People used to think that humans could generally be counted on to act rationally in their own best interests. This idea is generally called something like the Standard Economic Model, but the cognitive science of the past few decades has blown this idea out of the water, beyond any hope of return. We now know better—that people frequently think, decide, believe, and act in ways that are irrational, and that end up being against their own best interests.
And this is no small discovery. Nor are its implications small. The implication I wanted to highlight here in this short piece is a theoretical one, and if you ponder it for a few minutes, I think you’ll see the problem. It is that our US Constitution was predicated upon the Standard Economic Model, and it has no mechanism for dealing with the problem of widespread irrationality in the populace. Rather, it tends to assume that “we the people” will be a sufficient foundation upon which the central government could be built.
But suppose you had one of those clever treadmills with a generator built in, such that it powers a television as long as a person is walking or running on the treadmill. The obvious down-side of a design like that is that the human is part of the design. If he or she quits moving, the system lacks the energy to make it run. And so here’s the very simple concept: If the American people won’t put the required energy into our system of government, it won’t work.
Obviously, opinions vary on how good a system of government our Constitution created, but if any analyst were looking at the whole country as a political system, they would easily see that there is no failsafe in the Constitution for a scenario in which the citizens became disinterested in upholding the rule of law under the founding principles that are built into the Constitution.
I think the Constitution is a remarkable document, but that the American people were not up to the task of maintaining it, even from the very beginning. The very first Congress violated the Constitution in some egregious and fundamental ways right away in 1789, and the people did not act to put a stop to it. And that seems to have set the pace for the rest of the story, as the rule of law under the Constitution has continued to erode from then until now.
As it turns out, a people would have to think more, study more, and care more than the American people have, if they wanted to keep a government that’s designed like ours running according to the plan. But all humans, Americans included, tend toward being hesitant to exert themselves in cognitive, moral, and political matters. Sure, you might get them to repeat a slogan now and then, or to get out and vote, but you’ll not find many exerting the level of effort it would take to mount any substantial political reform. For whatever reason(s), they’re just not that interested.
And our entire system was built on the assumption that either they would be that interested, or that enough interested champions could be found among them to oversee the government for the people so, that the people could concern themselves with other things without the country falling apart. But even that second option requires some reasonable level of quality control over who gets into office, and America, it seems, is not willing to invest much into that task, either.
And so, the whole system has been left to those who want it for their own use more than the American people want it. In my novel, Benjamin True points out that people who own gold bars don’t leave them out on the doorstep because they will be stolen, and that government is like this, too—that it must be guarded carefully, or else, someone will make off with it for their own purposes.
If the American people cannot be persuaded to guard their own government aptly—if they simply refuse to care that much—then there is no hope for any improvement over our current situation, except that some better thieves might come along to steal our government from its current owners, and that they’ll use it more for our good than do the current thieves who have control of it.
I wouldn’t have been ready to admit this a year ago, but I see now that the American public has never been in control of its government, even from the very beginning. It has always been left to the few who want it the most—for whatever their motivations might have been. If the people were ever to be made equal to the task, it would take a substantial effort to educate and train them accordingly, and without any of the debilitating compromises that are so common in our culture. There is, to my knowledge, no such effort underway. Nor does there seem to be much interest in it. Various groups do stab at it here and there, but I have yet to see one that does not fall considerably short in getting the job done.
Ironically, many such groups seem to make the mistake of believing in the Standard Economic Model themselves. That is, they believe that if they just make the case for good governance, most of the people will naturally come along to join in to the effort in their own best interests. And if they make the case and the people don’t come along, they just assume that they didn’t make it well enough, or long enough, or to enough people. But the answer they won’t try is that the people would need to be trained to be rational first. It’s such a fundamental reform that’s needed, and not some superficial, Band-Aid sort of thing. And while such might naturally be considered the purview of churches, most of them, too, seem to be assuming the Standard Economic Model, and are doing very little to teach rationality. In fact, many of them tend to look on rationality with suspicion, at least, if not with outright disdain.
So, we are largely an irrational society, still telling ourselves we are largely rational. That seems to be what time it is.
I don’t think any of us can ever be perfect in this world, but I’m pretty sure we could indeed do better on the whole than we do. But we’ll not do much better by mere accident. No, we would have to face our irrationality head-on, and we are not yet in the right frame of mind for that. No, we’re currently still stuck on the idea that it’s the irrationality, dishonesty, and irresponsibility of the other party that’s really holding America back–or that it’s the irrationality, dishonesty, and irresponsibility of the other denominations that’s really holding the Church back. That explanation, as it turns out, is just too attractive for many to pass up. So we circle the wagons in our various camps and blame the other camps for most of what ails us.
That we will not sweep our own house clean is solid proof that we’re not thinking right—that we’re irrational, that is. And look what we do then: We expect that our irrational neighbors, whom we blame for how the neighborhood has gone to pot, simply ought to know better, and to straighten themselves out. And they’re thinking the same thing about us. And this makes for quite the dishonest, irrational, and irresponsible town. And a people like that are primed and ready to be manipulated by players who want to use the government for their own purposes.
And that’s what time I think it is.
I know very few individuals who have determined to overcome these biases and neglects within their own minds. The thought that one might find a whole group somewhere who have committed to such is hard to imagine. And the thought that the majority of the country’s voters might even want to accomplish this is just outlandish. Yet it seems to still be the assumption of “both sides” that their own camp is acting rationally in the country’s best interests, when both camps regularly violate not only the Constitution, but even their own party platforms.
We are in such a mess, and there is no indication that any large group of people is interested in working its way out of it. America might enjoy being better, but not, it seems, if she must do the work herself to make it so.
