I vaguely remember what I learned in primary school about democracy. I do remember the phrase: "the government of the people, by the people, for the people.." That sounds good, but a little too abstract! how do we actually execute it? I also remember something about election and freedom of speech... as "tools" for us, the people, to bring in a good government and keep it under control.
Too bad, these are the only two tools I (and possibly many other people) got to learn about.
Today, we end up interact with our government only by casting ballots and protesting on the street.
I'm an engineer by training. Whenever I build something for myself, I would like to have a lot of control on the construction process to make sure that I get what I want. After the construction is done and the product is in use, I would still like to have all these tuning knobs so I can keep tweaking and tuning it to function properly. There may be a few bugs to handle manually.. there may be some changes in usage context to adapt to. If we think of democratic government as something "engineered" by the people, we would hope for such level of controls.
......Unfortunately, that's not what we have.
Right now, we just pick from "a few choices of government" handed to us by someone else during election. Those choices are mostly terrible so we just pick the most bearable one. Then, once the government in power does not work properly, we don't know what else to do except for expressing our frustration on FB or streets. Rallying political movement takes time, money and charisma which most of us don't have enough. Thus, we join those few "movement leaders" who have more time/money/charisma available. Unfortunately, most of them also have their own political agenda.
We risk becoming pawns of someone else's political games. We probably know that...but again we have no option.. we just pick the most bearable one.
We have been talking about educating people about democracy..but what should actually be taught?
I think the useful lessons should be less about "how the government work"..and more about "how do we get the government to do what we want" The former is like physic.. the latter is like engineering.
Sure, it is important know the laws of physic to understand the constraints.. but in the end, it is even more fun to be able to build a gadget that works!
Cynics might say that politicians are way too corrupted beyond repair and there is no way to get them working for our interests. I would argue that, yes, lots of terrible politicians and mafia are out there. Still there are a lot that can be done. We engineers have built an oil platform in the middle of the ocean, a castle on the cliff and space station up the sky. We didn't remove the ocean, flatten the cliff or bring the sky down the ground. That's too difficult. What we did we was to work around the constraints: 1) making good blueprint, 2) studying the landscape carefully, 3) developing tools for specific landscape challenges, 4) experimenting on small scale and gradually building things up. Perhaps, seemingly terrible politics is merely a challenging landscape. With well articulated goals, good understanding of power structures, right political tools and thoughtful experiment, we might be able to get any government to do what we want.
(to be continue)
