It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past
The Government is our voice and our strength, and we are going to need that voice heard and our will exercised in the coming years.
We need to stop undermining our governments, we need to get money out of politics, and we need to sort out our democracies.
Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people.
Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well of, and lobbyists are not going to fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective.
Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.
That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. Telling that some people are too fragile to hear even a tiny bit of criticism or slightly different perspective about their God, the government.
> It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No it doesn't, subservience and dependence on the government and viewing them as "the experts", the moral authority, and those who aim primarily to serve others above themselves is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency.
It's funny, I get a lot of this kind of pushback from people with my simple observations of reality. Most of it seems to come from the same people who will simultaneously go on endlessly about how corrupt the government is, how much it spends on war, how racist and bigoted it is, how subservient to corporations and lobbyists, how it doesn't provide good healthcare, its police forces are brutal and unjust, justice system provides favorable outcomes for the wealthy, it doesn't do enough to solve climate change, doesn't make billionaires and corporations pay enough tax, etc.
... And yet when I point out the obvious, gee maybe that's because the people in government care more about themselves than they care about you, these same people suddenly lose their minds.
And I'll bet dollars to donuts I know where you and OP and anybody who criticizes me for making that comment generally on most of those above issues.
The thing about the sad truth versus a happy lie is that the sad truth doesn't prevent you from taking any action, participating in the system, trying to improve it or make it work for you. It's actually the happy lie that does that. I mean sure there are people who get paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.
That does not require it to be 'the' government and for it to cease being 'our' government. Further, a sense of ownership and a desire to work constructively with the parts that improve our lives does not require me to abdicate moral judgement to its authority. Finally, believing that public office can and should be an honourable pursuit does not imply or require that I believe that my current representation comes anywhere close of meeting that standard.
You are correct to assume that I believe my current government enables or even engages in injustices against certain cohorts of the population. Yes, I even believe that I benefit from significant inter-generational privilege that others were actively denied. No, that neither means that my life is a cakewalk, nor does it compel me to plead forgiveness in the gutter. It does however instill a duty to raise those less fortunate up when I have the means to do so. It also compels me to advocate for collective action to do the same.
Ultimately, I don't see embodying alienation between a democratic government and its citizens to be a reasonable source of tribalistic pride. It's fucked, and fixing it should be almost as existentially compelling as eating or surviving the elements.
In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.
There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these.
I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.
It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics.
Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies.
Understand this.
There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people.
Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society.
Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake.
Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face.
More generally:
A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy.
There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind.
The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few.
No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever.
At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable.
We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead.
Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.