Ivo Mosley’s In the Name of the People: Pseudo-Democracy and the Spoiling of Our World seeks to set the record straight: electoral representation is not true democracy.

Your book begins with the hope that we won’t soon write a coroner’s report for civilization. Without fundamental changes, what’ is civilization’s life expectancy?

One of the worst outcomes of the cooperation between banks and governments is the arms industry, funded by money created on the expectation that other governments like to buy arms. As a result small-scale wars proliferate, though the big one, thankfully, seems remote. Other hazards—environmental destruction, genetic tinkering, lab-created diseases, etc.—are too numerous to list: even so, it seems more likely to me that civilization will stagger on, becoming less and less “civilized”, rather than that it will actually come to an end soon.

One of your issues with modern financial systems is that lack transparency. Does the Internet make the tricks of money creation easier to hide from citizens or flush them out into the open?

Many issues get aired on the internet which would otherwise stay covered up, and money-creation is no exception. The process is a little complicated, but no more complicated than, for instance, the workings of the internal combustion engine. It’s just hard to believe what really goes on until you read the history of how it developed, and how it benefits those who hold political or financial power.

I trawled many websites looking for a good explanation, and spent 18 months reading and interviewing historians, bankers, historians of banking, lawyers, and economists before coming up with a simple version based on their insights. There is also a great deal of willful obscuring or willful ignorance—it’s hard to tell which—among professionals about many of the subjects I deal with in the book, bank-money included. The reluctance is like Victorian reluctance to discuss sex: a general avoidance of topics which that will cause discomfort, ostracism, loss of job and status, etc.

Regarding representation and self-governance, what is the biggest obstacle to preventing people from participating in a more direct, “true” democracy? What would a transitional society have to do to enable its own citizens and what is technology’s role?

This is one of the most interesting questions relating to democracy and government. There are interesting discussions going on in “sortition” (decision by lottery) circles about computers selecting citizens for political juries so that the whole of “the people” in all its variety is represented.