You may or may not know that Texas is one of those strange states that elects judges. So, in my first career, my name was on the ballot.
I’m here to tell you that the act of putting your name on the ballot is a seeking of power. Winning elections, I always thought, involved telling people what I would do with that tiny sliver of the people’s power if the elite — those being the ones who vote — decided to entrust me with it. Reelection was about reminding folks of promises made and inviting them to hold me to account.
To characterize seeking power as wrong is plumb silly. There are decisions, inescapable decisions, that have to be made so we can live together.
There comes a time when those decisions are too numerous and too complex for the entire polity to participate. The Founders thought the idea of having the entire polity participate in every decision, even if practical in the sense of possible, would be an invitation to rule by the mob, by H. sapiens in stampede mode, which is something they knew was easy enough to set off.
Fear of the mob in stampede mode is the reason they left us a republic rather than a democracy.
Fear of power accumulation by individuals to their own purposes rather than public purposes is the reason they left us a complicated scheme where it takes more than one branch of government moving at the same time to accomplish change and if the change involves the rules of the system we inherited then the change also requires enough time for cooler heads to prevail.
You also find it dysfunctional when human beings spend a great deal of effort to accumulate toys, unnecessary stuff.
To which I say that nobody is telling you that you are required to accumulate stuff to the point where it becomes only a method for keeping score because you have more toys than one human can play with.
The way to inhibit toy accumulation is to choke off the flow of resources to individuals by keeping wages low and taxes high. I suppose you could also ban the manufacture of toys, but that does not jibe with your call to not seek power because it would take a great deal of power to ban the manufacture, the sale, or the playing with toys.
The Constitution is based on a very pessimistic view of human nature to the end of keeping the worst tendencies of our relatives, friends and neighbors in check. None of the pessimism applies to us personally, of course ;-.
I’m not clear if you are saying the Founders were wrong about human nature or that God should take a Mulligan and try again. But I’m trying to visualize the path from where we are to where you want to go and I’m not having much luck.
