Clouds

Clouds float by.

They do not care about the blood you bleed or your secret tears. Later clouds will unleash their rain gently or violently and clean away your mess. But neither do those clouds care for you.

Whether you are good or bad, the clouds will simply float by or rain as they do.

And yet the earth is watered. Many have individual complaints. But the overall system has worked exceedingly well for a very long time.

There is something quite zen about that. There is some deep wisdom that I can only grasp at. That part of the system is bigger than any of us, or even all of us. The clouds don't care what we want or what we need or what we do. They just do their thing and leave us to adjust. And yet we all see the clouds and feel the rain.

I am not sure that government can be that independent from the day-to-day of human concerns. But I believe that de Tocqueville was right when he feared that democrcy would make government too much a slave to the whims and desires of the little people.

Government is like a giant bulldozer. Rarely does an individual person have a problem that can be solved by a giant bulldozer. People generally have hammer and screwdriver-sized problems. and goverment is not the right tool to fix those problems. At least not federal government. Maybe local government should be a hammer or a screwdriver. Maybe.

But it is too much to ask one government agency to tackle both international peace, redistribution of income, equitable use of resources, arguments between political parties, graft, and corruption. We only ensure that it will do nothing well by asking it to do too much and be too involved in our little problems.

Democracy 2.0 will probably need to have more branches of government that are each directly responsible to the people. I am not yet sure, but I am starting to think that the only branches of government that are not directly responsible to the people should be the branches that directly interact with the people. The purpose of this distinction is to avoid just the corruption that de Tocquevile predicted. If an incumbent politician is in charge of handing out aid to the poor, it is too easy for him to buy votes by being overly generous. The people who hand out aid to the poor should be caring and generous. But they should not be compensated based upon how much they give away. It is a form of separation of power. If we give ourselves more power, then we need to check ourselves against abuses of that power.

If the clouds heeded our cries there would be chaos. Would life on Earth survive? I suspect not. I think that they have to ignore us in order to keep us alive. Are we willing to learn the lesson and apply it? Does the lesson apply here?

I think the lesson applies. I am not sure if we have the self control to apply it. I am still thinking about it.

What do you think?