Of The People, By The People, Unfortunately
April 28, 2010 - 2:50 pm
Irradiated by LabRat 7 Comments
It strikes me that a core breakdown in political logic stems from seeing “the government” as a completely separate entity from “the people”. It’s true that it is, unlike people, an abstract entity whose structure does not depend on the people actually running it, and the people running it tend to develop a certain self-interested detachment in the wishes of the people they have power over.
Problem is, no matter how you move the boxes on the org chart around, the government is always people. Smart people, dumb people, uninformed people, drunk people, blue-nosed people, amoral people, ideological people, apathetic people, people just like the people all around you in your neighborhood and at your job whose decisions you normally wouldn’t give any particular credit. Under this system, we pick special people from the people who volunteer for the process, and in other systems they’re born into it or mostly selected, but at the end of the day it’s still people in the jobs and people picking them for the jobs. Some governments try to get around their people problem by proposing to put God in charge, but either because He doesn’t exist or because He has expressed complete disinclination in micromanaging humanity instead of making them manage themselves, it never seems to work and we wind up with systems every bit as venal and corrupt as we did when the people were reading from a different book. Other governments try to get around it by declaring all the people to be in charge, but when you look at it they pretty much seem to have individual people actually in charge the same way as in all the other systems.
We can’t trust the government to make better decisions than people because it IS people. We do try to put a better class of people in there than we think of when we think of the people that need to be regulated, but since all of us have radically different ideas of what actually constitutes smart people and better people there’s a pretty big cross-section of people anywhere that, when you peer at them closely, look an awful lot like the people around us but with more law degrees and fewer trade skills.
If your plan to improve society depends on the right people being in charge of it and will fail utterly or actually make things worse if the wrong people are, the plan is a conceptual failure out of the gate, because not only will the wrong people eventually be in charge, the chances are that you don’t even have the ability to identify the right people from the wrong people when you see them.
We’ve still got to work with being people, seeing as how nobody has graced us with a second option. This is what civilization, governments, and politics are for. But no law or government will ever be able to get around the people problem- it’s not just a flaw in the system, it IS the system. This is not subject to legislation or philosophy. If you proceed as though it were, the fundamental people nature of the system will reassert itself immediately, often quite creatively.
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