The Grand Illusion
Too many Americans (and all theocrats and dictators) have a fondness for “simple” solutions: Ban All Abortion. Stop all immigration. Kill the Unbelievers. Defund the Police. Stop the Steal. Insist that the only love be between a man and a woman. Balance the budget, no matter what. A college education is the answer.
The list of simplistic absolutes is long, both now and throughout human history, and all of those absolutes, including the many that I haven’t named, have one thing in common. They can’t work, at least not without massively increasing human misery and suffering.
Why do free or even semi-free nations have justice systems and courts? It’s just not to determine guilt and punish the guilty. It’s also to determine whether the absolutes apply and to what degree. Our legal system attempts to take into account shades of gray. It’s far from perfect, but those who created it understood that absolutes are too often tyranny.
The problem politically is that too many people don’t like complexity, and, as well, that too much complexity is unworkable. Just try to install solar power in some parts of California.
So law has to strike a balance between simple beliefs and unworkable complexity.
Unfortunately, the majority of the Republican Party seems to back tyrannical faith-based absolutes and far too many liberal Democrats opt for “woke” complexity.
What the Democrats don’t understand is that they’ve lost support by pushing complex extremes, while the Republicans don’t understand that their beliefs will result in the majority losing their freedom.
And, of course, the extremes on each each side thinks they have the only acceptable answers, which is why the election is turning out the way it is.
SIMPLE LAWS = STUPID LAWS … and … too much complexity is unworkable.
Which brought to mind “systems and processes”: an indicated basis for governance in “The Illusion”. However, in the US we apparently have a ‘Constitution’ guiding our ‘Hybrid Political System’ in the Process of ‘Legislation’ which then (in part) determines our Culture.
Problems, in the form of corruptions, result from the political systems adapting the processes used in governance of the people by the people as shown in the series of “lecture modules”:
https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/anti-corruption/module-3/key-issues/types-of-political-systems.html
The universe, earth, and “nature” plus willful meddling for personal sovereignty increase complexity of government attempts at guided control of human group behaviors. We in the western world could perhaps lay our present ‘chaos’ at the feet of Putin’s chief of staff and his ‘Nooscope” theory of channeled economic chaos which seems dependent on establishing extremes (as proxy wars between subgroups of states instead of nations).
“Malfeasance is easily buried in [this] chaos” and that is why Tyrants and Autocrats love it.
We have brilliant minds using super-computers trying to develop ‘mindful’ machines (in part). If our present world-wide chaos is due to miss-management of political systems and our legislative processes, then why can we not do something simpler than producing a machine with a mind: legislation where there is “a balance between simple beliefs and unworkable complexity” and which benefits 90% of the population with supportable underwritten costs to the remaining 10%? A complex ‘command line” would not weigh on the minds of the citizens and should be within capacity of our Techs and Computers (Quantum, photon or electron)!
I cannot wait for the solution in ‘Contrarian’.