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Lord0fHats t1_itd5j38 wrote

Reply to comment by wwarnout in Science, technology and innovation is not addressing world’s most urgent problems by nastratin

The problem is that people who are ignorant, incompetent, and only interested in what they can personal get are usually elected by people who are ignorant, incompetent, and only interested in what they can personally get.

And the great irony of it is, that those very same people are so terrifying in the things they want to do that they basically force us to make sub-optimal (but realistic) choices, or we just get disillusioned and become uninvolved.

So really at the end of the day we're basically left with choices on the sliding scale of ignorance, incompetence, and self-interest, and can rarely if ever make the choices that actually make the most sense. That's how we've ended up with science, technology, and innovation largely being motivated by profit-motive, since it's the one thing most people can get behind.

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Kelrakh t1_iteoj5j wrote

I still think you only need a critical mass of elected people who are mostly honest about most things when it doesn't affect their bottom line for things to work out.

E.g. We don't have small children working in coal mines in western nations anymore.

This didn't happen on it own.

Proving that laying out what the world ought to be, rather than accepting what is, did change the world. Otherwise why would the world have any changes for the better at all.

We can't let perfect be the enemy of good nor can we let good be the enemy of slightly-above acceptable. Not if the alternative is a downhill slide.

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Lord0fHats t1_iteoyn5 wrote

To be honest, I think this is already generally true.

For every famous 'lying' politician, there's 20 or 30 you've simply never heard of because they're too busy working to get on TV. A lot of the betrayals or let downs people complain about are really idealism running headfirst into reality and the expectations people had of the political system were unrealistic.

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perhapsnew t1_ite37jj wrote

So, we need one-party (of competent and interested in collective gain) political system then? Just like in China or North Korea?

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Lord0fHats t1_ite3j69 wrote

More like people need to learn to live with the things they can't really do anything about instead of obsessing over how things 'should' be.

Should be won't be a realistic outcome, not even in a dictatorial one-party system because the people who rise to the top in such systems are not anymore competent, rational, or knowledgeable than the bulk of the population. What gets to the top of a one party system is ruthlessness, not competence.

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