The Two Things Necessary for a Better Political System
As long as there are humans there will be debates about politics. In the end there are just two key pieces.
These are both huge things, so I can't say one is more important than the other: better principles and better people.
Without solid principles like due process, innocent until proven guilty, property rights, universal individual rights, distribution of power, checks and balances, ability to change people in power, the ability to change laws, stable laws, understandable laws, Jeff's Razor, restorative, restitutive, rehabilitative, and protective justice, illegal bribery and extortion, limiting conflict of interests, etc., you can't have a good political system. This is the part that is talked about and debated all the time.
The second piece is just as important. You need moral individuals. If you have the perfect political system and have a group of corrupted people run it, it won't be good. One of the bad things about politics is that this is hard to mitigate because power often attracts the worst people and corrupts the best. It's always dangerous. The only good corrective mechanism for corruption is individual morality. Morality emerges from repeated social interactions. Each of us has an effect on this. The cumulative effect is society. Society isn't just run from the top down, it's built from the bottom up.
If either one of these two pillars of society falls down, then the entire social system crumbles. It crumbles because there is nothing holding it up, nothing holding it together. Like a diseased body that turns on itself, attacks itself, destroys itself.
Each of our interactions decides which way society is being built. The individual is the savior, or destroyer, of society.
These are both huge things, so I can't say one is more important than the other: better principles and better people.
Without solid principles like due process, innocent until proven guilty, property rights, universal individual rights, distribution of power, checks and balances, ability to change people in power, the ability to change laws, stable laws, understandable laws, Jeff's Razor, restorative, restitutive, rehabilitative, and protective justice, illegal bribery and extortion, limiting conflict of interests, etc., you can't have a good political system. This is the part that is talked about and debated all the time.
The second piece is just as important. You need moral individuals. If you have the perfect political system and have a group of corrupted people run it, it won't be good. One of the bad things about politics is that this is hard to mitigate because power often attracts the worst people and corrupts the best. It's always dangerous. The only good corrective mechanism for corruption is individual morality. Morality emerges from repeated social interactions. Each of us has an effect on this. The cumulative effect is society. Society isn't just run from the top down, it's built from the bottom up.
If either one of these two pillars of society falls down, then the entire social system crumbles. It crumbles because there is nothing holding it up, nothing holding it together. Like a diseased body that turns on itself, attacks itself, destroys itself.
Each of our interactions decides which way society is being built. The individual is the savior, or destroyer, of society.
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You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com
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