This will be the beginning of a large selection of post concerning the evolution of our systems of government. Our country is hurting… and I want to help in the way that I can. My hope is that we can start moving towards evolving our Government’s operating system to more effectively meet the needs of the planet and the people and beings that live on it.
Democracy failed… and it was inevitable. The next system will fail as well, but lets not hold negativity over this truth – instead we must embrace that with the evolution of the human operating system into greater complexity, we must also upgrade the systems which help to organize the collective potential of the human race.
Democracy was a wonderful idea and of course many of the basic tenants can and should be used within our government, but democracy alone has proven to be partially ineffective in driving us towards solutions and in helping us to select competent leaders and representatives.
Democracy helped to address some long standing issues concerning institutional oppression – by giving more people a voice we did emancipate ourselves (partially) from the stagnation of a lacking in influence from diversity. Before democracy, the privileged alone held the power to impact change on a wide-spread governmental level… for a time democracy started to facilitate a voice for the masses. Until it failed completely because of a few seemingly inescapable variables. here are some reasons why democracy has failed – a future post will offer a potential solution.
- Education and Information. Democracy needs an educated and informed population to function adequately. This one is rather obvious – the people need to be informed about the solutions that they are voting for and against, and they need an education to assist in deducing the efficacy of the proposals. Here comes the death-blow irony… in a democracy we have the freedom to vote against education and against regulations which could ensure a properly informed populace. We now live in a country where we are asked to vote on issues that 1.) we were never informed about with any degree of useful transparency 2.) the information generally lacks the specificity needed to deduce efficacy 3) and often the information is too complex to assess without a very high level of education.
- Equal representation. In an ideal democracy the topics in need of solutions as well as the solutions themselves would come from a diversity of perspectives. The questions “what would we like to solve and how would we like to solve them?” would be asked to masses. But without some type of regulation for campaign financing the before mentioned questions are only being asked to small portion of our population. Not only does this leave the masses voiceless, but in doing so it also leaves the most viable solutions off the table = we are often voting for the better of two ‘not-so-good’ solutions to the issues effecting our nation.
- Fantasies and lying. Not only are we not guaranteed all the information necessary to deduce the best course of action when voting, there are also no safe-guards in place to control for mis-information both intentionally and unintentionally and both covertly and overtly. This means that it is permissible to lie in order to get the population to vote for you. To be ridiculous – there seems to be no consequence for a person stating that they will enable a solution that is impossible such as “I will solve our country’s garbage problem by securing genetically modified goats who will eat all the trash and digest the substances into a non-hazardous organic waste.” The solutions presented by politicians are currently not required to be reliable or valid… in fact it is permissible to suggest strategies that have already been dismissed by the scientific community and to state with defiant rigidity that the dis-proven strategy will work. For example, there is nothing in place to keep one from saying, “I will eliminate global warming by cutting down all the trees.”
- Fallacies. In college I took a class on deductive reasoning and logic – the class was an elective… we live in a country that has not educated the populace in deducing the rationality of an argument… what is worse is that again there are no safe guards in place to protect the populace from fallacies (a fallacy is essentially when someone appears to be using ration – but there is deception and the argument is actually flawed – for example, “Sarah said that 2 +2 = 4, but Sarah has cheated on her taxed and engages in constant acts of infidelity – so can we really trust that the answer is really 4?” Every campaign I’ve watched is inundated with fallacies: “He didn’t vote for the war he doesn’t support our troops” He supported gun registration laws = he wants to steals your guns” “He believes in talking with the enemy = he is a terrorist”
- Emotional and Psychological Manipulation. It is totally permissible to rile people up and offer no solution. Politicians are permitted to talk about: guns, abortions, education, war, poverty, racism etc without ever stating a reasonable position on how to improve things. The result is a very dis-regulated and fearful populace that is voting for absolutely nothing concrete. People are therefor voting against things like war and abortions… but if you ask the relevant politician what the plan is it seems like it can generally be deconstructed into “we are gonna get rid of it!”… when we ask how they repeat “we gonna get rid of it the other guy wants to keep it.” The field of psychology has made some brilliant discoveries related to our implicit operating system (the mostly unconscious/automatic choosing system) – the problem is that this information is being used to intentionally manipulate the voters. The most simple example is the use of dissonant music in political adds intended to smear the opposition. When you hear the dissonant music (think Jaws soundtrack) you feel fear (often you are not conscious of the feeling) this feeling is then associated with the relevant politician (automatic association of the visual and audible stimuli)… you then vote against them because “you don’t like them” for some inexplicable reason.
- Science is irrelevant and credentials are unnecessary. The strangest thing to me is that we life in a relatively functional capitalistic society and the functional tenants of capitalism don’t seem to be present in the democracy. In any corporation a person is hired based on their ability to prove that they have the qualifications, strategies, and various aptitudes necesary to satisfy the objective of the job… we don’t require this of our candidates – there are hardly even base qualifications (such as not being an overt racist). Additionally capitalism functions by demanding functionality – if you say something is going to work a certain way you are liable to fulfill your promise to the consumer. Science is used to deduce functionality = we have millions of scientifically validated solutions to our community’s issues – why are we operationalizing untested hypothesis created by politicians with no expertise in the relevant subject when the are experts in the various subjects who have already created empirically validated solutions?
- Smoke in mirrors, slight of hand, and unrelated issues on a single bill. Some might offer that we the public do have a means of proposing solutions to get passed into law. The issue here is that often bills contain a myriad of differing proposals that are unrelated ex. the bill will be for expanding health care and opening up a national forest for mining. What is worse is often bills have intentionally misleading or confusing language so that the public believes they are voting for one things when in reality they are voting for another. In relation to the solution that I will present below… often times we are asked to vote on creating or removing regulation – my proposal is that we create a system where we are voting on solutions that have already been empirically validated.
To draw this to a conclusion we essentially land on the truth that we aren’t actually voting for anything of any substance… the democracy has turned into somewhat of a high-school popularity contest where petty unsubstantiated claims make up all the information the population can use to choose our direction.
so what is the solution? I intend to write a post on this, but the beginning tenants look as such:
(this evolves democracy – its is not a totally novel operating system)
1.) deconstruct all concerns into a few categories such as education, social equality, infrastructure, environments, social values/law, etc
2.) let the population vote of the issues that are most important per the above categories (ex. environment – Clean river water, Social equality – equal access to higher education, infrastructure – increased energy efficient mass transit)
3.) Let science and ration influence the strategies on how to accomplish the desired solutions (ex. clean our rivers – what has been empirically validated to improve water quality?)
4.) create an application process that would ensure that only people qualified to operationalize/lead the above solution strategies can apply for the leadership position.
5.) let the people vote on the qualified candidates who, like every other job in the country, are held accountable to producing the promised results.
quite simply the people vote for solutions instead of just for people and those people are responsibly for fulfilling their obligation to lead the solution to existence. The community then focuses on solutions and competence as opposed to focusing on problems and our subjective assessments of the morality of certain people.
the governments job is to create solutions… if you don’t do your job you are fired 😉
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