Our assumptions are killing us. No, really.
Most people believe other humans are similar to them. That we all want the same things, like life, liberty, good food. We don't want to poison others, hurt others (usually).
However, these assumptions do not apply to all humans.
Like the tails of vampires (that we just think are neat stories to frighten children) there are creatures that walk among us, who do not share these things.
So, we vote for a politician, and think that it is just an error, or congress critters are stupid, that the new law had the opposite effect as the title implied. And the politicians do not change it.
The problem is our assumptions. That they are good people. And they would not want to harm others.
People have different drives
Your typical neo-liberal wants safety, and will give up freedom for it.
Your typical conservative wants freedom, but also wants things to stay the same.
They both want life, abundance of food, good times, but the way they go about it is different.
In this graph, we see that there are really three political sides. And this defines most people's base way of interacting with the world.
And any political structure that we come up with has to serve all three of these kinds of people. And not in an antagonistic, our side wins and destroys you for 4 years, and then switch. All that brings is more destruction, more distrust.
Further, a group of people have been using this to play two factions off of each other. (the third just wants to be left alone, so they are very un-political.
There is a group of people that want YOU dead.
This is where our "everyone has some kindness in them" assumption really fails us. There is a group that is actively trying to wipe out a good portion of humanity.
And under them, is a group of humans who have no warm-empathy. Meaning, they see you as a toaster or a car. If you are working well for them, they may be nice. If you are not working well for them, you are disposed of. And they won't lose any sleep over it. These are narcissists (psychopaths and sociopaths). And no, it is not curable. We can't just give them a little love, and make things all better.
So, if we elect people, and assume that everyone has a little good in them, and no one will intentionally want to kill off the population, then we are setting ourselves up for a lot of pain. And, our govern-cement will never work for us. It will work against us, in many subtle, underhanded ways.
If we want good govern-cement
We have to start by weeding out destructive people from positions of power.
We have to firmly recognize that there their exists narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths and that they do not share our base moral instinct of not harming others.
We have to recognize that not everyone has some good in them.
(We will also have to recognize that some people do not have the ability to do good. They are stupid; they harm themselves and others because they are incapable of doing otherwise)
Now that we have identified these beings, we must isolate them from harming us.
A narcissist is ok as a surgeon. He has no qualms about cutting a person open.
But the narcissist is not ok as a leader, unless you want someone who uses people as objects. Sending them to die in a war, and laughing about it.
So, we must keep these people out of positions of power.
Interestingly, it is also one of our programmings, that when we are faced with this, we look for ways to test for psychopathy.
(the best way to test for psychopathy is to have a printed list of narcissistic traits, and then ask the person does this describe them. What a test)
Instead, what we need to do is recognize what we really want. We want people in charge to be empathic. If someone is going to be in a position to help the people, then they need to have a great deal of empathy. And we should test for that.
Which is really easy if we make debate questions to ask about such things. When the people work out that high empathy is what they want in a leader, then it becomes quite easy to look for that.
And this, weeds out all the narcissists. It weeds out all the people that want the position just for the power. It radically changes everything about govern-cement.
Political Trichotomy image from TFM