Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

It is possible for a person to become wrapped up in his/her day-to-day activities and grow out of touch with the larger world.  This can happen to a president, Supreme Court justice, or member of Congress, just as it can happen to anyone else.

True, elected officials are supposedly in touch with what their constituents want, if they hope to be re-elected.  But this does not necessarily happen.  Such people are often able to win re-election through deceptive political advertising, negative campaigning, and other strategies that tug at voters’ emotions while leaving their larger life situations neglected.  Thus Americans, with their votes, have managed to spend many years in periods of excessive tobacco use, unpopular gun laws, substandard health care, and other circumstances that they actually do not want, circumstances that other advanced nations have been far more able to address responsively.

The suggestion here is not that the president should go back to a high-powered law firm, Hollywood filmmaking, or whatever it was that s/he did before becoming a politician.  The suggestion is, rather, that top leaders should be expected to spend a substantial number of hours, each week, working in a type of job that exposes him/her to a variety of real-life problems that people face.  Examples could include positions as counselors, social workers, nonprofit organization administrators, small businesspersons, legal aid lawyers, nurses, and community leaders.

Such leaders should be exposed, moreover, to real-life living conditions, to some practicable extent.  It is perhaps not realistic to imagine that a president could get a good feel for the life of a homeless person merely by tenting out in a park, surrounded by Secret Service agents.  Nor is it likely that such a leader would have the time to run an ordinary middle-class household.  But there may be some sort of living arrangement that would provide at least some constant reminder of what people are experiencing.  One example might be to live as a guest within a host family’s home and to participate in that family’s decisionmaking.

Such activities would detract from the number of hours available for affairs of state.  They could also distract the leader’s attention from important decisions that a national leader must make.  That is an important concern.  It is not necessarily crucial, however.  Leaders spend much of their time undoing the damage (or reversing the progress) that previous leaders have managed to achieve.  While the distraction of a real life could hamper a leader’s ability to achieve some things, it could also inform his/her judgment and instincts, so that the things that s/he did pursue and accomplish might be more likely to endure — within, perhaps, less of a cultural of constant governmental upheaval.

It is also true that any job, including particularly a job in government, can become encrusted with internal politics, gossip, resentments, and other potentially destructive behaviors.  Leaders, in particular, can become accustomed to their comforts. to the point of being spoiled.  Whether or not the leader in question felt invigorated by regular exposure to the lives and problems of normal citizens, some such removal from a potentially insular world could be invigorating in fact.  There have been too many American presidencies, in particular, that have become insular, inward-looking, suspicious of the press, afraid of the public, and otherwise unresponsive and irresponsible.

The American government of 2100 can be more truly a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  Insuring that decisionmakers are ordinary people, directly or at least vicariously, could help to advance that goal.

The U.S. was poorly served by the constitutional arrangements that kept George W. Bush in power long after he should have departed.  The U.S. has been poorly served by its health care and educational systems.  Despite its wealth and power, the U.S. often proves strangely incapable of running its affairs competently.

To learn what approaches might work better, and to gain experience with them, the U.S. needs to become a place in which it is possible to test theories of governance and social policy on a large (say, statewide) scale.  Educational, legislative, and even constitutional reforms may be necessary to minimize uninformed resistance to prudent experimentation.

Education is in chains. Hopefully, by 2100, it will be freed.

People love to learn. Not everyone, not every subject, and not always. But in general, if people are given an opportunity to learn something, and if they see it as useful or interesting, and believe that they can indeed learn it, they will.

That does not necessarily apply when other factors intervene. Teenagers, for instance, have a lot to sort out. They are not the best candidates for education — certainly not for education of a coercive nature, which is how too many of them experience it at present.

Education has become more free with the advent of the Internet.  It is now possible to find someone, somewhere, who has already looked into many of the puzzlers that two-year-olds (and older) pose to their parents.  But much still remains to be done.

It is still very much the case that exceedingly knowledgeable people are encouraged to share their thoughts only through professional journals that publish only a fraction of what there is to be known and shared on any given subject, and that they tend to do so in terms that only an educated elite can understand.  We are far from a situation in which people who need to know can learn directly and efficiently from people who know.  This can change, very much for the better, by 2100.

According to Barbara Tuchman (A Distant Mirror, 1978, p. 39),

[M]uch of medieval life was supportive because it was lived collectively in infinite numbers of groups, orders, associations, brotherhoods.  Never was man less alone.  Even in bedrooms married couples often slept in company with their servants and children.  Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was unknown.

No doubt people in the Middle Ages were capable of narrowmindedness and pettiness.  Then, as now, it probably depended upon where you were and who you were.  Some people are not going to do well in small towns; some are not going to do well in office politics.  It is probably healthier to have a lot of people around, so that people who are now isolated will generally tend to have individuals in their daily life who become familiar with their foibles.  In a world that treats everyone as a stranger, it can be easy for everyone to become strange and estranged.  And that’s strange.

Society invests a fortune in the training of doctors, Ph.Ds, and other sorts of specialists and experts.  Then society requires these people to spend hundreds of hours of their time, each year, dealing with trivial stuff that could be done just as well, if not better, by others.

Example:  filling out forms.  There are rental or mortgage application forms, grant application forms, credit check forms … there is really no end to the number of forms that a person can fill out in a year.  There are times when the trained specialist does need to deal with those forms personally.  But there are many other times when s/he does not.  It would be in society’s interest to make it easy for the specialist to hand off this sort of task to someone — a paralegal, say — who does like to deal with forms, or who is making a business out of it — someone who has not invested years in becoming a lawyer or CPA, and who therefore is not too busy or expensive for the job.

Another example:  commuting.  Society can force the trained specialist to sit in traffic, just like everyone else.  If the specialist were responsible for the forms, the traffic jams, and the other wastes of time that make him/her less productive, then it might be just as well that s/he does have to sit in traffic:  it may remind him/her to do something about the problem.  But for the most part, the highly trained specialist who is spending hours filling out forms, or sitting in traffic, does not have any training or influence in that sort of problem.  The people who create forms and traffic tend to be rich people and politicians.  Many times, those people can afford limo drivers, helicopters, or other ways to avoid the delay.  That’s a world apart from the anthropologist or biomedical researcher whose precious ability to contribute to society is just being dribbled away.

If anthropologists qualified for a special seat on the train, a special diamond lane on the freeway, or other perquisites designed to make the best use of their time, young people might have a different impression of the value of becoming a highly educated specialist.  When the only people who can afford those sorts of perquisites are bankers and politicians, then naturally those are the directions in which young people’s ambitions turn.

By 2100, I hope, society will have recognized that it is dreadfully wasteful to train specialists, and then make it difficult for them to make the kind of contribution to society that they would like to make.

It is important to give everyone a chance to be heard, to provide input into how s/he is governed.  Good government cannot ensue, however, when the person providing that input lacks time or knowledge to understand the issues on which s/he would opine.

That principle applies at all levels.  Some may consider it most applicable at the grassroots level, where people sometimes express strong opinions on matters they do not comprehend.  Others may consider it more applicable at the level of journalism, advertising, and other broadcasting, where the power to influence opinion can easily exceed the degree of responsibility with which one exercises that power.

Still others may consider the principle most importantly applicable within the halls of government, where the pressures of time are such that judges and juries do not understand the cases they are deciding and legislators vote on bills they have not even read, much less explored.  The principle may even be considered to apply, broadly, to any instance in which executive power is vested in one person, in public and private sectors alike, when those powers result in ill-informed, corrupt, or otherwise unjustifiable decisionmaking capable of causing great pain or damage.

It is possible to research the extent to which people understand the important issues on which they are voting or acting.  When people cannot or will not acquire competence in those issues, good government and the health of society call for devolution, power-sharing, or other temporary or permanent reassignment of decisional power to those who can and do demonstrate mastery of the issues.

Fundamentally, the principle recommended here is that it is better for the right decision to be made by the wrong people, than for the wrong decision to be made by the right people.  That is not an infallible principle; there are times when it will be incorrect.  Reassignment of the powers exercised by voters, journalists, executives, and government officials should not be done lightly.  But in cases when there is an extensive track record of incompetence or irresponsibility in the handling of serious decisionmaking duties, it may be reasonable to make adjustments to prevent further abuses of power and privilege.

Maybe there are times when it is important to deceive the public.  For that matter, maybe there are times when it is important, or appropriate, to lie in private.  This post is not about those cases.

This post is about the fact that, except possibly in exceptional cases, the public should not be lied to.  What needs to change, by 2100, is the extent to which people are permitted to lie to the public.

People who are capable of lying to the public tend to be those who are in a position to have their opinions heard.  This includes politicians, advertisers, writers, ministers, and so forth.  These are the people who should not lie to the public.

It is hard enough for people to figure out the truth of things, without being misled by opinionmakers who manipulate people’s feelings and concerns.  Finding the truth is a full-time occupation, as people discover when they try to do some educated shopping for a major purchase.  It can take weeks to make a single well-informed decision about what car to buy, where to go to college, or whom to vote for.  There is no good reason to make such decisions even more difficult by fogging up the issues.

There is no such thing as corporate personhood, for instance; it is a legal fiction.  It should not be permitted to ramify on into the further confusion of corporate free speech.

Advertisers have subsidized many forms of beneficial or desired activity.  In other words, we have been bought.  We have allowed producers of unnecesssary, inferior, and sometimes even harmful products and services to persuade us of their essential goodness.  This is a mistake.

Some kinds of lying to the public are based upon laws, procedures, and semi-official traditions.   Formal legal provisions or other actions may be needed to curtail or reduce these.  Other kinds of lying to the public may be better approached through semi-formal or even informal responses.

For instance, religious people have many valuable things to say, whether based on their scriptures or on their personal experiences and insights.  But religious people who claim to have the backing of scripture, or of personal experience, should be subject to public disapproval if their claims are not borne out.

There are limits to all rights.  You cannot use free speech to start a panic by yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.  You cannot use religion as an excuse to rip people apart with false accusations.  Responsibility is commensurate with power.  The greater your ability to influence people’s thinking, the more closely the rest of us should scrutinize your use of that power.

It is impossible to speak the truth consistently.  There is too much wishful thinking in the world, and there are too many things that are hard to figure out.  But there is a limit to that excuse.  When you get up in front of those people and turn on that microphone, you had better be doing something that is good for the common welfare.

Voicing a contrary opinion is perfectly reasonable; but voicing an opinion (contrary or not) based upon willful deception or deliberate ignoring of important facts is a different matter.  We will be better off when we have less of it.

By the year 2100, people should own their homes.  Not a mortgage; not a promise.  They should have complete and sole ownership of the place where they live, as soon as they move in.  Not just “homeowners” as distinct from renters.  Everyone.  They may or may not be entitled to lose it by bad luck or stupidity.  But they should start out on a note of confidence and hope, not deep in a hole.

The prices of goods and services should more accurately reflect their true costs.

Presently, for example, the price for a quart of oil is set by a merchant who, in turn, has paid a stated price to an oil company. Both the merchant and the oil company set their prices based upon relatively immediate inputs. For the merchant, there are costs of rent, wages to employees, electricity, and so forth. For the oil company, there are costs of production, storage, and transportation.

There is not presently any responsibility, built into the pricing, for the effects of consumption of that oil. If it gets burned, there is an unpriced cost to the atmosphere. If it sits in an abandoned garage until its container deteriorates with age, there is an unpriced cost to the soil, and possibly the water supply, that some of its nonbiodegradable ingredients will pollute. A different example is a bottle of alcohol. Its price should reflect the costs and benefits associated with its consumption.

In either example, somebody, someday, is going to pay a price, monetary or otherwise, for the transaction’s outcomes. That person will generally not have been party to the original transaction. His or her interests should be more fully represented in the transaction price. While it is impossible to predict all possible outcomes for a can of oil or a bottle of rum, it is not impossible to make progress toward a more responsible valuation of goods and services.

The 20th century, especially but not only in its second half, was a time of great liberalization of sexual practices. This liberalization had some benefits. It also brought some undesirable side effects.

A reasonable goal for the year 2100 will be to achieve more balanced and constructive outcomes in this area. One step in that direction will be to grant people greater freedom to vary in their attitudes and practices toward sex, according to their ages, beliefs, physical and mental conditions, priorities in life, and other characteristics — indeed, to accord respect to those who honorably decline to exploit every sexual opportunity.

Another step will be to place sex in context by encouraging friendships among people, so that they need not expect the persons with whom they are romantically involved to provide everything that they could get from a broader set of positive relationships.

Enhancement of positive relationships among people in various contexts (e.g., workplaces, communities, schools) may also moderate the general interest in sex: people do sometimes use sex as a way to get affection, when they might instead be getting that (often, in a more reliable form) through participation in a socially healthy environment.