Everybody hates congress, but likes their congressperson, at least if they know their congressperson. Why? Because people are generally good, and generally care about the wellbeing of society as long as it does not conflict with their self-interest, at least. But the institutions that we have set up to govern our society, the most basic structures in our society tend to produce extraordinarily inefficient and non-utilitarian outcomes. Maybe the problem is not that we are electing scumbags to represent us. Maybe the problem is that we are giving honest people incentives to become scumbags. And by maybe, I actually mean definitely.
So here is the solution that I propose: Why don’t we actually try to fix society? The problem has always been that you pretty much have to spend a decade educating yourself before you can ever really know enough about the way that our institutions work in order to make an educated decision about what is wrong with them and how they can be fixed, let alone actually push the other 300 million people in the country to go along with your idea. It’s just not feasible for many people to make that kind of investment in something that probably won’t change in their lifetime, and is decidedly unlikely to ever benefit them or their grandchildren even, financially to any great extent.
But it is so obvious that the country could be run in so many different ways that would be better than the status quo. Just about any random group of a hundred people in the country could come up with better policies than what this congress churns out! Surely there has to be a way to change something?
What if we, as a society, could come to an agreement that we need to change our society fundamentally? What if we could agree that there is likely a better way to do things? If we could just agree on that one thing, then we could nominate a small group of educated individuals to spend that decade deliberating and educating themselves even more as they came up with a new structure for society. They could be a constitutional convention de novo, reanalyzing what the framers set up after two hundred years, and drafting a plan for a more perfect union. Completely separate from the whims of public opinion, they could use their own expertise and judgment to craft a document that they truly believe is ideal, and then at long last unveil the finished work to the American people to be debated, tweaked, and ratified at large.
This is, in part, how we came by such a powerful original document so many years ago. But that document was never perfect, and it was never fully separated from political concerns. We know so much that they didn’t know back then. We have so many more intellectuals to pick from than they did all those years ago. It is time to remake our society for a new era. It is time to go back to the basics, and try again.
Sometimes Profound 