Democracy is when the people, those who bear burdens, make the laws. But technocracies want to say "we derive our effectiveness from being effective, from knowing what we're doing". They take over from the people, and reduce how much the people make laws. But supposedly, they are working for the people, and embody values that the people choose or would choose if they thought about it. Effectiveness is a servant of values, and derives its legitimacy from those values. Values are arbitrary and don't necessarily require expertise to determine.
However, though we might want to subordinate technocracy to democracy, might it be that legitimacy requires that an absolutely legitimate lawmaker (the one who deserves to be ought and thus is ought) know what they are doing when they make laws? This seems plausible, at least initially. And so an unquestionably legitimate being would foreknow all consequences to their lawmaking.
I suppose this is possible, although it would require God (legitimacy) to be timeless or able to be outside of time, which I don't want to say unless I have to. I tend to think that God can't know what doesn't exist yet and which doesn't flow from his will, namely, our future free-willed decisions, and anything downstream of them. He can know generally how things will go for a while into the future by projecting how events are likely to go, and also know what depends on his will or on the negotiations he made with the evil beings, but things can still surprise him. But how could he deserve to have created, then? It would seem that either he foreknew, or would have been prevented from creating any other being.
One thing to note is that we know, from observation, what legitimacy allows, which is to say, we see that there are free-willed beings, and that there is great suffering which seemingly could only flow from the possibility of there being free will. So we can say that there must be some feature of legitimacy which allows us to exist. I could bite the bullet and say "God foreknows" in the strong, traditional, time-transcending sense. But another possible explanation is that there is another factor, which is that "God loves".
The three candidates for "value of ultimate legitimacy" then would be "God bears burdens", "God foreknows the consequences of his actions", and "God loves". Because legitimacy loves, it values the well-being of people. A population ethicist, according to the rest view, sees that the eternal well-being of billions of saved people is worth so much that their existence is more worthy than their non-existence, and so it is more legitimate to create (with the disposition to know as much as possible what you are doing and to bear as many burdens as possible), than to not create, even if perfect foreknowledge (or perfect burden-bearing, for that matter) are impossible.
I think it is plausible that it is not just the burden-bearing of the population (in democracy) that gives them their legitimacy, but that they love themselves, and likewise technocrats derive legitimacy from their love of people, or of whoever else falls under their policies.
I don't like the word "love" because it's heavily loaded, somewhat ambiguous, and tends to be sentimentalized. But I think given those caveats, there's something there: maybe a value for the true well-being of persons, and for persons themselves? But then we need to decide what true well-being is -- or observe how it has been decided for us by God. Does God get to decide what true well-being is? Or is that simply part of his nature? Probably the latter. We are descended from him, so what is good for him is good for us (generally speaking).
There may be something in the common meaning of "love" (among all the loadedness) other than "personal valuing", the simplification proposed in the previous paragraph, which is also part of what ought ought to be. In other words, "love" is the right word, rather than simply "personal valuing".
In the MSLN creation account, the Father and Son co-create what it means to be a person. They do so, disposed to loving and carrying the burdens of those who will be persons after them, looking ahead to the consequences of what they decide. Love is about bringing about the well-being of people as they have been designed by God.
So to summarize and maybe make more clear, legitimacy is love which is a conscious person, and in order to be legitimacy (to be itself) love must be inclined to bear burdens and understand the consequences of its actions as much as is possible given the limitations of love -- of love itself (love must create and the created beings must be free and respected enough to be able to reject God, so as to truly decide to love God), and of love's personhood, its nature as a person. (I have used "it" for "love", but legitimacy is a person, or rather a group of persons.)
Burden-bearing and foreknowledge do not dominate the limitations of personhood, not even ideally, because both burden-bearing and foreknowledge are subcomponents of being a person. They do not exist apart from personhood and the nature and limitations of personhood. And love by definition is concerned with persons, and so only makes sense within personhood. So legitimacy is most fundamentally a person (or a group of persons), who are described by the terms "loving", "burden-bearing", and "competent / knowing the full effects of what they do)". There is a hierarchy: personhood, then love, and below love burden-bearing and competent foreknowledge. But the hierarchy can be unified: a person (or persons) who is maximally disposed to love, which entails the maximal disposition to bear burdens and be competently foreknowing, among other things.
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A bridge between competent foreknowing and burden-bearing: If we pursue technocratic excellence to an absolute level, we start to need to know everything we possibly can, and if we do, we become omnisubjective. And if possible, we need to know what everything people go through feels like, firsthand, in order to really know what we're doing. So we will need to undergo something like the Son living enough finite lives to experience all relevant simantic words.
Likewise if we bear burdens, we will tend to be motivated to want to do our best in ruling, requiring maximal competent foreknowledge.
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