As I cringe watching Trump, I also cringe watching President Joe Biden deliver a for him fiery speech in Philadelphia defending the integrity of democracy, in which he boasts about the power of “We, The People.” Our democracy is not threatened because of the Jan 6th insurrection (I do not condone it). It is under threat by our democracy’s inherent and ballooning fallacies.
We are idiots because:
- We allow ourselves to be led by politicians who bank on a 240-some-year-old constitution that has only evolved downstream, despite Thomas Jefferson’s suggestion to rewrite the constitution every thirty years. Why are we surprised its commandments are no longer relevant and fail to serve the broader context of a society with more loosely coupled people, companies, and borders? We elect people based on popularity, not based on leadership merit.
- We allow ourselves to be led by politicians who fail to meet the litmus test of responsible governance. The actors, peanut farmers, lawyers, journalists, and reality TV personalities have proven to be leaderless leaders. They play a good game politically but lack the knowledge, skills, and purview to align the compass of human efficacy with the first-principles of nature, ultimately determining human excellence.
- We allow human plurality with many opinions to be widdled down to two-party and two-people choices, significantly diluting the people’s will. Then we further artificially elect who we want, rather than who we need, with the undemocratic arbitrage of the electoral college. Representative democracy, this is not.
- We allow ourselves to be led by Presidents relying on the power of God to make our and their hopes come true. Saliently, ignoring the separation of church and state, as defined in the declaration of independence, our ethos ought to be guided by. We must untie ourselves from the sleep of reason religion is based upon and instead rely on the first-principles of nature determining human efficacy and longevity.
- We allow ourselves to be led by Presidents who preach about the excellence of American freedom and then constantly adjust the dials of freedom. Not just because the long-term policies they put in place prove to be rebels without a cause and are failing to build the strength of societal renewal left and right. Freedom does not need to be messy, but freedom without strict paradoxical rules allows the wild west of personal freedoms to deteriorate the integrity of collective freedoms. Understanding and managing the balance of freedom requires leadership.
- We allow ourselves to be led by Presidents of a human theory left undefined. That is akin to putting twenty players on a grassy field and not telling them the theory, systems, and rules of soccer you expect them to play and adhere by. It is simply unacceptable and irresponsible to assign leaders of a country without a theory everyone is supposed to subscribe to and support. Rights without obligations in a Constitution do not suffice. No country in the world should follow in our leaderless footsteps. There is a better example of democracy we can all learn from.
Democracy is not a system, for a system requires an embedded theory that uses a specific source of input to produce the desired output. Read up on what constitutes a system. “Systems” that are not are the ultimate greater-fool trap. Casting your vote for democracy is like continuing to watch television in the hopes programming will get better.
We must lead differently by first identifying the theory of humanity. Then the systems embedding said theory. And then, and only then, identifying the rules needed to protect the integrity of the systems to support the theory.
As our cars demonstrate, we Americans are terrible system builders. Because, under the prowess of untouchable freedom and unyielding progress towards a humanitarian destiny unknown, we prefer to fly by the seat of our pants. Until our pants come off and our world is crumbling under its manmade fallacies. It is time to show the world how we can do better by using nature’s guide, not religion, as its higher power.
In the words of Winston Churchill, “The United States will always do the right thing, but not until they have exhausted all other options not to.”
Stop voting for the dysfunctional policies our out-of-touch Presidents deploy today if you do not want the mediocrity of our democracy to balloon further out of control. That is just like turning your TV off when the programming sucks. The best way to suck the air out of leaderless democracy is to begin to reinvent it all anew.
