In the last post we saw how culture is an invention. Early Christian Americans created for themselves that their cultural beliefs were justified. Most believed cultural truths that slavery, including beating and killing blacks, was moral. Then we looked at Judaism, and saw that it had justified slavery as well. Plus it whitewashed some of its history.

What made Jewish culture of the 1800’s better than southern culture is that their culture had given up slavery many years before. Does that sound true? It’s not. There were Jews in the south and in general they owned slaves, argued for slavery and fought in the civil war. There was moral difference between Jews, Christians and Atheists in those days. But they all justified inhumane treatment of some humans. In the south, most of them were taken in by cultural beliefs.

It was the cultural beliefs that were evil. People naturally adopted the culture. Sure, those who happened to be black saw the lie of it, but few people listened to them. And not all blacks saw the lie. There were a significant number of free blacks who owned slaves. In the museum were stories that some were known to be as cruel as the worst white slave owners.

This isn’t to disparate southern culture or Jewish culture. It just illustrates that humans are susceptible to societal norms, and it’s very difficult for us to see the evil in our own culture. We think of ourselves as good people and justify the way things are. Our culture blinds us to much of the evil. When we do see the evil, we often justify it as unfortunate, or we create an attitude of resignation or powerlessness that justifies our tolerance of it. You and I continue to do this today.

People are not good or evil. But they become evil when they believe and act according to evil beliefs. It they give them up and see the evil, if they repent and adopt new truths, they can be become good. Mostly we’re all somewhere in between. We adopt good truths, but still have some evil truths hidden in blind spots. It’s usually much easier to see the blind spots of others, especially of people who don’t share our truths.

My point is that the pull of the culture is incredibly strong. If everyone’s obeying something as morally corrupt as slavery, including the whipping and killing of slaves to keep them enslaved, that something must be incredibly strong. Culture can even blind us to the humanity of others, causing us to ignore strong instincts of empathy. Most people naturally are kind to each other. But slavery skewed morality to allow stealing freedom from others, tolerating extreme evil and justifying it.

Culture is an invention. But when we don’t realize it’s an invention, when we think it carries truth, we stop being responsible for good and evil and we’re capable of huge evil.

In the next post, we’ll tie this back to democracy and political accountability.

Since culture is purely an invention, why do we invent national politics that has no accountability?

My wife and I are traveling in the south-eastern US. We’re in South Carolina today and much is different. At one point I instructed my wife, driving our rental car, to “hang a rufus.” But then I wondered, “Does that mean something different, here?”, I looked it up on the web- no, it’s safe. But it might have- you can never tell in a foreign culture. And, it’s clear that our notions of the forces in southern culture are purely invented, by us, by the stories we’ve heard, as well as by southerners.

Culture is purely an invention.

The one thing we know about the south is that for years it encouraged people to have horrible moral judgement. The northern states had figured out a century before that slavery was wrong and had done a lot to abolish it. But the south held tightly to its principles that good Christian morality included beating, whipping and killing blacks to force them to work for nothing. It took a war to stop most of the practices, and today, 150 years later, there are still vestiges of those principles.

My lineage is Jewish. My people came from the same kind of humans, people who used culture to justify slavery, as is well documented in the bible. And we whitewash that history. I had heard the “fact” that slaves were freed every 7 years.  I looked it up today- only Israelite slaves were freed. Foreigners and their off-spring were slaves for life.

Do you think ancient Jews didn’t beat their slaves? In The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, I believe it said about 50,000 slaves ran away each year. Do you think humans in the days of the bible were any less eager to escape slavery? Back then the lines of communication were slower and less written records were kept. So slaves probably ran away all the time. What kept the practice alive? It could only have been corporal punishment and the thread of more corporal punishment. I come from a line of humans. Humans are susceptible to thinking horrible things, and having them justify horrible actions. We all are.

This is the point. Culture brain-washes us. Completely. We’ll investigate this more in the next post.

In the previous article I shared the first part of a conversation I had with someone about why we don’t fix our political system. In this article, we look to see if we should blame ourselves. He said:

I think your premise is flawed because I think the real issue is our own laziness about being involved in politics.

The status quo resists changes. One of the most powerful ways it does this is by rationalizing itself. It makes up the myth of “Lazy Americans” as an explanation. But this is a simplification. There’s really no such thing as laziness. We feel lazy when we aren’t motivated to take action. The real problem is that our political system makes most of us feel disempowered.

I agree that our culture says most Americans are politically irresponsible and lazy.  But this is a myth. It’s just something we say. Just like it’s a myth that “American government is of, by and for the people.” Perhaps it began that way, but today most Americans feel our government is a behemoth that’s separate from us, accountable to the wealthy.

About politics, why not be lazy?  I tried working harder in politics, being informed on issues, communicating with my representatives, always voting.  I didn’t see that it made any difference. I voted for change, nothing changed. Many of the ways I’d like to see America change aren’t even considered by Congress or the media. Surveys even say that some of these are things most Americans want. (Many aren’t even asked by surveys.)

In my experience, working in politics is frustrating. There’s a huge system of people and practices keeping it like it is. It seems like it’d take endless effort or a ton of money to make a difference. It’s futile. Who wants to work on something frustrating and futile?

It’s more accurate to say we’re cynical and resigned. This feeds our culture of disliking politics and thinking it’s dirty and dishonest, thinking politicians are corrupt and worse. So people don’t even try to make changes, much less brainstorm solutions. So we appear lazy. But lazy is the effect, not the cause.

The answer isn’t to blame people and call them names. The answer is to change the system to reward participation, to have it make a difference. People should be able to participate quickly and effectively. This is what we’re proposing at PeopleCount.

There are no “lazy Americans” causing our political system’s problems. It’s the other way around. The system’s problems are causing people to seem lazy. This is why PeopleCount proposes adding a new system of accountability that’s rewarding for both people and politicians.

Someone asked me:  If we all agree that our political system is badly broken, why aren’t we fixing it?

There’s a lot of agreement about the problems, gridlock, inability to move forward on issues- gun control, debt ceiling, even a budget, health care.  But to fix them, the parties would have to agree that fixing is in their best interests. And then they’d have to agree on how to fix them. They seem to highly value blaming the other party, so there’s payoff in letting problems persist.

Why are we so willing to be lead over a cliff?  What are we all doing that has us so busy that we stopped being vested?

We don’t want to be led over a cliff.  We are vested.  The problem is that we’re individuals piled in the back of the pickup truck, with no real access to the driver.

Each party seems to be generating a plan to veer off, believing it’ll be easier when the cliff is inevitable.  Plus, each side sees the other’s plan as a worse cliff. The problem is, we the people can’t do anything to stop it.

In a recent poll, over 60% of Americans said the parties are doing such a poor job that a third party is needed. But the way our system is set up, supporting a third party is seen as letting the opposition win, so a third party isn’t possible until we change our voting system, such as to use approval voting. But the parties don’t want to consider that, so there seems to be nothing we can do.

In addition, politics has degenerated to being about philosophy rather than action.  Many want “small government”, but the only concrete proposal I’ve seen is to end the EPA or Planned Parenthood, and Democrats see this as having minuscule fiscal effects but lots of bad consequences. A much bigger win could be ending agricultural subsidies, but the industry puts pressure to keep this out of the debate, and the Congress is more accountable to industry than to us. The military budget is also huge, but there the conservatives and industry work together to keep it high.

When it comes to philosophy, we really do have two sides. But there’s little evidence that people are really split between them on practical issues.

To fix these problems, we can’t just blame people, we need to fix our political system so that as a people we can work together. We need a systemic fix.

I think your premise is flawed because I think the real issue is our own laziness about being involved in politics.

We’ll look at this in tomorrow’s article.

We have a primitive notion that the private sector is more efficient than government. It’s nonsense. The private sector is horribly inefficient. Most businesses fail. They waste tons of money. As long as they’re profitable, we allow the inefficiencies. Government is just a target because there’s no profit.

Monopolies are incredibly inefficient. Our internet, phone and television providers are monopolies. They waste tons of money on advertising, trying to steal customers from each other, but they charge high fees and offer slow services. Compare this to England where the government opened up the competition and prices are less than 1/10th the price for better service.

This article has a good quote about America’s internet access:

We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we’ve seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight.

Inefficiency happens in government not because of the lack of competition, but because there’s no governing board or executive. No one’s pushing for results. No one is holding Congress accountable. Congress allocates money, but We, The People are neither guiding them nor monitoring them. We just grumble and every two years and our political process almost forces us to reelect them.

There are three basic ways Americans approach government. Some of us assume there should be competition. This makes us blame government instead of fixing it. The real problem with government is that we’re not taking responsibility for it by supporting a system like PeopleCount.org.

And then there are those who argue for partisan solutions. We need to fight ourselves better and beat ourselves. We must wrestle power away from “the misguided Americans.” We blame each other instead of taking responsibility for fixing it.

And the third group are tired of all the blaming and justify their resignation. They argue that it’s too hopeless to even consider taking responsibility for our government.

Then there are those of us who propose solutions. All too often we, too, complain instead of working together to make our solutions work. Blame isn’t going to solve our problems. It’s time to take positive steps.

There’s a myth about self-selection bias. This post will first explain “self-selection bias” in surveys. I’ll illustrate with an example. Then we’ll explore the myth.

Imagine you want to know what fraction of kids prefer blue vs red marbles.[1]

Imagine you bring two bags of 1000 red and 1000 blue marbles to a shopping mall, and two glass bowls, and as kids leave the mall[2], you say, “Would you like a free marble? Please take either a red one,” and you wiggle the bowl with red marbles, “or a blue one?” And you wiggle the blue one.  Imagine that three quarters of kids you approach take a marble. Imagine that after a very long day, all the blue ones are gone and 500 red ones remain. You conclude 2/3 of kids prefer blue.

Self-selection bias warns us that the kids who took marbles did so by choice. Instead of choosing random kids, we let them choose who took a marble. The kids we sampled selected themselves, hence the term “self-select.”

What if the kids who didn’t take a marble were afraid? And what if half the kids who like red marbles are kids who are afraid? That is, if all the kids who were afraid preferred red marbles? If this was true, by letting the kids determine our sample, we biased the results in favor of blue, and the real answer is that 50% of kids prefer blue! The self-selection biased our results. It slanted them to make blue seem preferred 2-to-1, when it’s really 1-1.

But there’s also a myth about self-selection bias. The myth is that if you let people self-select, you won’t get accurate results. I’ll illustrate how this works in the next article.

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[1] Why would you want to know the ratio of red to blue? Because you always feel guilty giving kids candy on Halloween. And they like getting little toys even more than they like candy. So this year you plan to buy red and blue marbles and want to know what proportions to buy.
[2] It’s important to give the marbles when kids leave the mall. If you give kids marbles as they enter the mall, some kid is likely to drop one and someone could step on it and take a hard fall and sue you. (It could happen in the parking lot, too…)
[3] What you really like is giving kids stuff, Halloween or not. The pretense of the survey gave you an excuse for giving marbles to kids at the mall, too!

One of the many dysfunctional parts of our political system is our system of polling. We take surveys to find out what people think. But polling has a number of problems. This post will just list the problems. There’ll be a separate article about each one.

1. Polling is inaccurate about ballot measures. Answering a poll is very different from voting. So the results differ.
2. Polls often have poor questions and answers. Surveys are usually spoken to people, so the answers must be simple and often don’t give people much choice. And they’re expensive, so they ask few questions. 
3. Polling is done mostly nationally, because it’s so expensive. So we can’t use polls to tell us what each state or congressional district wants, so they don’t help us hold members of Congress accountable for representing constituents.
4. Polling has serious accuracy problems. It’s assumptions about demographics are rarely valid.
5. Polling doesn’t inform citizens.
6. Polling is slow. Most repeated polls are only done annually.
7. Polls are a poor way to find out what society thinks, but they have a rock-solid mathematical foundation. So we settle for poor information about what we want.
8. Our reliance on polling disempowers us from inventing something better.

The bottom line is that polls are poor, but they’re the best we have. So we rely on them. As citizens, we live with little information about ourselves, and what we want for our future.

In other posts I’ve written about how political accountability depends on us knowing ourselves. Polling leaves us disconnected from ourselves and from our government representatives. They disempower us with respect to holding elected officials accountable.