The American System of Government

At the highest levels of the Federal Government of the United States, I don’t think we are living in a democracy. I think we are living in:

1. A money-ocracy.
2. A PR-ocracy.

Money-ocracy

I think that we have made the system of government so complex that it’s very difficult for the average person to understand the law, the process of making laws, or what’s involved in enforcing it. It’s even difficult or impossible for the people in charge of this system to fully understand it. As such, it takes a significant investment to be able to understand the current situation and help influence it in one direction or another. This is where money comes in—people with more money can hire more people who can spend more time understanding the details and talking to the right leaders.

Also, since we have given the federal government control over huge amounts of money (and the ability to pass laws affecting the economy) there is a tremendous incentive for businesses and wealthy individuals to spend money here to improve their chances.

Now, on one hand, there is a positive argument for this system, that perhaps the people who produce more value for the civilization should have more say. That’s actually a fine argument. The problem is that our economic system doesn’t guarantee that people who have money are actually the people producing the most value for the society. Due to investments and inheritance, people can amass tremendous amounts of wealth without producing anything of value. And unfortunately, if you’ve ever met a person who has somehow amassed wealth without exchanging anything of value for that wealth, they are frequently nuts.

Look, there are many wealthy people in the world who have achieved their wealth by producing something of value, and it’s actually worthwhile for them to be able to stand up and say, “Hey, don’t pass this particular law, because it would actually harm society by affecting our ability to help others.” It’s just not everybody.

Unfortunately, though, there is also one other problem with this.

PR-ocracy

PR (which is, essentially, the control of human emotion in order to accomplish some outcome) is the most powerful weapon in the world. When used competently, it overwhelms all the power of money and authority in the world. Of course, to execute large PR campaigns, you do need to have enough money to fund them. Sometimes, though, that’s less money than you might think. People and organizations with few resources have frequently “won,” historically, by executing better PR than their opponents.

Since we have made the system impossible to understand, the only realistic way that you can influence the population or its leaders is by directing them emotionally. We might wish to believe that there are folks around who are operating on cold, hard data and logic, but there’s not enough of them to make a difference, especially because on paper, the government is a democracy, and thus all you have to do is get a majority of people to agree with you. (And not even a majority, but just the majority of the people who show up to vote, whether that’s in an election, in Congress, within a committee in Congress, etc.)

This is dangerous for two reasons:

1. It consolidates power into the hands of people who have the skills and the resources to execute large-scale PR campaigns (or execute small-scale ones on individual leaders in the government).
2. It is too easy to influence wealthy individuals via focused PR campaigns, and then get them to spend money to influence the money-ocracy.

That second point is the other problem with the money-ocracy that I mentioned above. I’ve seen this happen over and over—some well-intentioned wealthy individual or small group gets heavily influenced by some PR operation and decides to devote their resources to things that end up being destructive or worthless.

But to be clear, the first problem is even worse, because it can create governments that don’t work for the best interests of all the people. Even if they want to work for those best interests, that’s really hard when you’re surrounded by a maze of false PR data telling you, “If you do the thing that we want, that really is what would be the best for the society!”

Solution

So what’s the solution here? Well, the reason these things happen is that the system is too complex. The system is too complex because it attempts to produce huge numbers of very specific regulations and laws covering every area, to a level beyond what any individual could comprehend. It does this because it believes in “the rule of law, not the rule of men.” It has that belief due to destructive, uneducated, or ignorant leaders causing huge damage to the civilization throughout history.

You can eliminate the complexity from the system by providing a set of principles on which the country is run, rather than specific detailed laws. You could train a vast number of competent people on how to apply these principles, and make them a sort of local judge that offered fast and cheap justice.

The problem you would run into would, of course, be that you’re depending heavily on the judgement of individuals. Now, if you look over the American legal system, judges often do make good decisions when they are given the freedom to do so and good-enough principles for making that decision. They tend to make bad decisions when they are constrained in some irrational way by previous legal decisions or unnecessary laws.

The problem is this: they don’t always make good decisions. They have emotions and minds and lives. Some of them have destructive tendencies. Enough of them will behave irrationally that they would cause significant damage to the society. (Plus, once you allow them to make those judgements, you change the target of PR campaigns from Congress to judges.)

This is why I always keep coming back to there only being two solutions to the state of the civilization:

1. Address human irrationality.
2. Provide sufficient education to withstand false data from evilly-intentioned PR campaigns.

Both of these things can be accomplished, but those are subjects for some other discussion.