The News, Ethics and Politics: Our Futures And Their Power

Eliminate politics. It is a bad venture. It has been for thousands of years, and it will be for thousands of years to come---if we don't cure it like the disease that it is. Lets face it even the brightest of us don't understand everything, and no one truly knows even a good portion of economics, social science and world diplomacy. Each of those requires extensive, almost infinite, information about equations, human nature in groups and as individuals and about thousands of cultures. There is literally no way to know it. However, in our modern political scene, we pretend like we do. We act certain. We feel certain. We are deceiving ourselves.

Since when have you opened up an advanced text book to realize you know everything in it---even when you've been in that field for years? Any professional knows that there is literally more information in an given, single, professional field than any one hundred trained professional's can assimilate, let alone one person.  And, there our thousands of professional fields and specialities that are required to run the government for even a day. And each of those have hundreds or thousands of people diving up the understanding and responsibility of those areas. 

Yet, when we vote, we think we can decide whether or not someone had done the right or wrong thing in there field. We pretend that we know what philosophy is best for running our  nation's finances, whether it is better to lighten taxes or increase them, whether to drill or not to drill, whether to attack or not to attack. We are wrong. These are not simple problems that can be solved with a civilian's mind, or even a brilliant professional's mind. Each of those problem requires infinitely complex mathematical,  behavioral, economic and cultural calculations that requires thousands of brilliant minds to understand and act upon.

However, this is what politics tells us: "You understand it all, and you know you can trust me, so vote me because you know I am right". Meanwhile, they're spoon feeding your only information. And, you take it up eagerly because believing is far better than feeling lost in the chaos of information you can't understand. Believing that Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin can run a nation makes you feel more equipped to handle the world.

In reality, you are busy surviving, feeding your children and working your job, and you are just one person. You can't understand. the best that you can hope for is that you play a significant piece in the puzzle. The best way to play a piece in the puzzle is to vote people in who are qualified to make those decisions. In this world of constant psychological manipulation that is an impossible choice. There is no way to make the right decision. 

And, that is how we need to exercise our power in this democracy: we need to find a way so when we make a decision we can have a real, trustworthy reason to believe that it is correct, and not just deceptive certainty. 

We need to break it down. What do we want for our nation? We want to live healthy, happy and free. We want our nation's power to protect and promote these. We want crush corruption, and optimize our government so that it serves our desire for a health and happiness in the long and short term. We can do that by effective watch-dogs, and the best candidates. 

We must fix our watch-dog and find a way to choose our candidates that eliminates political manipulation, whether wielded through a news agency or a  politician. The way to do this is to make the News a different kind of profession, held to the same standards as a doctor or lawyer. A profession that is not for entertainment value, but that genuinely seeks to uncover corruption and bring truth to the public. News agencies need to become a new legal category, where the size and influence of the agency is limited by strict rules, and where the news agencies are held accountable by other news agencies and the public. Every story that is meant to report news on politics or world happenings should have reliable and valid resources,  recorded and verifiable.  If they don't there should be serious consequences, consequences that are independent of the government, but no less binding.

The other side of this is politicians themselves can manipulate, and subtle differences between the candidates can warp the vote in wrong way. For instance, you can predict elections based on how tall the candidate is. This preference for taller people could cause us to choose the wrong person. And there are many more ways that are both intentional or not intentional that we can be influenced to vote in the wrong direction. 

In order to snip our own self-defeating mental heuristics out of the process, we need to limit the kind of information that we receive. We should do this by law. The law must say that we never see our candidates.  The only criteria that can be known---and posted and easily accessible to the public must be: IQ, Education, Grades, Languages spoken, Experience, Financials and Other criteria set by a committees of the best professionals who deem these to be important in decision making and background experience.  Political affiliations of the candidates should never be mentioned.  Specially designed tests for candidates need to be taken and posted, as well, that gage leadership skills, charisma, and cultural and economic understanding.

The only way to fix a broken system is to redesign it. Our system is broken because we don't have the kind of understanding and control we think we do. We aren't actually making choices---we're being unconsciously told what to do. We're leashed. We're leashed to other's information, other's opinions and other's persuasive charisma. Beef up the watch-dogs and eliminate the political scene by eliminating the manipulation. Eliminate politics. 

Bush, Palin, Obama and Hillary: The Same in Change: Changing The world and Getting out of a Paradox

A fox, a chicken, a bag of grain and the smelly old farmer,  who owns them all are on the side of a river bank. The farmer wants to get to the other side with all of his possessions intact. But---he can only cross with one of them at a time. Considering he's got a microcosm of the food chain at his feet, how does he cross without loosing one possession to another? How does he cross without losing the chicken to the fox and the grain to the chicken?  Most adults have a very hard time solving this riddle. Why? Because, they are forward thinkers.

We think about solutions as linear in time: We complete step 1, we complete step 2 and then step three, and then we get our final outcome, the solution to our problem. And, we never go back to step 1 or two. Now, many direct problems are solved with this forward thinking; however, many problems cannot be solved like this. The crossing problem certainly cannot. And, many of our most important political problems cannot. Watch the news, or  listen to political conversations in school, church or Starbucks. They all have one thing in common: they are forward. Consider the political debates of our time: Immigration, Social Reform, and market fluctuations. We build a fence for immigration, we add to existing systems in social reforms, we stabilize the market with more money. All of these are forward thinking. We see a problem and we add to it.

But, like in the riddle, we keep ending up with the same outcome. Something always gets eaten. Immigrants are starved, murdered or get across anyway; The poor get poorer and the rich get richer or the poor get more dependent and everyone gets poorer; and, the market absorbed more money, and then again goes through it's boom and bust cycle, and people continue to get a fortune or lose a fortune. It seems like we are living in a paradox: If I take the chicken first, then I either have to leave it with the grain or the fox when I go back for the grain or the fox. If I take the fox or the grain first, It is the same.

So what do we do if what we have always done isn't working--although many would Americans would say, "it does work!". But, that is only because they are too uneducated (or watch too much FOX news (it is so entertaining)) to realize that western nations (and China) are build on the failures of other people. We use our most impoverished because they are willing to do necessary but terrible work; we use 3rd world nations because they strip their nations wealth for us cheap because their officials are corrupt and their people desperate; and we use other nations as dump sites for our toxic waste, so we don't have to see it's effects and affects and we make a dime off of it while we are creating "Cancer Villages". And, even our middle class in America keeps fluctuating, losing their houses and malnourishing their children because they can't feed their children nutritious foods.

So, what is my proposed solution? Go back. We need a fresh start. There will always be the fox, the chicken and the grain, but we can go back and figure out how to keep them separate and thriving. We'll always have those who easily get power, those who are easily taken advantage of and the resources in-between. We have to get across the river, though, and move through time to a better place. We can't cross the ambiguous waters where the change of movement allow predators to thrive unchecked and feeders to eat themselves out of their only supply of food. The people, those who are the thinkers, the dynamic moral thinkers, usually the educated middle class, those who can see both sides of the bank and all that is in-between, need to solve backwards.

We've been working building on systems that are hundreds and thousands of years old. Now, we need to look to our sociologist, philosophers, psychologist, ecologist and maybe some of the best economic theorist, and look for a better system of doing things. We need a better design, one that is not based on a predatory system, like unfettered capitalism. Instead of building on these old systems--politics, current financial systems and educational systems--we need to start a new.

Politics needs to be eliminated. We should not choose our leaders like we choose between Coke and Pepsi. We should develop system of leadership that puts the best people in the best positions without compromising representation. As a starting step, we should not allow a person to be chosen based on appearance, charisma, or unlimited funds. Instead, we should find a way to allow the public to choose based on principles that are more valid. For instance, all leaders to be elected should should have their entire life laid bare in all things relevant--like financial history, academic writings and college transcripts. Instead of limiting political ads as they are, they should be eliminated. There should be a way to post information about political things that is completely without the flash and manipulation.

Also, until the education system can fixed there should be a special series of classes for voters that is based on the best educational theory, one researched by our brightest minds, that helps people learn basic valid reasoning, like recognizing fallacious reasoning, and psychological principles, like how easy the mind is to persuade and in which ways; and, also, how to operate in the new system of voting, where you have only writings and other appropriate materials to show what the candidates are like. Everyone who wants to vote should be required to have these classes and made so that no matter what ones situation, they can easily take the class.

We need an entirely new system and as a nation and as the world, we need to discover what things we need to change piecemeal and which things we can change immediately and completely. Politics, as it is, can be changed almost completely--Now. It needs to. Economics and education may need to be piecemeal. But all of it needs to change in synch with one another. And, it needs to happen in a generation, lest others forget the movement.

Education, Philosophy, UNF and Sarah Palin's Front Porch

All of us have had the experience of being frustrated and clueless in our first philosophy class---if not for most of them. And, lets not forget the terror of a dropping GPA . To many, philosophy is as punished, as obscured by past personal failures, as math has been. This is a terrible crisis. It seems like just another cliche, but this is a cliche that needs to change because effectively teaching sound reasoning is probably the simplest and most effective solution to cleaning up our squalid political world--and setting the foundation for a better  future.

If philosophy is the path to sound reasoning, and sound reasoning is the method to a better future, then it should also be that philosophy has been subjected to the best research in learning theory, and that the classes that teach philosophy are arranged so that even the mediocre IQ can manage to learn to think with the best thought-technology around. It should be arranged so that learning sound reasoning is an accessible, manageable and personally profitable process. This is not the case now.

Philosophy is taught using text full of old words, old syntax and cultural backgrounds that are no longer salient. Professors  have to either ignore or teach all the background necessary to understand philosophical principles, hundreds or thousands of years of it, in a single semester---and then teach the important principles themselves. Students are left with their heads spinning and many if not most are filtered out of philosophy, all together.Philosophy has become an elitist discipline, with only those indifferent to grades, or those highly motivated, or those who are intellectually gifted or all-of-the-above making it through even a minor successfully.

The text and the language, they have a huge part to play in the study of philosophy, and they definitely should be introduced---slowly and consistently. This is one of the great strengths of the UNF philosophy department: they introduce the literature well. However, there needs to be a large scale move to make philosophy universal. Philosophy, of all the academic disciplines, is the most important for a thriving society. It is the great measure of sound thought. Which is of great need in all societies, but especially in such societies that vote people into office based on slogans, like "flip, flop", and on posters with pleasant pictures like HOPE. We, as a democratic society, have sold ourselves to the decore of the political arena, where car salesmen dressed as leaders determine the salience of political debate. Since I've studied philosophy, every year people become dumber because I see past there flash, quickly. we need an entire nation, a world, of people who see past the flash---a world of philosophers. At very least, we shouldn't let our college students get out of school without being compelled to vomit after watching C-span, or having the ability to see past the glare of bright colors, catchy slogans and the raucous of political collective-monologue.

I was walking through the UNF campus last semester, and it suddenly occurred to me that these students are the best our nation has to offer. They're the university students. Most of our nation doesn't have university degrees. At very least, these people, the minority educated class, should be able to reason soundly. However, listening to even philosophy students about to graduate, makes me realize: we need to do way better. Listening to everyone else makes me want move to Alaska---the part that even Sarah Palin can't see from her front porch---build a shack and give up on the world except for the periodic angry letter and manifesto mailings. But, then again, that sounds like the Unabomber, so guess I'll take my chances with city life.

http://www.back2college.com/gpa.htm