What's your silver bullet?

What one thing would you do, were you Supreme Being or simply Commander in Chief, that, above all others, you feel would go furthest and accomplish the most towards achieving an ideal society and/or government of humans here on Earth?

Pragmatically it's a pointless question; it's improbable that any of us are going to be appointed God any time soon, and most likely the press would just make fun of our hair if any of us tried to run for President. 

But it's a
useful question regardless, because it underscores what I think is the
fundamental problem with government, any government... we tend to
expect too much of it.

Well, America
really is unique in human history, and in human social/political
evolution. And I think that uniqueness comes largely from the fact that
the American founding fathers had a previously unheard of political
insight -- that wisdom is an individual attribute, one that is rarely
or never found in groups of humans.

Whether people are aware of it or not, what they hunger and
thirst for when they think of a 'better government' s not so much righteousness as it is a wise
government. Whatever it is they want from their governing authority
structure -- that it take care of them during natural disasters, that
it protect them from harm, that it defend their individual liberties,
that it keep taxes as low as possible and waste those taxes on idiocy
as little as is feasible -- all of that boils down to 'wisdom'.

And what, precisely, is wisdom?  For working purposes, I'll define wisdom as the ability to learn not only from
your own experience, but vicariously from the experience of others, and to apply what you have learned in a manner that is
consistently effective in resolving conflicts and solving problems.

But there are different kinds of wisdom, just as there are different
kinds of luck. One person may be very wise in the ways of, say, the
Amazon wilderness. Another may be wise as applied to the workings of the streets of
Brooklyn. Another may be wise in the ways of, saying, getting a grant
proposal through Congress, or handling a budget meeting in the English
department of a large University.

Generalized political wisdom of the sort that is required for wise governance is the most
demanding of all of these these -- it requires that you be able to use your own
experience, and the experience of others, to effectively and
consistently resolve not only your own personal conflicts, but the
conflicts of a society, a nation, a race, or any other group/subgroup
of human beings... and humans are the most cantankerous and difficult
to lead entities in the known universe.

So we long for wise government. But, unfortunately, wisdom is an individual attribute. You rarely... I want to
say 'never', but I don't generally believe in 'never', so, rarely...
see it in groups of humans. Put the six wisest men and women in the
world in a conference room with coffee and donuts, and tell them to, I
don't know, come up with a plan for directing traffic smoothly around
the Super Bowl, and two hours later, they'll still be arguing over who
has to brew more coffee, because, you know, the guy from New Zealand
deliberately left half a cupful in the bottom of the pot so he wouldn’t
have to do it, and the woman from Canada is resolutely refusing to take
that last half cupful and get stuck with the job.

Wisdom is stable only within the individual; try to spread it over a group and it evaporates.

So we find ourselves in a box.  We yearn for wise government, but to obtain such, we need to get one wise person and let them run everything.

Which is the basis of every human government, pretty much, prior
to the founding of America. Caesars, dictators, tribal shamans, kings,
monarchs, pharaohs, emperors... whatever you call the Big Boss, it is
basically this principle at work... find someone who seems like an
effective problem solver, let them solve the problems.

But that won't work for the long run, because your effective problem solver eventually dies, and then other, less wise people covet the power he or she has accumulated. Material power
is a form of wealth, just like anything else, and it can be passed
along, or seized. Once you give it to an effective problem solver... or
he or she just takes it, effectively solving the problem of doing so
and proving themselves 'politically wise' at least to that extent... it
multiplies and takes on a mass, a weight, and a momentum of its own, and there is nothing people
covet more than power. So once your first 'wise person' dies, there is
inevitably a fight over who will inherit his or her power...

...and let me back up a step here.  Another reason the search for wise government is 'fooked for starters', in the words of the Committments' original drummer, is that as a general rule, only the unwise covet power.   Wielding power over your fellow man is usually a headache.  It grinds you down, even without factoring in assassination attempts.  It makes for long wearying days and sleepless worrying nights.  But it can certainly make for a comfortable lifestyle, gets one into the history books, and applied in an unenlightened fashion, can allow one to gratify a great many of humanity's more basic urges, so it always seems to be an attractive job to the unwise and the unenlightened.  Which means, naturally, those are the sorts who generally seek power, and who generally obtain it.

This is a problem in and of itself.   And you have another problem, too. Even assuming one somehow finds a wise person and gives that person power, wisdom rarely survives the
accumulation of power for very long. Take the wisest person you can find and give
them absolute authority over other people, and that person will
tend to, gradually or abruptly, become less wise.

Absolute power corrupts... ah, but you all know that one already.

Anyway, that's the problem
with seeking 'wise' government... you need to basically set up a
government of one person, or, at most, of very few people. A tyranny, a monarchy, an imperium, or, maybe, a very narrowly limited oligarchy...
whatever you want to call it. And however this form of government
starts out, it won't stay 'wise' very long.

So how does one make a governing group 'wise'?

I don't think you can. We’re just not that evolved or enlightened yet;
any group of people is going to have problems getting along well enough
to solve problems effectively, much less, in an enlightened, socially empathic manner. And our Founding Fathers knew this, too. They
didn't bother trying to cut that particular Gordian knot. They decided
wise government wasn't worth the effort.

Instead, they tried to create a benign government, the only way
they could… by, essentially, making it inept. Authority is going to become
corrupt; you can’t stop that, it's inherent to any authority system. So you have to set it up so that even when
it does inevitably go bad, it can’t hurt you much.

So our
Founding Fathers deliberately set out to create a form of government
that wouldn't be wise, but that would at least be somewhat effective at
what it needed to do, while, at the same time, spreading all the power
across the largest number of people possible. See, they deliberately
set up the opposite of the 'one wise person ruling all' model. They
said 'okay, we'll have a lot of idiots handling everything more or less
collectively… and when those idiots try to take advantage of their
power, well, they won’t have much power to take advantage of, and they'll get in each other's way a lot'.

That's human nature, and that's how you make it work for you when it comes to setting up an authority structure.  Spread it out among a great many people, and trust that when the time comes for some one person, or group of people, to inevitably make some kind of power grab, all the other people in power, who are equally greedy for it, will do their best to stop them... not out of enlightenment or idealism, but out of simple jealousy, and self preservation.

Such a government will not manage efficiently, nor, often,
effectively... but it will manage, just because, well, as S.M.
Stirling likes to say, quantity has a quality all its own.

This all seems terribly cynical, doesn't it?

It may help to bear in mind that the most idealistically founded nation-state in the world was the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Sometimes, cynicism just works better.

This is what a lot of people don’t get about the founding of the United
States… it wasn’t an act of idealism. Our Founding Fathers were out for
themselves. They were tired of having the Crown and the Church messin in their business, so they came to a new continent where they
hoped they’d be far enough away from that nonsense to be left alone.
Turned out they weren’t far enough away, and they didn’t feel like
moving any further, so they fought… and when they succeeded in kicking
the Church and the Crown out, they sat down and created a government
structure meant to guarantee that the Church and the Crown would never
be able to screw with them again. The Constitution and the Bill of
Rights are not idealistic, they are very selfish… they are documents
that say, ‘you can’t mess with us; these are all the ways you can’t
mess with us, now leave us alone’.

Of course, when our Founding Fathers devised an inept government specifically so that they themselves could not be messed with, they were actually simply trying to protect their own private power over their own property... which property, at the time, included not only all of the improved land on the continent, but nearly every female and non-white male living and working on said improved land.

So a government whose power to actually govern is strictly limited by its own internal inefficiencies is really only a good idea, if the people who will putatively be governed by that limited government are all actually free to do as they please.  Which most of the population of the United States of America has never really been.  Over the course of nearly three centuries, the power of white landowning males has somewhat diminished, but it has done so almost entirely as a result of central government action.  In other words, as decentralized private power (which is mostly, inevitably, applied in unwise and unenlightened ways) has diminished, centralized federal authority has grown.

Unfortunately, centralized federal authority is also going to be, for the most part, applied in unwise and unenlightened ways, so, honestly, there seems to be no good answer.  Limit the powers of government and the rich bastards steal all your shit and make your life miserable.  Pass laws to protect yourself from the rich sonsofbitches, and those same laws allow the government to steal all your shit and make your life miserable. 

Yet all is not grim and there is cause for hope.  If the social progress of the United States over the course of its existence demonstrates anything, it is that we can change things for the better if we really want to.   The elimination of slavery, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the increased autonomy of labor forces in the marketplace, a growing sense of tolerance for those not exactly like ourselves, a deeply implanted, even fervent, belief on the part of most if not all Americans in the very concepts of liberty and freedom for all individuals, and a consequent diminishing of basic tribal xenophobia... all of these are good, even great, developments in human society. 

To each and every one of these progressions there is resistance and push back on the part of those who feel threatened by any and all change.  Many of these are, of course, those who have enjoyed privileges within less enlightened and progressive social contexts, but not all of them are such.  Some are just people who want their entire lives to remain the same way as they were when they were children, or as they were for their parents and grandparents.  That's human, too.

The forces of progress enjoyed great victories in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries.  In response, the forces of fear and regression have risen up righteous and enjoyed some triumphs of their own in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.  American elections in particular have always been about a choice between these two things -- progress towards social and financial equilibrium and equality amongst all human beings, or regression to the sort of strict class/caste society that the wealthy, privileged and powerful prefer. 

It may, in fact, be absolutely impossible to have a democratic and/or representative government that is also in any great way 'wise' or 'enlightened'.  Perhaps benignly inept is the best we can really hope for... certainly, I believe that's the conclusion our Founding Fathers came to.  (American history bears them out; our wisest Chief Executives have enacted some of our most odious state policies, from Lincoln's egregious unfair Draft Act to FDR's equally contemptible imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in  internment camps.)

But we do, occasionally, get a little wisdom, trickling down from on high... or, maybe, trickling up, when we ourselves exercise some individually, and collectively, at the voting booths.

This election, like every other one in American history, will be about a choice -- progress, or regression?  Dignity and tolerance, or fear and loathing?

Choose wisely.