent.

As in Lesterland, the money election and the voting election have a special relationship in U.S.A.-land too: To be able to run in the voting election, one must do extremely well in the money election. One doesn’t necessarily have to win — though 84 percent of the House candidates and 67 percent of the Senate candidates with more money than their opponents did in fact win in 2012 — but you must do extremely well. The average amount raised by winning Senate candidates was $10.4 million; losing candidates raised $7.7 million. The average amount raised by winning House candidates was $1.6 million; losing candidates raised $0.774 million. Money certainly isn’t the only thing that matters. But anything other than money is way, way down the list of “things that matter.”

And here is the key to the link between Lesterland and the United States: There are just as few relevant “Funders” in U.S.A.-land as there are “Lesters” in Lesterland.

“Really,” you say?

Yes, really.

Read more of this fascinating and, ultimately, inspiring book. Lesterland is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Larry Lessig has been referenced twice this morning, first by Wikihouse’s Alastair Parvin and secondly by the musician Amanda Palmer. So it seems only right and proper that the Harvard Law professor should round off this session of TED2013. He’s here to talk about Lesterland, a fictional land with a population of 311 million people of whom the 144,000, or 0.05%, named Lester are the people really in charge. It’s the United States, of course, and Lessig is using the analogy to help us confront and understand the truth of democracy in the United States. It’s a theme of Rootstrikers, the project he founded to battle the corruption of campaign funding in the American political system, and it’s a topic that has Lessig visibly fired up.

Lawrence Lessig: Laws that choke creativity

You see, the United States also has its Lesters, its 0.05%; they’re the people who fund elections. Lessig, who could probably trademark his manner of delivery if that didn’t, you know, go against precisely everything he stands for, has data to prove it. His favorite stat, he says, that in 2012, 0.000042%–that’s 132 Americans–gave 60% of the SuperPAC money spent in the election cycle. It’s these few, he says, who are our Lesters, and our dependence on them is perverting the democracy of the country. After all, if candidates have to spend between 30% and 70% of their time trying to raise funds to get back to Congress, which they do, might that not affect their principles, their beliefs, their ideals, and what they’re prepared to fight for on behalf of the people?

And here’s the rub: whereas in Lesterland, Lesters might comprise a somewhat random selection of demographics, with poor Lesters getting their moment to air an opinion along with the rich ones, that’s not the case in the US. Here, the vast majority of the Lesters are less interested in acting on behalf of the common good than they are in furthering their own interests. The system is twisted, and the competing dependencies on our political system are no less than a corruption, says Lessig.

“The good news is it’s bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption,” he adds wryly. It blocks the left on issues they hold dear, but it blocks the right too. Yet it seems like no one is prepared to change anything about this borked status quo. Lessig tells a story of then-Vice President Al Gore wanting to deregulate the telecoms industry. “The response was ‘hell no: If we deregulate these guys, how will we raise money from them?’” The delivery makes the line funny, but it’s an awful thought.

Lessig isn’t here to let us off the hook. We know all this already, he accuses. Yet we ignore it. And we cannot ignore it any more. “We need a government that works.” He refers to the call by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, made from this stage yesterday to get support for a prize fund for clean energy. “It was a  punch in the gut to have a former governor stand up and try to Kickstart a national energy policy from TEDsters,” Lessig says. “Is this a third-world nation? Are you serious? We need a government that works! Not one that works for the left or the right but for citizens of the left and the right.” Until we reform this issue, he adds, no other issue has a chance of being resolved.

So how do we do actually solve the problem? Turns out, the solution is easy, and wouldn’t even require a Constitutional amendent. It would need a single statute calling for lower dollar fundraising. The problem? The politics: when so many Congresspeople and senators head to K Street after their time in office–becoming lobbyists, enjoying no less than an average increase of 1,452% in their salary–what possible incentive would they have to change things?

“I get this sense of impossible, but I don’t buy it,” Lessig continues. “This is a solvable issue. Think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the twentieth century–racism, sexism, or the issue we’ve been fighting this century, homophobia. Those are hard issues. You don’t just wake up one day no longer a racist,” he describes lyrically. “This is a problem of incentives. Change the incentives and the behavior changes.” When Connecticut first adopted the system, 78% of elected representatives gave up on large contributions within the first year.

Lessig closes with another challenge, spurred on by a woman telling him he’d convinced her it was hopeless, not entirely his intent. “I imagined a doctor saying ‘your son has terminal brain cancer. There’s nothing you can do.’ Would I do nothing? Would I just sit there? Of course not. I would do everything I could do because this is what love means. The odds are irrelevant. You do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned.” It is this passion that citizens need to apply to this problem. After all, he adds drily, “even we liberals love this country.”

“When the pundits and politicians say change is impossible, what this love of country says is: That’s irrelevant. We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic. We act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong. And here’s my question: do you have that love? Do you have that love? Because if you do, then what the hell are you, what the hell are we doing?”

When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked him what he had brought with him. The reply: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” We have lost that republic, Lessig concludes. “All of us have to act to get it back.”

Sanjay Dastoor is co-founder of Boosted Boards, a startup that aims to build the world’s lightest electric vehicles.

Alastair Parvin is one of a team behind WikiHouse, an experiment he describes as being the seed of design’s great project in the 21st century: the democratization of production.

Inventor, scientist, author, engineer — over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.

Twice the world yo-yo champion, BLACK mixes dance, sport and performance to create unforgettable yo-yo moments.

Collaborating with brilliant public and performance artists and people in neighborhoods, Lesley Perkes instigates with imagination and public space — to transform entire atmospheres. Just like that. Ha!

In a special surprise in the session, Sergey Brin of Google appeared to talk all about Google Glass — sharing why it was created and what it can do.

Alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer believes digital content should be free, and that artists can and should be directly supported by fans via a “patronage” model.

The U.S. Congress is broken, and law professor and legal activist Larry Lessig wants you to help him fix it. In “Republic, Lost,” he tells you how.

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg — and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about “the bottom billion.”

See the full list of 100 >>

Lessig08.com will also host Lessig’s yet-to-launch Change Congress initiative, an effort to fight corruption in government. Lessig has devoted himself to this effort — in fact, TEDTalks hosts one of Lessig’s last lectures on copyright law, his previous cause.

Watch Larry Lessig’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Larry Lessig on TED.com.