Bad govt represents bad people?

[sw@tiac.net (Steve Witham)]

>Phil Karn writes
>
>> It really gives one pause. Is government really the enemy of personal
>> freedoms, or does it merely reflect an intolerant and unenlightened
>> general population?

John Kreznar replies-

>Excellent question.  Answering it the wrong way leads to tremendous
>energy misdirected to trying to influence politicians and bureaucrats,
>even when they are effectively representing their constituencies in the
>general population...

John seems to mean 1) the people are bad, and 2) people who believe the
people are good try to influence politicians.  Point 1:

Saying that a bad government is just representing bad people gives it more
credit than is due.  Sure, that's what it claims to do, but does that have
anything to do with reality?  The whole is different from the sum of the
parts.  Besides the parts there is their arrangement.  Government as we know
it is a bad arrangement of people.  It contains positive feedback
structures that amplify certain mistakes instead of correcting for them.

The bad things that happen with governments often play on people's
irrational fears and psychological "hot buttons."  They also make use of
the news media's eagerness to cover certain kinds of subjects and events.
A feedback loop will take advantage of whatever signal paths are out there.
So, you have people whipped up into showing their worst sides, and then
given exaggerated coverage on the news.  It's hard to say what would give
a true picture of what most people are like.

On the other hand, governments contain negative feedbacks (formerly
called checks and balances) that can sometimes make them act *more* sanely
than the average mob taken from their own population.

On John's point 2: The goodness or badness of the people has little
to do with whether it makes sense to try to influence politicians, since
they do not represent and are hardly influenced by the will of the majority
anyway.  It's the structure of government that needs changing.  What might
help change that is a complicated thing I won't go far into.  But whether
you're going with or against popular opinion probably has never mattered
as much as how clever, ruthless, resourceful, well-connected, etc. you are.

 --Steve

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