6 ms·

"Try not to set too much store by politicians. Not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of

"Try not to set too much store by politicians. Not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement… No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius." I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives (and heaven forbid it to be an integral part of our identities). Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. And the tragedy is that even as we've put more and more stock in the former, we've been actively sabotaging the latter.

prox 5y ago
This also the view of Thomas Payne. Everyone should read “Common Sense”. Most topics are still relevant. Many problems you see in US politics are already foretold, and also how to get out of it. Personal responsibility doesn’t mean taking care of yourself, and stop there, it means taking care of your world, your community and as you say, fix small things together. Insulation is the real pandemic imo.
- asymptosis 5y ago
  I tried looking up things like "Thomas Payne" and "Common Sense" but nothing quite matched what you seem to be driving at. Is there something obvious I'm missing, or do you have a link for where to start looking further?
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    Common Sense by Thomas Paine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
    - asymptosis 5y ago
      Thanks! Ah, it's the spelling. I took "Payne" too literally.
  - prox 5y ago
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/147 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/147 On project Gutenberg!
- afpx 5y ago
  I'm trying to read it ("Common Sense") and, it's making me feel pretty dumb. I'm only a couple of paragraphs in, and my eyes are already glazing over, and I can't follow what he's talking about. The Wikipedia page says it's the highest selling book in American history, or something. And, people read this at taverns, apparently.
  - prox 5y ago
    It certainly takes a moment to get accustomed to it. More than 200 years separate us from his time and way of writing. I do think if you stick with it you will adapt to it. It’s not unlike reading a new coding language in that sense :)
- brundolf 5y ago
  There's a modern rhetorical trend where the phrase "common sense" just means "whatever I personally think to be obviously right", so that's given me a pretty strong distaste for anything/anyone using it. But I maybe shouldn't make the assumption that that's how it's used here.
  - prox 5y ago
    Yeah, a semantic shift might have occurred. Remember we live in a hyper individual society compared to the time of Thomas. It’s more about an appeal to our common humanity, if that makes sense :)
  - prox 5y ago
    Also, adding to my comment , this is the first paragraph: >Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
  - uxjxbjkbuiduid 5y ago
    The work referenced here is an argument distributed as a pamphlet by Thomas Paine before the American separation from Great Britain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense Whether that corresponds to your modern rhetorical trend is, I suppose, up to you.
_0ffh 5y ago
>big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives I'd be happy to leave politics alone, if only politics would deign to leave me alone as well. Only it doesn't, it's a cancer that eats it's way through society until nothing outside of it is left. We either kill this cancer, or we die of it.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Please think again about what "politics" means to you. Some people just think of boring men and women in suits shouting in adverts, blaming the other person for all our failures. Yeah, we all hate that. But politics is bigger than that. To my mind it is the process through which any group of humans decides how to work together (or possibly annihilate together). Its how we agree to build roads, schools, hospitals. Its where we build them, who builds them, who gets to use them. It's how fairly or not we share the burdens. It's about who is an enemy and who is a friend. It's about taxes and rebates, of course, but if we dont collect and spend the taxes to, say, build a school, politics is about do we want to have someone else build the school? Is that fair? Will it educate the children correctly. Even when government does not do something politics is still there. Because its about everyone who is not us, and how we interact with everyone who is not us.
  - _0ffh 5y ago
    >> I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the "economic means" for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means." << Franz Oppenheimer (1908), "The State" Please do not confuse the social and societal with the political, that's a fallacy.
    - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      My simplistic understanding of Oppenheimer is "we all lived in perfect harmony, then some strong men came along and forced everyone into hierarchies and pay tax. If only we could get rid of politics and go back to living in harmony." It's a common reaction to bad politics - dictators and purges and so on. It's surprisingly common in post Cesaer Rome - but at least they wanted to go back to a Republic. Sorry but humans work better when they work together - from hunting Mammoths to building skyscrapers. So the answer is to find better ways to work together. I see that outcome as society and the process as politics. Edit: an interesting example is right in the front page - https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-... which roughly says "video games allow private industry to grow a village into a town pretty linearly, it it never worked like that because (weather / war / some bugger owned the land and would take more surplus than would let you grow - plus it was often planned like urban planner planned) Oppenheimer would say that's evil politics, let's stop politics, I would say that's incentives and power balance and economics and military power imbalances and lack of medical and public health. In my (again simplistic view) it took the English and Dutch to build strong Parliaments abs financial systems that kept the monarchy in check and allowed private industry to begin to grow, and advances in public health to lay foundation for industrial revolutions. Oppenheimers not wrong I guess, just the solution is a moderation of the politics not going back to a simpler time.
pjc50 5y ago
> No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact Pretty much the central tenet of western capitalism is that it can and will grow; indeed, all sorts of sacrifices of fairness are made in the name of increasing the total size of the pie. Nor is the total number of pie-consumers and pie-producers fixed. It may be counter-intuitive, and it is certainly not obvious if you've spent your life in the Soviet system, but it's important to consider.
- allendoerfer 5y ago
  People unfortunately do not really care about the absolute amount of pie they get. They only care about getting the same amount of pie the others on the table have. They are angry if someone gets more than they get. Sometimes they do not see that this person actually has baked the pie. Others might not have had a chance to have lunch before. Unless people are starving, the absolute amount of pie does not really matter to them.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    Brexit taught us people will vote for a much smaller pie if they think it will make others slices smaller and closer to theirs.
    - hnbad 5y ago
      As an outsider, a lot of conservative politics in the US only make sense if you consider that certain people are willing to burn themselves to the ground as long as they get to use those they hate most as kindling.
      - refurb 5y ago
        That same observation is made of the other side as well - a willingness to blow up a system, even if it hurts the common man, in order to get to a supposed utopia.
    - deleted 5y ago
fsloth 5y ago
The factor people tend to be blind to (I was) is the magnitude of the effect of historical institutions to current state of affairs. American perhaps are more blind to this than others as their institutions start at a point when the relevant research material concerns things which at that point (18th century) were already centuries old. Old institutions affect the prosperity and quality of current institutions surprisingly much: Hapsburg empire: https://voxeu.org/article/habsburg-empire-and-long-half-life-economic-institutions https://voxeu.org/article/habsburg-empire-and-long-half-life... An old inca highway: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/31/an-inca-highway-still-benefits-people-living-nearby https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/31/an-inca-... LOTS of old borders which obviously demarcate centuries old polities, treaties and circles of influence (you need to know what they are to observe them in this map) - mapped nicely into how strongly higher education is inherited: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211019890 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211019890 As an example we can take Finland that has an obvious area more dark in the east than rest of the country. The funny thing is this area delineates a territory that fell under the Novgorod sphere of influence in 14th century in the treaty of Nöteborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_N%C3%B6teborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_N%C3%B6teborg Daron Acemoglu has a fantastic book discussing the tenacity of historical institutions make or brake current affairs centuries after: Acemoglu: Why Nations Fail (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/0307719227 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d... and so on)
- distances 5y ago
  > Hapsburg empire: This was extremely interesting, and at the same time quite depressing that present-day corruption levels depend on last centuries instead of just the strength of current institutions.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    I'm not sure if it's depressing - generally institutions that attempt rapid reprogramming of population are not considered humane. As mantra goes - culture trumps process. Culture of society even more so than in companies.
WalterBright 5y ago
I was sadly amused when Obama decided to get involved in gender and bathrooms. Shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.? But such involvement from the top in minor issues is characteristic when the top accretes too much power. Everyone lower just delegates it upwards because nobody wants to take responsibility. Back in the 70s when the dorm at Caltech I attended went coed, the bathrooms weren't set up for that. So the students solved the problem themselves. A sign was made with a circle divided into 4 quadrants and a rotating pointer in the center. The quadrants were labeled: 1. men 2. women 3. don't know 4. don't care which seemed to satisfy everyone.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >Shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.? I think prioritisation is half the problem in politics, everyone thinks that their issues ought to be a priority and it's very hard to have a centralised authority wade in and decide that for people without looking at best out of touch and at worst actively malicious. It's a big reason I'm a fan of liberalism (in the British rather than American sense) and subsidiarity, central planning in my opinion usually leads to poorer results because the people on the ground in a given situation tend to make better and more informed decisions than someone sitting at a desk in London with many degrees of seperation from the situation at hand. The solution I think is to make government as local as possible so that different places can have different priorities without breaking things for other people. I believe that politics ought to be as decentralised as practically possible and political abstractions are employed only when absolutely necessary (ie it'd be a bit silly to ask Ceredigion County Council to run its own nuclear energy programme). Not only does this reduce tensions between ideologically diverse areas, it also frees up what remains of the central government's power to focus on long-term globally important issues rather than flitting about with the issues of the day. We need to dispense with this "winner takes all" approach to politics where the most powerful ideological minority can lord it over everyone else for five years at a time and instead adopt a much more "each to their own" approach in my opinion. The two big barriers to this approach are a) politicians that currently rule the roost of a highly centralised system would be loathe to give up their power - it's very rare that powerful people have the moral fibre to selflessly abandon power and influence for the greater good of humanity and b) current local government infrastructure is pretty atrocious, it's often made up of ridiculous retirees with nothing better to do than exercise their instincts for petty tyranny.
phekunde 5y ago
> Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us This thinking is nothing new. It was identified long back that the rulers/politicians are reflection of the society. There is a very well-known old proverb in the language Marathi: "Jashii prajaa, tasaa rajaa". It means, "A king is a reflection of his subjects". So that tells us, this understanding that the king/ruler/politician is reflection of the society was understood long back. Some how, the way democracy is defined and taught has created this misunderstanding that the elected few will serve the electorate and do good for them.
tablespoon 5y ago
> I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. I don't think that's quite right. IMHO, there's a feedback loop between those things and they're both important, especially on the negative side, but even on the positive side, too. So politicians won't be our salvation, but they will be part of it.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better >Politicians are just a reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives. Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. I've added those to my personal list of Great Quotes! Not as poetic as the Russian, but more succinct. I sometimes wonder if gems like this are scattered throughout the social media firehose "like tears in the rain." Maybe the singularity will pick 'em up one day...
brundolf 5y ago
Edit: I want to refine the above since this is ticking upward. I think there are certain problems that do require top-down coordination from everybody, and there are certain moral issues that really are so fundamental they deserve to be enshrined in law. It's just that these days we tend to overestimate the size of these categories and target everything we think to be wrong with our society using this extremely large and imprecise "hammer". Many things, especially small and personal and compassionate and nuanced things, will simply be smashed instead of fixed. And people, in particular, have to improve from the inside out. This (my part at least) also isn't a "government efficiency" argument, it's a "government precision" argument. Governments (and political factions, and corporations for that matter) cannot know things like morality; they can only respond to very imprecise signals sent to them by the populace. If you look to them as a personal north star, you will end up empty and broken inside. And as you look to them as levers of change, expect that everything they do will be at best a clunky, wide approximate of what you hope for. Factor that in when you set your expectations for which things they can and can't solve.
- spacemark 5y ago
  Very well put. Hans Rosling (RIP) in his book "Factfulness" talks about how the leaders of a nation or even the system of government make very little difference in the rising standard of living in a given country. What makes the difference is people getting up and going to work. Ie, incrementally and steadily improving what's actually in each of our spheres of control rather than losing our minds over celebrity politicians' latest tweets. As Epictetus said, "If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters." As true today as it was 2000 years ago.
shazeubaa 5y ago
Nailed it! Well said.

prox 5y ago

This also the view of Thomas Payne. Everyone should read “Common Sense”. Most topics are still relevant. Many problems you see in US politics are already foretold, and also how to get out of it. Personal responsibility doesn’t mean taking care of yourself, and stop there, it means taking care of your world, your community and as you say, fix small things together. Insulation is the real pandemic imo.

asymptosis 5y ago
I tried looking up things like "Thomas Payne" and "Common Sense" but nothing quite matched what you seem to be driving at. Is there something obvious I'm missing, or do you have a link for where to start looking further?
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  Common Sense by Thomas Paine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
  - asymptosis 5y ago
    Thanks! Ah, it's the spelling. I took "Payne" too literally.
- prox 5y ago
  https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/147 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/147 On project Gutenberg!
afpx 5y ago
I'm trying to read it ("Common Sense") and, it's making me feel pretty dumb. I'm only a couple of paragraphs in, and my eyes are already glazing over, and I can't follow what he's talking about. The Wikipedia page says it's the highest selling book in American history, or something. And, people read this at taverns, apparently.
- prox 5y ago
  It certainly takes a moment to get accustomed to it. More than 200 years separate us from his time and way of writing. I do think if you stick with it you will adapt to it. It’s not unlike reading a new coding language in that sense :)
brundolf 5y ago
There's a modern rhetorical trend where the phrase "common sense" just means "whatever I personally think to be obviously right", so that's given me a pretty strong distaste for anything/anyone using it. But I maybe shouldn't make the assumption that that's how it's used here.
- prox 5y ago
  Yeah, a semantic shift might have occurred. Remember we live in a hyper individual society compared to the time of Thomas. It’s more about an appeal to our common humanity, if that makes sense :)
- prox 5y ago
  Also, adding to my comment , this is the first paragraph: >Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
- uxjxbjkbuiduid 5y ago
  The work referenced here is an argument distributed as a pamphlet by Thomas Paine before the American separation from Great Britain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense Whether that corresponds to your modern rhetorical trend is, I suppose, up to you.

_0ffh 5y ago

>big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives I'd be happy to leave politics alone, if only politics would deign to leave me alone as well. Only it doesn't, it's a cancer that eats it's way through society until nothing outside of it is left. We either kill this cancer, or we die of it.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Please think again about what "politics" means to you. Some people just think of boring men and women in suits shouting in adverts, blaming the other person for all our failures. Yeah, we all hate that. But politics is bigger than that. To my mind it is the process through which any group of humans decides how to work together (or possibly annihilate together). Its how we agree to build roads, schools, hospitals. Its where we build them, who builds them, who gets to use them. It's how fairly or not we share the burdens. It's about who is an enemy and who is a friend. It's about taxes and rebates, of course, but if we dont collect and spend the taxes to, say, build a school, politics is about do we want to have someone else build the school? Is that fair? Will it educate the children correctly. Even when government does not do something politics is still there. Because its about everyone who is not us, and how we interact with everyone who is not us.
- _0ffh 5y ago
  >> I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the "economic means" for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means." << Franz Oppenheimer (1908), "The State" Please do not confuse the social and societal with the political, that's a fallacy.
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    My simplistic understanding of Oppenheimer is "we all lived in perfect harmony, then some strong men came along and forced everyone into hierarchies and pay tax. If only we could get rid of politics and go back to living in harmony." It's a common reaction to bad politics - dictators and purges and so on. It's surprisingly common in post Cesaer Rome - but at least they wanted to go back to a Republic. Sorry but humans work better when they work together - from hunting Mammoths to building skyscrapers. So the answer is to find better ways to work together. I see that outcome as society and the process as politics. Edit: an interesting example is right in the front page - https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-... which roughly says "video games allow private industry to grow a village into a town pretty linearly, it it never worked like that because (weather / war / some bugger owned the land and would take more surplus than would let you grow - plus it was often planned like urban planner planned) Oppenheimer would say that's evil politics, let's stop politics, I would say that's incentives and power balance and economics and military power imbalances and lack of medical and public health. In my (again simplistic view) it took the English and Dutch to build strong Parliaments abs financial systems that kept the monarchy in check and allowed private industry to begin to grow, and advances in public health to lay foundation for industrial revolutions. Oppenheimers not wrong I guess, just the solution is a moderation of the politics not going back to a simpler time.

pjc50 5y ago

> No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact Pretty much the central tenet of western capitalism is that it can and will grow; indeed, all sorts of sacrifices of fairness are made in the name of increasing the total size of the pie. Nor is the total number of pie-consumers and pie-producers fixed. It may be counter-intuitive, and it is certainly not obvious if you've spent your life in the Soviet system, but it's important to consider.

allendoerfer 5y ago
People unfortunately do not really care about the absolute amount of pie they get. They only care about getting the same amount of pie the others on the table have. They are angry if someone gets more than they get. Sometimes they do not see that this person actually has baked the pie. Others might not have had a chance to have lunch before. Unless people are starving, the absolute amount of pie does not really matter to them.
- mnd999 5y ago
  Brexit taught us people will vote for a much smaller pie if they think it will make others slices smaller and closer to theirs.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    As an outsider, a lot of conservative politics in the US only make sense if you consider that certain people are willing to burn themselves to the ground as long as they get to use those they hate most as kindling.
    - refurb 5y ago
      That same observation is made of the other side as well - a willingness to blow up a system, even if it hurts the common man, in order to get to a supposed utopia.
  - deleted 5y ago

fsloth 5y ago

The factor people tend to be blind to (I was) is the magnitude of the effect of historical institutions to current state of affairs. American perhaps are more blind to this than others as their institutions start at a point when the relevant research material concerns things which at that point (18th century) were already centuries old. Old institutions affect the prosperity and quality of current institutions surprisingly much: Hapsburg empire: https://voxeu.org/article/habsburg-empire-and-long-half-life-economic-institutions https://voxeu.org/article/habsburg-empire-and-long-half-life... An old inca highway: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/31/an-inca-highway-still-benefits-people-living-nearby https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/31/an-inca-... LOTS of old borders which obviously demarcate centuries old polities, treaties and circles of influence (you need to know what they are to observe them in this map) - mapped nicely into how strongly higher education is inherited: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211019890 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211019890 As an example we can take Finland that has an obvious area more dark in the east than rest of the country. The funny thing is this area delineates a territory that fell under the Novgorod sphere of influence in 14th century in the treaty of Nöteborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_N%C3%B6teborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_N%C3%B6teborg Daron Acemoglu has a fantastic book discussing the tenacity of historical institutions make or brake current affairs centuries after: Acemoglu: Why Nations Fail (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/0307719227 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d... and so on)

distances 5y ago
> Hapsburg empire: This was extremely interesting, and at the same time quite depressing that present-day corruption levels depend on last centuries instead of just the strength of current institutions.
- fsloth 5y ago
  I'm not sure if it's depressing - generally institutions that attempt rapid reprogramming of population are not considered humane. As mantra goes - culture trumps process. Culture of society even more so than in companies.

WalterBright 5y ago

I was sadly amused when Obama decided to get involved in gender and bathrooms. Shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.? But such involvement from the top in minor issues is characteristic when the top accretes too much power. Everyone lower just delegates it upwards because nobody wants to take responsibility. Back in the 70s when the dorm at Caltech I attended went coed, the bathrooms weren't set up for that. So the students solved the problem themselves. A sign was made with a circle divided into 4 quadrants and a rotating pointer in the center. The quadrants were labeled: 1. men 2. women 3. don't know 4. don't care which seemed to satisfy everyone.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
>Shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.? I think prioritisation is half the problem in politics, everyone thinks that their issues ought to be a priority and it's very hard to have a centralised authority wade in and decide that for people without looking at best out of touch and at worst actively malicious. It's a big reason I'm a fan of liberalism (in the British rather than American sense) and subsidiarity, central planning in my opinion usually leads to poorer results because the people on the ground in a given situation tend to make better and more informed decisions than someone sitting at a desk in London with many degrees of seperation from the situation at hand. The solution I think is to make government as local as possible so that different places can have different priorities without breaking things for other people. I believe that politics ought to be as decentralised as practically possible and political abstractions are employed only when absolutely necessary (ie it'd be a bit silly to ask Ceredigion County Council to run its own nuclear energy programme). Not only does this reduce tensions between ideologically diverse areas, it also frees up what remains of the central government's power to focus on long-term globally important issues rather than flitting about with the issues of the day. We need to dispense with this "winner takes all" approach to politics where the most powerful ideological minority can lord it over everyone else for five years at a time and instead adopt a much more "each to their own" approach in my opinion. The two big barriers to this approach are a) politicians that currently rule the roost of a highly centralised system would be loathe to give up their power - it's very rare that powerful people have the moral fibre to selflessly abandon power and influence for the greater good of humanity and b) current local government infrastructure is pretty atrocious, it's often made up of ridiculous retirees with nothing better to do than exercise their instincts for petty tyranny.

phekunde 5y ago

> Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us This thinking is nothing new. It was identified long back that the rulers/politicians are reflection of the society. There is a very well-known old proverb in the language Marathi: "Jashii prajaa, tasaa rajaa". It means, "A king is a reflection of his subjects". So that tells us, this understanding that the king/ruler/politician is reflection of the society was understood long back. Some how, the way democracy is defined and taught has created this misunderstanding that the elected few will serve the electorate and do good for them.

tablespoon 5y ago

> I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. I don't think that's quite right. IMHO, there's a feedback loop between those things and they're both important, especially on the negative side, but even on the positive side, too. So politicians won't be our salvation, but they will be part of it.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better >Politicians are just a reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives. Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. I've added those to my personal list of Great Quotes! Not as poetic as the Russian, but more succinct. I sometimes wonder if gems like this are scattered throughout the social media firehose "like tears in the rain." Maybe the singularity will pick 'em up one day...

brundolf 5y ago

Edit: I want to refine the above since this is ticking upward. I think there are certain problems that do require top-down coordination from everybody, and there are certain moral issues that really are so fundamental they deserve to be enshrined in law. It's just that these days we tend to overestimate the size of these categories and target everything we think to be wrong with our society using this extremely large and imprecise "hammer". Many things, especially small and personal and compassionate and nuanced things, will simply be smashed instead of fixed. And people, in particular, have to improve from the inside out. This (my part at least) also isn't a "government efficiency" argument, it's a "government precision" argument. Governments (and political factions, and corporations for that matter) cannot know things like morality; they can only respond to very imprecise signals sent to them by the populace. If you look to them as a personal north star, you will end up empty and broken inside. And as you look to them as levers of change, expect that everything they do will be at best a clunky, wide approximate of what you hope for. Factor that in when you set your expectations for which things they can and can't solve.

spacemark 5y ago
Very well put. Hans Rosling (RIP) in his book "Factfulness" talks about how the leaders of a nation or even the system of government make very little difference in the rising standard of living in a given country. What makes the difference is people getting up and going to work. Ie, incrementally and steadily improving what's actually in each of our spheres of control rather than losing our minds over celebrity politicians' latest tweets. As Epictetus said, "If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters." As true today as it was 2000 years ago.

shazeubaa 5y ago

Nailed it! Well said.