Geniocracy

Geniocracy (from Latin genius, "innate ability, natural talent," and Greek kratos, "rule, power") is the Raëlian doctrine of government — a form of democracy that weights political participation by measured intelligence. It is the first of the seven New Commandments that Yahweh delivered to Raël (Claude Vorilhon) during the December 1973 contact and that Vorilhon recorded in The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974). The doctrine proposes what its source calls a "selective democracy": the right to vote reserved for those whose measured intelligence is at least ten percent above the population average, and eligibility for public office reserved for those at least fifty percent above it. Vorilhon set the doctrine out at length in a dedicated 1977 book, Géniocratie (English: Geniocracy: Government of the People, for the People, by the Geniuses), and founded the Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy the same year.

The doctrine

The name pairs two roots. Genio- comes from the Latin genius — attendant spirit, then innate ability or exceptional talent — and -cracy from the Greek kratos, "rule," the suffix that also yields democracy, aristocracy, and technocracy. The choice of genius rather than meritum (which would give meritocracy) or techne (which would give technocracy) is deliberate: the doctrine attaches authority to raw intellectual capacity rather than to demonstrated achievement or specialised technical skill.

The argument begins as a critique of universal-suffrage democracy. In its present form, the source holds, democracy weighs every vote equally regardless of the voter's capacity to understand what is at stake — "the voice of someone whom you might vulgarly call 'a cretin' is worth as much as that of a genius, who has thought maturely about the way he or she is going to vote." Across history, Vorilhon argues, power has been held first by the physically strong, then by the wealthy, then by politicians and military men — never by the people who actually move civilisation forward:

"Whether they discovered the wheel, gunpowder, the internal combustion engine or the atom, the geniuses have always allowed less intelligent people in power to benefit from their inventions. Often such people have used peaceful inventions for murderous ends. All that must be changed."

The organising image is the body. Just as the cell in the foot does not vote on what the hand should pick up — that is the brain's task, and the foot benefits from the brain's good decisions — political judgement should belong to those equipped to exercise it rather than be spread evenly across the whole organism:

"Each person is a useful cell in this huge body we call humanity. The cell in your foot should not decide whether or not your hand should pick up a given object. It is the brain, which must decide, and if the object in question is good, the cell of your foot will benefit from it. It is not up to the foot to vote."

The historical example is Copernicus, condemned by a Church majority that lacked the knowledge to judge him: "Copernicus was condemned by a majority of incompetent people because he was the only one at that time who had a sufficiently high level of comprehension." Where a decision turns on specialised knowledge, the source argues, weighting every opinion equally produces reliably worse outcomes than expertise-weighted judgement — had the public been polled on whether the automobile should be permitted, "you would still be riding in a horse and cart."

The proposed mechanism is psychometric. Intelligence tests, applied from infancy and recorded on an identity or voter's card, would establish each person's intellectual coefficient and set eligibility against the two thresholds:

"Only those with an intellectual capacity of at least fifty per cent above the average should be eligible for a public post. To vote, individuals would need an intellectual coefficient of at least ten per cent above average."

Vorilhon insists this is "a totally democratic system" — contested elections, free political organisation, and peaceful transitions all preserved — and stresses that it rewards intelligence rather than credentials. There are engineers of below-average intelligence who accumulated degrees on the strength of memory, he notes, and labourers and farm workers of no formal education whose intelligence runs fifty percent above the average. The aim, in the source's own naming, is "placing the genius in power, and you may call that 'Geniocracy'."

Because the doctrine is framed as a selective democracy rather than a break with democracy, it is defined as much by what it is not. It is not monarchy or aristocracy, whose authority is hereditary; not plutocracy, whose criterion is wealth — the source explicitly casts the rule of "the rich, who used their money to employ many 'brutes'" as an earlier pattern to be left behind; and not theocracy, whose eligibility rests on religious standing. It parts from technocracy, too, which would empower narrow technical specialists — engineers, economists — whereas Geniocracy weights general intellectual capacity; and from meritocracy, which rewards demonstrated achievement and credentials, whereas the doctrine's test is measured intelligence, credentialed or not. The distinction matters to the source, since credentials tend to track privilege while raw intelligence, on its account, does not.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

Yahweh delivered Geniocracy as the first of seven New Commandments — the Aquarian-age program the Elohim proposed for humanity's long-term development, alongside Humanitarianism (property and inheritance), World Government, Demilitarization, Science as Religion, Telepathic Cultivation, and the Metaphysical Clarifications. Within that program Geniocracy is foundational: the other reforms presuppose leaders able to grasp their long-range logic. The source makes the dependency explicit in the Humanitarianism section — "If geniuses are admitted to power, they will understand the usefulness of these reforms."

On the canon's account the doctrine is not a human invention but the standing practice of the Elohim's own world. The preface to Géniocratie states it plainly: "These challenging concepts already apply on the planet of the Elohim. Unless we can come up with something better, they advise us to begin preparing to implement a similar system, since all human progress is ultimately dependent on the work of geniuses." Earth's adoption of Geniocracy is read, then, as the taking-up of a cosmic-civilisational standard — offered rather than imposed, with humanity left free to devise something better if it can.

Vorilhon carried the doctrine into a body distinct from the Raëlian Movement itself. The Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy (1977) pursues Geniocracy as a political project, while the Raëlian Movement remains a religious-cultural institution focused on diffusing the message and building the Embassy. The two are deliberately separable: "a person can be a Raelian and a 'Geniocrat', just as one can be a Democrat and a Christian; one can have a religion and a political opinion. Raelians do not have to get involved with the Geniocratic party."

The corpus reads Geniocracy as a direction of travel rather than a program for tomorrow. It is what human government is to evolve toward across the Age of Aquarius — as intelligence measurement grows more reliable and the cultural ground is prepared — not a system to be imposed on present democracies. Its full realisation would depend on validated measurement, on coordinated World Government implementation, and on a long shift in how societies think about authority and participation.

Comparative traditions

Geniocracy joins a long line of proposals that would tie political authority to knowledge or intellect, and it is best read alongside them rather than in isolation.

The nearest ancestor is Plato's philosopher-king. The Republic (c. 380 BCE) argues that political decisions, like medicine or navigation, are a kind of expertise, and that a specially cultivated guardian class should rule — an argument whose just-soul / just-city analogy runs parallel to Vorilhon's body metaphor. The differences are real: Plato's guardians are formed by philosophical education rather than measured by test, and the Republic is frankly non-democratic where Geniocracy keeps elections. The Confucian tradition, operationalised in China's imperial examination system (keju, c. 605–1905 CE), offers the largest historical experiment in merit-selected government, though it tested classical learning and moral cultivation rather than general intelligence.

Closer to the present, the twentieth-century technocracy movement (Howard Scott's Technocracy Inc., founded 1933) would have handed governance to engineers and scientists, and Bertrand Russell weighed — and largely resisted — the idea of a "scientific oligarchy." The contemporary academic debate over epistocracy, rule by the knowledgeable, is the closest living parallel: Jason Brennan's Against Democracy (2016) argues that widespread voter ignorance makes universal suffrage produce poor outcomes, while David Estlund's Democratic Authority (2008) defends democratic legitimacy against exactly such proposals. Earlier still, John Stuart Mill proposed plural voting in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), giving the better-educated additional votes while keeping universal suffrage — a gentler cousin of Geniocracy's hard threshold. These convergences are probably best read as independent responses to a shared problem; Geniocracy differs from all of them in resting its case on the Raëlian source and in specifying exact psychometric cut-offs.

Critical perspectives

The doctrine is, by any mainstream measure, deeply controversial, and its objections deserve to be stated fairly.

The first is measurement. Geniocracy assumes that "intelligence" can be measured reliably enough to gate political rights. Whether any single number captures intelligence at all is contested: Charles Spearman's g factor gave the psychometric tradition its foundation, but Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981), together with the multiple-intelligences and triarchic models of Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg, questions whether intelligence is unitary or measurable in the way the doctrine requires. The Flynn effect — the sustained twentieth-century rise in test scores — further unsettles any fixed threshold.

The second objection is historical. Proposals to attach political standing to measured intelligence sit uncomfortably close to the eugenics movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Francis Galton's hereditarian program and its later, darker applications — and critics reasonably ask whether an intelligence franchise could avoid reproducing those associations, or the class and racial biases documented in the testing itself.

The third is democratic principle. Mainstream democratic theory treats equal political liberty as basic rather than as something to be earned: Jürgen Habermas grounds legitimacy in the equal participation of all citizens in public deliberation, and both John Rawls and Michael Walzer reject distributing political authority by merit. On these views a "selective democracy" is close to a contradiction in terms.

The fourth is practical. Even granting a valid measure, critics doubt that intelligence testing could be administered honestly in real political conditions without capture, corruption, or manipulation by whoever controls the tests — the perennial question of who guards the guardians. The corpus itself concedes the force of these difficulties by casting Geniocracy as a distant developmental target rather than an immediate reform.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Raëlism
• Raël
• Yahweh
• Elohim
• Hebrew Bible
• Message from the Designers
• Humanitarianism
• World Government
• Demilitarization
• Science as Religion
• Telepathy
• Metaphysical Clarifications
• New Commandments
• Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy
• Paradism
• Cyberparadism
• Embassy
• Age of Aquarius
• Apocalypse

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974. The principal source articulation of Geniocracy in Chapter VI (The New Commandments).

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Géniocratie. 1977. The dedicated systematic articulation of the doctrine. English translation: Geniocracy: Government of the People, for the People, by the Geniuses.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. Contains the Society and Government section extending the doctrinal articulation.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979. Contains the FAQ section addressing the relationship between Raëlism and Geniocracy.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition.

Plato and the philosopher-kings tradition

Plato. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

Annas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato's Republic. Clarendon Press, 1981.

Pappas, Nickolas. The Routledge Guidebook to Plato's Republic. Routledge, 2013.

Confucian tradition

Confucius. The Analects. Trans. D. C. Lau. Penguin Classics, 1979.

Mencius. Mencius. Trans. Irene Bloom. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Bell, Daniel A. The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Bai, Tongdong. Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Chinese imperial examination system

Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. University of California Press, 2000.

Miyazaki, Ichisada. China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. Trans. Conrad Schirokauer. Yale University Press, 1981.

Twentieth-century technocracy movement

Scott, Howard, and M. King Hubbert. Technocracy Study Course. Technocracy Inc., 1934.

Akin, William E. Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. University of California Press, 1977.

Bertrand Russell

Russell, Bertrand. The Scientific Outlook. Allen & Unwin, 1931.

Russell, Bertrand. Authority and the Individual. Allen & Unwin, 1949.

Contemporary epistocracy tradition

Brennan, Jason. Against Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Brennan, Jason. The Ethics of Voting. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Estlund, David. Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Caplan, Bryan. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton University Press, 2007.

John Stuart Mill

Mill, John Stuart. Considerations on Representative Government. Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. John W. Parker and Son, 1859.

Robert Heinlein

Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. Putnam, 1959.

Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Putnam, 1961.

Singapore meritocratic experiment

Lee Kuan Yew. From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000. HarperCollins, 2000.

Mauzy, Diane K., and R. S. Milne. Singapore Politics Under the People's Action Party. Routledge, 2002.

Intelligence-measurement scholarship

Spearman, Charles. "General Intelligence Objectively Determined and Measured." American Journal of Psychology, 15:2, 1904, pp. 201-292.

Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius. Macmillan, 1869.

Binet, Alfred, and Théodore Simon. "Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux." L'Année Psychologique, 11, 1905, pp. 191-244.

Wechsler, David. The Measurement of Adult Intelligence. Williams & Wilkins, 1939.

Cattell, Raymond B. Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action. North-Holland, 1987.

Flynn, James R. Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton, 1981; expanded edition 1996.

Sternberg, Robert J. Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Basic Books, 1983.

Critical democratic-theory engagement

Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Trans. William Rehg. MIT Press, 1996.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.

Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1983.

Web resources

"Geniocracy." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniocracy.

Geniocracy.org. http://www.geniocracy.org/. The principal contemporary web presence of the Movement for Worldwide Geniocracy.

"Epistocracy." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistocracy/.

"Imperial examination." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.

Geniocracy. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/geniocracy/

"Geniocracy." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/geniocracy/.

"Geniocracy." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/geniocracy/.

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  title        = {Geniocracy},
  year         = {2026},
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}