Complicated world

I’ve been told that the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know. I think I understand that better now than any time previous. It’s more than just not knowing something, it’s a difficulty in even taking specific stances on various issues because you realize the complexity of them.

I think it’s unfortunate that the world is so complex that a normal person is completely unable to make well informed decisions about the wide range of issues that face us today. The average person can maybe make one or two well informed decisions at the national level, decisions in which our values coincide with the choice we make. However, most of the time we are most influenced by politicians, personalities, or parties – while the rest of the time we just don’t care. I feel that our democracy is in it’s infancy when it comes to making the right decisions on the basis of our true values. This assumes that our values are fixed, which in fact is not reasonable – we change our values on the basis of our experiences – another important issue for the development of ourselves personally and of our democracy.

It seems unreasonable to ask everyone to know everything. Perhaps we need to think a little more about the structure of our democracy – it seems to be an issue that is not seriously discussed. The are some issues that should be in discussion right now like the idiotic electorial college system or simple alternative systems of voting (as simple as the run-off). Others that might be more extreme, like multi-point systems of voting, or a completely changing the strcture of the exective, adding or removing elected posts, or overhauling elected positions (from top to bottom) all together. Without getting into specific ideas, at the very least these issues should be discussed seriously at some level without. Unfortunately, we are happy (or complacent) in the US because we have faith (and pride) in the system of our founding fathers.

If we should take pride in anything, it should be in our ability to learn and adapt and our realism. The reality is, our current system is fundamentally limited in it’s response to both short-term and long-term events because it depends on a public that is limited. We do it economically and socially and even our judiciary system is very adaptable. Perhaps it’s time to remove the do not cross tape from the some of the most fundamental aspects of our democracy and begin debating them more seriously in order to adapt, improve, and move forward.

Any ideas?