Politics

Politics is a human construct that gives people a reason to argue with each other. The intended goal was to create a structure for managing cites, provinces/states, countries, businesses, and to some extent individual people. While the intended goal was originally meant to be helpful, what it has manifested into is no longer helpful. It is now far more harmful than it is useful. 

Why do I believe that is? We have injected personal beliefs and morality into a structure that is meant to be completely neutral and non-judgmental. We are using government as a means of determining right and wrong, thereby forcing everybody to live by a set of moral codes of conduct and belief systems that they don't agree with, believe in, or wish to follow for themselves.

There is a lot of irony in our world today as the conservative right tries to push their religious morality onto other people, while the left pushes their more secular morality onto people. The left has a rather comical, hypocritical stance of pushing their own secular morality while telling the right to keep their religious morality to themselves. The left constantly tries to claim moral high ground, but it doesn't seem to see it's own hypocritical stance. Politics has become a tug-of-war in terms of who will win the moral debate. As of this writing, the right is currently winning the proverbial tug-of-war.

If politics were an old school scale with plates on either side, the scale would violently go from side to side all the time because we have lost the ability to balance the scale. Not only can we no longer balance the scale, we have this idea that everybody must follow the same moral code, believe the same religion, and see the world the same way in order for politics and government to work. Have you ever tried to get millions of people to agree on those things? To say it is an impossible goal, is an understatement.

The consequence of all this is that our world has become very subjective. Everything, including things that used to be considered somewhat factual, is now up for debate and open to interpretation. This has created two completely separate versions of reality that seem to divide along the political lines of left and right. There are at least two completely separate sets of new cycles. Mainstream media, specifically national news stations, are no longer trusted. The political spin, particularly in American news cycles, is off the charts. People seem incapable of finding a neutral middle. Everything is viewed as good or bad, right or wrong. We have lost the ability to stay neutral to what's happening around us and instead prefer to spin it as positive or negative in some sort of a way, even when the political leanings are more or less removed. 

And then we look around and wonder why there is a growing divide. I can tell you why there is a growing divide. People do not want to be told how to see things. If Trump says he wants to engage in mass deportation of immigrants, there are some who will view that as the best thing ever and there are some that will not like the idea at all. If you are a reporter talking about what Trump plans to do and you spin it as positive, even if you keep your political opinion out of it, I still know you are a right-leaning reporter. Conversely, if you spin it as negative, I know you are left-leaning. This news must be reported as a completely neutral thing that is neither good nor bad. It is just a thing that Trump is doing - nothing else. When you are able to do that then you are a neutral reporter. We currently do not have this in our world. It does not exist in mainstream political news reporting today. No reporter out there is completely neutral because every single one of them spins the news they are reporting on as either positive or negative. Because of the division in our world today, it is very easy to tell what your political leanings are from how you judge what you report on.

Politics is meant to be purely for regulatory purposes. That means that politics should be controlling national issues like borders, relations with other countries, security and so on. They can also have a very large umbrella over things like education, healthcare, and big business, but government should not be in control of individual people.  Government should regulate large corporations via ethical standards but should not be telling individual people whether what they are doing or thinking is right or wrong. The government needs to stay out of individual people's lives.

How would that look in society? Government's job is not to decide whether abortion is good or bad. Government's job is to ethically regulate it so that we aren't aborting too late in the pregnancy and then provide access to that service. That's it. That is their only job. It doesn't matter if you agree with abortion or not. The government is neutral. There is a segment of the population that wants access to abortion, their only job is to provide that because it is being asked for by a group of people.  The people that don't like it will just have to get over it because the service is wanted. The government's job is not to push religious morality onto others. 

Conversely, there is a large segment of the population that wants easier access to guns. The governments job is to figure out what ethical regulation looks like in terms of guns. It's not about safety. It's not about protecting anybody. It's not about morality. It is ethical regulation of a product - nothing else. Guns are therefore treated in the same way as you would any other product that can be bought and sold.  The government is neutral. Guns are not good or bad. They are just a product and the government's only job is to figure out how to distribute them ethically.  The same would be true for driver's licenses, marriage, women's equality, LGBTQIA+ issues. We manage businesses to ensure equal access because that is ethical. It doesn't matter whether you think it is moral or not.   The bottom line is that if any product or service is wanted, the government's job is to provide it ethically and fairly. 

Ethics are not right and wrong or good and bad. They are about fairness and equality. It's about equal distribution. It's about making sure that corporations are taking care of their communities, managing resources, and playing nicely with their competition. Ethics is not about the morality of anything.  So when we talk about guns, it's not about stopping murder, it is only about the ethical distribution of the product. The consequence of somebody owning that product is not part of the conversation. What somebody does with the product once they own it is not up to the government, that is up to the individual. We leave the individual alone to do as they please.

When we take the government out of the business of judgement, morality, and controlling individuals, politics stops being a source of debate and conversation. The government has a very narrow focus that does not infringe on the individual. That is the way it is meant to be and we have gotten out of control in terms of trying to swing the moral leanings of the government in one direction or the other. That is what creates the divide. 

If it were me, I would remove taxes completely and I would insist that corporations provide free resources to help the people in their communities. If we're talking about Walmart, then they would have to provide the equivalent of 30% of their profit in free clothing and food to each community they have a store in. They would use their cost to purchase the product when determining how much product that is, not the retail price of the product. Large builders would have to provide free tiny homes or bachelor apartments. Electric companies would provide free electricity and so on. Every company would have to provide a percentage of its product or service free to the community it supports using its cost to purchase the product or provide the service, not the retail value of it. If you were looking for a quick way to fix poverty, this will do it. Because we're talking about ethical distribution, even Elon Musk can grab free food if he wants to. There are no limits in terms of income when it comes to providing access to these products and services. The only limits are in the amounts that an individual can have access to. Given the amount of technology we have available to us these days, it is easy to create customer accounts and setup distribution lists on those accounts.

The scope of politics has gotten out of control. With a narrowed focus on only business ethics along with national security, borders, and so on, we can fix the divide that has fractured our society.

Love to all.

Della