Sustainable Goverment

History has demonstrated, and is demonstrating that human instinct and emotion leads to behavior that is in the short term self interest of the actor, but undermines the long term interests of the broader society, including, often, the actor's descendents.

Over the long view of history we as a species are evolving into more cooperative and productive societies that allow us to all live longer, healthier and happier lives by learning to modify and control selfish and emotion based behaviors.  The concept of democracy was a big step forward toward moving societies away from from zero-sum battles between individuals that produce big winners and big losers toward more cooperative societies that multiply individual efforts to produce a better life for everyone.

But as democracies have evolved they have have developed a nasty tendency toward zero-sum battles between interest groups fighting to shape policies to their advantage.

It appears the next stage of human evolution is to fine tune our constitutional frameworks to develop a counterbalance for our tendency to just project our selfish short term emotions onto our organizational behavior.  But in the short term we have a growing body of data about how our emotions can control our logic.  We need to find a way to make more voters more aware that what feels good isn't necessarily good policy.  That means we have to focus more effort on teaching voters to distinguish between data and emotion, and to understand that their political opinions are usually rooted in emotion rather than deliberative consideration of facts and data.