Not Even Not Zen 443: Biomythography - Note 149, People or Politics

People or Politics

We were socializing over the sort of game that doesn’t take much attention. We had time to discuss politics.

This was in college. Half of us were guests in a group living arrangement called the Prescott Mods that always looked to me like the sort of condos you would find around a ski lodge. The buildings had high-angled metal roofs. Inside them, the many-bedroom units were spacious and, despite the college furnishings and modular furniture, they felt comfy. Our discussions about politics tended to fill the common areas. Everyone walking through joined in for a little while. Our concepts remained idealistic, of course. I'd assumed we had all worked jobs for a few years, at least, but we were still young enough for us to imagine every political system functioning if people wanted it.

The ‘if people wanted it’ problem was larger than anyone knew. It is, essentially, the most serious problem in economics. Most of the fiscal judgments that appear to be about math are really about incentives and other estimations of human nature. But our judgments of other people were about what one might expect from college students.

“Communism does work,” a young man said from the sidelines. He hadn't joined the board game. He was a roommate on his way to the kitchen. His political contribution came from his experiences in his previous year, which he had spent in communal living. “Just because the Soviets are corrupt doesn’t mean the Czechs are corrupt. Or the Chinese. They're making things work.”

Across from me, my friend Al made a skeptical sound. He thought America was full of crooks. And we all, everyone around the table and elsewhere around the room, thought the Soviets were corrupt. The Chinese government seemed idealistic but also full of power-mad people at the top who were happy to murder one another and sometimes kill swathes of their own countrymen.

“It sort of works,” a couple of us allowed. I snuck a peek at my game cards.

“But it assumes people are honest,” Al commented. "That's the flaw."

At some point during our game, we ended up in a half-hour argument about capitalism, specifically the part where it eventually curdles into monopolies, like milk left out on the counter of Free Enterprise. Then we tried to tackle socialism, except nobody at the table could actually agree on what socialism was, which did not stop half the young men from having extremely strong opinions about it. This is, I believe, a requirement for being a college student: you must be prepared to argue passionately about things you cannot coherently define.

Eventually it dawned on me that the real design flaw in every political system ever invented is the people running it. Specifically, their tendency to get corrupted, which is basically a law of human nature on par with a law of physics.

This, I decided, is probably why the United States has muddled through as well as it has. It showed up to the philosophy party before capitalism, socialism, and communism brought in the serious drugs and ruined the nation-building vibe. Humanity had already spent several thousand years watching leaders get corrupted, so the founders had time to think about that part of things. Most of the political theories that came after our founding seem to operate on the assumption that people are rational and well-intentioned, which is an assumption I would not make about my best friends, let alone a large government.

Even today, actual functioning countries are basically political system smoothies - a blend of everything, yes, but with one of the main ingredients still being 'try to stop people from being terrible.'

As I sat with my friends, I had a sudden vision, as I often had back then, of moving parts, of organizations in action, and of the people in and around them. I realized I could make any political system work. It didn't matter if I had to implement communism, capitalism, socialism, anarchy (so popular then among teenagers), theocracy, or pretty much any other thing. The system didn't matter.

It was always about the people. Which, frankly, explains a lot.

If I had the right people, I could form a business. I could form a tribal government; run a farm; do anything constructive I wanted to do. What's more, the right people were always the same people. There are people who will make any system function because they're the hard workers who are willing to be responsible for themselves and others.

And I knew who they were. I built a list in my head with Al's girlfriend, Donna, at the top. The list totalled four or five people at most. That, I found discouraging. I could add a few others who weren't the right people, exactly, but who wouldn't go against the team effort. They could work under the influence of the great souls. The list grew to eight or nine people.

But for the ones who mattered most, there were at best five people out of the (roughly) thousand I knew.

In contrast, I was aware there are people who excuse themselves from responsibility under any system. They cause any politics to fail and die in corruption. I thought those were rare, maybe one or two out of a hundred. But that estimate made the great souls even more rare than the selfish ones. I tried not to think about those proportions.

I focused on the list and what it meant. It's the people, not the politics, that make efforts succeed or fail. Good people - not just well-intentioned ones, but folks actively working and doing good deeds - were at the root of every success I'd heard about. With good souls, I knew I could build any organization.

About a minute later, I realized it would probably all fall apart in the next generation. Any system that depended on good people driving it would fall apart on the next regression to the mean, on the tendency of children not to be quite like their parents.

The progeny of saints are not saints themselves.

So while it was obvious that a society built on good people is a good idea — right up there with "exercise more" and "stop eating the entire sleeve of Oreos" — I circled back to a slightly less comfortable realization: a well-run society can't just hope everyone behaves. It has to actively lean on people. It needs to reward the good citizens, ideally with something better than a certificate of appreciation. It needs to punish the bad ones. It probably needs public shaming. And corporal punishment, maybe, for people who can't be shamed but the society doesn't want to outright kill.

Basically, a society has to do all the awkward, unglamorous things that every successful nation has always done. Corruption, of course, never fully goes away — it's less a problem you solve and more a raccoon you continually manage — but in the early days of any effort, before the checks and balances are in place, success really comes down to the people involved. The quality of the people determines the quality of the victory.

It's a concept that could be deeply inspiring or deeply terrifying, depending on who you're standing next to at the time. For me back then, it was inspiring.