Political Questioning

I am not good at many things but one thing I am good at is looking at complex processes and seeing how complex things connect.

Since we are coming up on another election I have began questioning my political belief system. Some of my beliefs have recently changed. Part of this is through questioning my own beliefs and part of it is from gaining a better understand of how (I think) the world works.

I am not sure how you would define by political leaning but I hesitate to categorize myself. It just gives others a platform to “place me in a certain box”, some a platform to argue with me (some people like fighting), and some a platform to say I am like them when their beliefs are so contrary to mine that I want nothing to do with them.

Here are the current beliefs I am working from:

• Each of us got to where we are through our work ethic (good or bad), our luck (good or bad), and our connections with others (good or bad). All three, not just one.
• We are all connected, all 7 billion of us. We need to be careful acting to the contrary.
• Education is a better solution in many cases, not just schooling. Teach a man to fish…
• There is value in striving and hard work and some failure
• There is going to have to be a ripping off the band-aid moment to fix some of our problems.
• We lean on violence too easily in many cases.
• People are fallible, this leads any system that is controlled by people to be affected by this. The more people operating the system the more of it will be affected by fallible people. Thought experiment: What if our government was large complex and took care of our needs. I am not necessarily afraid of this, I am afraid of the people running the system who are doing the wrong things.
• Most of us are motivated to meet our own needs, this affects how the politicians think and how they can be manipulated.
• The more complex a system the more it has a chance to break and the more energy and attention it needs to keep it running.
• There will always be a certain percentage of people who cannot get with the program. They are too dumb, they are ignorant, they are trying to take advantage, etc.
• I believe there are some groups that have been in power for a long time who are fighting again what the population wants because it will be detriment to those in power.
• I think our political leanings are being used against us to reduce our authority as a whole (i.e. liberals, republicans, conservatives, libertarians, etc.)
• The system is broken, behind the times, and it was not designed, it is a patchwork. Some things fall through the cracks and some people take advantage of it.
• We spend too much money outside of our country but don’t really fight it and spend a ton of energy fighting money being spent in our country.
• We do not look at issues as greatest to least so we are distracted. How much of an impact is gay marriage going to make compared to the impact of taking about 15%-25% of our income to send many of our young men and women to war?
• Question spending in one area but totally ignore exorbitant spend in another (we spend very little on education compared to the military)
• We are not willing to look at long term issues and realize they need long term solutions.
• Our government thinks it needs to hide things from us (i.e. the Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership)
• The population is being ignored (who really wants the NSA spying on us?)
• Complex issues typically need complex solutions
• Follow the money
• The government controls some things they should not and does not control some things as well as they should.
• The right and left especially the extreme ends have more in common with each other then we like to admit.