Political Engineering

One of the things I like to think about often, aside from infinity and the infiniteness of God and existence (I know, I try to take on the big ideas a lot), is politics. However, it's not pop-culture politics, like The dumb stuff Trump said at some amped up rally or whether or not Joe Biden is going senile.  What I like to meditate on in politics is more complex. Big picture stuff. Political theory. How governments and societies work and how complex systems operate in general. 

    I have become fascinated with the concept of political engineering.  Applying engineering principles and approaches to political systems.  Revolutionizing or altering systems to fit a particular objective for that system. 

       The most important part of engineering and designing a political system is what your objective is. What your goal for the system is and what it's priority is supposed to be. 

        Engineering any system, whether human or government or otherwise, always needs a goal to achieve.  Every engineered system needs to fill a function.

        If the priority of government is liberty, than the engineering of that political system would have to account for the factors of the human condition that both threaten liberty and foster it.  Our founding fathers attempted to do this 250 years ago. They were deep thinkers.

         They wanted to engineer a political system that accounted for the complexities of life back then and the social and technological paradigms that were the established norms of society and life back then.  They knew how complex humanity was. They knew the vices of men who wanted power and the necessity of putting a check on power.

       In my thinking on political engineering, I would often think of alternative ways of arranging power and authority in a powerful social or political hierarchy. I would think about how maybe changing the procedure by which we pass bills or operate our government or other systems of society might make them more fair, more efficient, or even do better to prevent oppression and preserve liberty and opportunity more. 

  In my thinking on political engineering, I would often use shapes as a frame of reference. Things like a triangle would act like a legislative body and in the center of it would be an executive. a bill would be introduced into the triangle and cycled around the triangle with each equal side of the triangle making changes to the bill  and cycling it around until all parties on the triangle were satisfied and the "people/representatives" that resided on the sides of the triangle would send it to the "executive" who sat at the center of the triangle assembly and he would either sign it into law or veto it. 

If He vetoed it, he would need a very good justification, as the 3 sides can put immense pressure on the executive to sign it into law.

 This is just an example of the kind of thinking I was interested in when it came to political engineering. I loved playing around with shapes and structures as well as applying abstract governing principles in new ways of arranging power.  I like  the idea of preventing tyranny. I like the idea of breaking up power. I just try to do it in creative ways.  I looked at power in terms of decision making like a factor in a math equation, or even geometry. 

       How you structure the projection and positions of that power as well as the scope and reach of it determines things like the scope of liberty and the preservation of opportunity, as well as the longevity of the system.  You can be quite creative and quite original in doing so. 

     The downside of political engineering is the applicability of many of the theories and systems designs in real life. As we all know, politics often have very potent real world consequences, some are a matter of life or death. Engineering political systems can sometimes have detrimental consequences, and the process in doing so can be abused for the personal gain of the engineers/designers.  The great downside of theoretical experiments involving politics is that when one fails, people often get hurt. Some even die.  

Even so, I think it important to meditate on things like political engineering and the design of complex systems, since when a system is successful, many people and society as a whole can reap the benefit and prosperity that comes from successful engineering of complex systems.