The Roots Of Political Gridlock? A Foolish Population & Their Options Are Soon Parted

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Definition of a foolish population? One that doesn't listen well enough - or often enough - to enough of it's own, growing spectrum of feedback ..... to know what it knows!

You want yet another perspective?

Control Fraud:

"voters will not get angry ..if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place."

(?? And if they don't realize that national outcomes are being diverted, regardless of how much "money" does or doesn't seem to change hands?)

This is an incredibly long and detailed essay, above, by Francis Fukuyama ..... and yet he goes to all that trouble without making any suggestions for what to do about the challenges he lists!

I find the straightforward approach of OBT&E - or OSCE - to be much more productive.

Quit separating the endlessly emerging challenges from the early and continuous adjustments?

Forget Combinatorial Chemistry. We're undergoing Combinatorial Culture - and have to parse the simultaneous changes the best we can. That ALWAYS means forcing early decisions with insufficient data, but not TOO MANY! We've been doing this for 4.5 billion years, so don't panic. In fact, we've gotten really good at it, and now practice the refined approach called "social species."  No matter the context, social species solve emerging challenges by ... "being social" - i.e., by exchanging, analyzing and quickly (& continuously) acting upon ENOUGH of their own, available feedback to surf unpredictable reality.

Do we have to do that on a larger scale every year, by inventing & testing entirely new and more scalable methods?

Sure. That doesn't mean it's not doable.

What happened to American ingenuity?

We seem to be trying our best to tax it out of existence, with FICA, Medicare and other income taxes on what's left of Jane and Joe Sixpack of the former Middle Class.

We now use the hyper-efficient NSA to detect any sign of public feedback.



Yet if they detect any ... do they just call in the newly weaponized SWAT teams? What's next? Diverting the imaginary Social Security Trust In Fiat Fund to support drones for neighborhood police?

There is a better way, obviously - but we have to select it from current options. We can invest in developing reasonable, reasoning, free citizens ... or we can invest in imprisoning them in their own faux security.





Yes, there's an app for that. We're still working on bullet proof apps for the unborn, all the way to their source ... ovaries and testes. Support the RIGHT TO STRIFE fund! Since that obviously won't be enough, will we encase our brains in impenetrable shielding too? Or just our institutions and their momentum, since that's always tangential to our culture's unpredictable Adaptive Path.

If a shrinking Policy Space and declining Policy Agility is what we think we want, then we're doing a good job. Unfortunately, those goals are incompatible with what we all say we want for ourselves, our kids, our grandchildren, and our 7th generation yet unborn.

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their [methods] cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw