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I think Plato was spot on that when people go into politics for their own financial gain, the society as a whole will suffer for it. We need to create systems

I think Plato was spot on that when people go into politics for their own financial gain, the society as a whole will suffer for it. We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. I would agree with Plato that character training, or at the very least testing, is useful and appropriate.

nine_zeros 6y ago
Agreed. Or at least remove the possibility of career politics. 2 terms in most positions ought to remove all the oldies implementing policies of 70s on today's people.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  Wait aren't these opposites? > 2 terms in most positions ought to remove all the oldies implementing policies of 70s on today's people. This sounds exactly like a problem of ideology, not financial gain.
  - nine_zeros 6y ago
    When people are so entrenched and need to make a living, they will make a living out of what they are entrenched in. There are no other real career choices for them besides continuing in politics.
    - dwohnitmok 6y ago
      Isn't it the case that those politicians who leave office and continue to work (mostly those who are not of retirement age) almost always make more money in their post-office careers than while they were in-office as a politician?
      - nine_zeros 6y ago
        But they need to establish themselves as successful politicians before they can have a successful post-office careers. By enforcing duration of political careers, there will be a constant influx of new blood who will represent the people of the time.
dwohnitmok 6y ago
> We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. Is your implication that right now most politicians are not politicians out of ideology first and foremost, but rather for their own financial gain? I would take the contrarian view. I would guess the majority of politicians are politicians because of ideology. Although they may not believe everything (or perhaps even most of what) they say they do and what they do believe may change while in office, I would be surprised if they don't have some core ideology that powers them. It's otherwise unclear to me why politicians seek re-election so frequently. In most Western democracies, a person with the opportunity to become a career politician has far more lucrative job opportunities outside of politics than within, especially once you've become a high-level politician. If people were doing it for money, I'd imagine they'd do a single term and then immediately try to parlay that into another job rather than trying to slug it out term after term. The other mildly persuasive explanation to me is enjoying the power of the office, but the feeling of power is very hard to separate from fervent ideology.
- vkou 6y ago
  A simple answer may be Darwinism. The politicians that survive are politicians that seek re-election. The 'why' they originally go into politics (money or ideology) may be irrelevant as a fitness function for this sort of thing. (And eventually, as t -> ∞, the percentage of politicians that seek re-election will -> 100%.)
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    Darwinism generally arises in a world of fitness where reproduction is the dominating force. That is if politicians reproduced while in office to form more politicians and reproduction among politicians was the main source of new politicians then yes we might have reason to believe that seeking re-election is an emergent behavior from basic survival. However, that's not the way politics works. There is a stable equilibrium where politicians are constantly replenished by the larger population as they leave office, which holds true as t approaches infinity. And indeed this is more or less what we observe in Western societies.
nradov 6y ago
I don't want politicians who rule based on ideology. That's how we get disasters like the USSR. Instead I want pragmatists who change their minds in response to new information.
Fishysoup 6y ago
Maybe we ought to "summon" people semi-randomly to work in politics for a few years, the way you get summoned to a jury or get drafted in a war. It's gonna suck for many of these people, but at least it's gonna make it harder for career politicians and predators to assume office. Issue is you have to protect the "choosing" process from interference.
nostrademons 6y ago
The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. That group includes Hitler, Lenin, Mao, bin Laden, et al. We want people who are attracted to politics out of a sense of responsibility. Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. Both ideology and financial gain optimize for the wrong things.
- vkou 6y ago
  > The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. Does this also include the founding fathers (Or Abraham Lincoln? How does he stack up, compared to the likes of Jefferson Davis, or many of the other defenders of an unjust status quo?) Were they not ideologically motivated? They certainly spilled a lot of ideologically-sounding ink, and started an ideologically-motivated revolution, and then made a lot of ideologically-motivated decisions. Or do we define ideology to explicitly consider our current orthodoxy to not be ideological? [1] Lenin and Mao certainly had enough of a sense of responsibility. Just because you disagree with their ideology[2] (And agree with that of the founding fathers) does not mean that they didn't feel that it was their responsibility to bring about what they thought was a better future. > Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. This is, in my opinion, actually a much better litmus test then the rather subjective 'ideology' versus 'responsibility' question (Which hinges entirely on where you stand on an ideological spectrum.) [1] That would be the 'everyone but me is an ideologue' argument. I don't think it's a great one. [2] It doesn't need to be said that most people would disagree with their methods, so let's not veer into that tangent.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Most of the founding fathers were very pragmatic. The Constitution is one big compromise - it is the document that it needed to be to get 13 colonies to agree on a political union. There's plenty of stuff there (like the 3/5 compromise, or electoral college) that doesn't hold up ideologically today. Certainly stuff like Declaration of Independence or Common Sense is ideololgically-sounding. But these are propaganda pieces: they are also what they needed to be to get the citizenry behind the revolution. The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people. (Interestingly, by this definition, America's two greatest ideologues are probably FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Which I think is accurate, but they're still widely esteemed. I still maintain that they are two of the most dangerous leaders in U.S. history though.)

nine_zeros 6y ago

Agreed. Or at least remove the possibility of career politics. 2 terms in most positions ought to remove all the oldies implementing policies of 70s on today's people.

dwohnitmok 6y ago
Wait aren't these opposites? > 2 terms in most positions ought to remove all the oldies implementing policies of 70s on today's people. This sounds exactly like a problem of ideology, not financial gain.
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  When people are so entrenched and need to make a living, they will make a living out of what they are entrenched in. There are no other real career choices for them besides continuing in politics.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    Isn't it the case that those politicians who leave office and continue to work (mostly those who are not of retirement age) almost always make more money in their post-office careers than while they were in-office as a politician?
    - nine_zeros 6y ago
      But they need to establish themselves as successful politicians before they can have a successful post-office careers. By enforcing duration of political careers, there will be a constant influx of new blood who will represent the people of the time.

dwohnitmok 6y ago

> We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. Is your implication that right now most politicians are not politicians out of ideology first and foremost, but rather for their own financial gain? I would take the contrarian view. I would guess the majority of politicians are politicians because of ideology. Although they may not believe everything (or perhaps even most of what) they say they do and what they do believe may change while in office, I would be surprised if they don't have some core ideology that powers them. It's otherwise unclear to me why politicians seek re-election so frequently. In most Western democracies, a person with the opportunity to become a career politician has far more lucrative job opportunities outside of politics than within, especially once you've become a high-level politician. If people were doing it for money, I'd imagine they'd do a single term and then immediately try to parlay that into another job rather than trying to slug it out term after term. The other mildly persuasive explanation to me is enjoying the power of the office, but the feeling of power is very hard to separate from fervent ideology.

vkou 6y ago
A simple answer may be Darwinism. The politicians that survive are politicians that seek re-election. The 'why' they originally go into politics (money or ideology) may be irrelevant as a fitness function for this sort of thing. (And eventually, as t -> ∞, the percentage of politicians that seek re-election will -> 100%.)
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  Darwinism generally arises in a world of fitness where reproduction is the dominating force. That is if politicians reproduced while in office to form more politicians and reproduction among politicians was the main source of new politicians then yes we might have reason to believe that seeking re-election is an emergent behavior from basic survival. However, that's not the way politics works. There is a stable equilibrium where politicians are constantly replenished by the larger population as they leave office, which holds true as t approaches infinity. And indeed this is more or less what we observe in Western societies.

nradov 6y ago

I don't want politicians who rule based on ideology. That's how we get disasters like the USSR. Instead I want pragmatists who change their minds in response to new information.

Fishysoup 6y ago

Maybe we ought to "summon" people semi-randomly to work in politics for a few years, the way you get summoned to a jury or get drafted in a war. It's gonna suck for many of these people, but at least it's gonna make it harder for career politicians and predators to assume office. Issue is you have to protect the "choosing" process from interference.

nostrademons 6y ago

The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. That group includes Hitler, Lenin, Mao, bin Laden, et al. We want people who are attracted to politics out of a sense of responsibility. Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. Both ideology and financial gain optimize for the wrong things.

vkou 6y ago
> The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. Does this also include the founding fathers (Or Abraham Lincoln? How does he stack up, compared to the likes of Jefferson Davis, or many of the other defenders of an unjust status quo?) Were they not ideologically motivated? They certainly spilled a lot of ideologically-sounding ink, and started an ideologically-motivated revolution, and then made a lot of ideologically-motivated decisions. Or do we define ideology to explicitly consider our current orthodoxy to not be ideological? [1] Lenin and Mao certainly had enough of a sense of responsibility. Just because you disagree with their ideology[2] (And agree with that of the founding fathers) does not mean that they didn't feel that it was their responsibility to bring about what they thought was a better future. > Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. This is, in my opinion, actually a much better litmus test then the rather subjective 'ideology' versus 'responsibility' question (Which hinges entirely on where you stand on an ideological spectrum.) [1] That would be the 'everyone but me is an ideologue' argument. I don't think it's a great one. [2] It doesn't need to be said that most people would disagree with their methods, so let's not veer into that tangent.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Most of the founding fathers were very pragmatic. The Constitution is one big compromise - it is the document that it needed to be to get 13 colonies to agree on a political union. There's plenty of stuff there (like the 3/5 compromise, or electoral college) that doesn't hold up ideologically today. Certainly stuff like Declaration of Independence or Common Sense is ideololgically-sounding. But these are propaganda pieces: they are also what they needed to be to get the citizenry behind the revolution. The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people. (Interestingly, by this definition, America's two greatest ideologues are probably FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Which I think is accurate, but they're still widely esteemed. I still maintain that they are two of the most dangerous leaders in U.S. history though.)