The Fundamental Flaw of American Politics

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(extraneous material removed version) The Fundamental Flaw of American Politics There is something fundamentally wrong with the American process of electing a president. It's that the candidates are running on platforms and espousing solutions that they know little about. And then, we, the people, are voting on those ideas when we too know little about them. Even if our candidates were Einstein's, even Einstein is an expert only in his chosen field, such as physics. He's not an expert in economics; he's not an expert in social development; he's not an expert in immigration. Why are we electing people who are running on a platform they are experts at? And why does the entire country listen to their ideas and vote whether they are good or not, when we neither are experts? If you run a business and you are going to develop a new product, or you need to fund a solution to a particular problem, you go out and you hire the best brains in that field. You then put them in a laboratory where they experiment, where they try many solutions, until they see what works. And then only do you implement it and build your business upon it. We are not doing that. Rather, we are swayed by a charismatic person who has a good sounding idea that they can speak persuasively about. The idea sounds good; but they're not necessarily the best ideas. They haven't tried it in the laboratory or experience. And then, we're electing that candidate and their idea immediately committing our national course of action on to it. This is wrong. This is flawed. This is a recipe for mistakes on a colossal scale. What we need to do is instead of electing a president based on a platform, we need to elect a president who says, "I will elicit the best minds of the country. I will draw upon the brain pool, the immense intelligence that's there in the American people, to find the best ideas. And only then will we commit the nation to them." This is a fundamentally different approach to the American presidency and to leadership in general. Now, the American president is not the leader touting a platform. Rather, they are an executive managing resources, finding brainpower and creating experimentation. Then when solutions emerge and are proven, they become an executive in the fullest sense of the word, meaning they execute upon the direction that has been chosen. They manage it, they implement it, they build it, but they don't come up with it own their own. We need to tap the brainpower of the American people. We need to find a mechanism of communication and dialogue where the best ideas rise to the top. And even the experts don't always have the right answers. Sometimes the best ideas come out of the left field, from unexpected resources; from the young guy in the mail room who seems to know nothing but has a fresh perspective, has an insight. We need to elicit the experts, and we need to elicit more; we need to elicit th creative intelligence and spirit of the American people far and wide, educated and uneducated, experienced and inexperienced. And even wider, we may need to tap, we should tap, the brainpower of the world, for many of our problems have effects and causes that are worldwide. Many of "our" problems, such as immigration problem, have their roots in other countries. We need to look for solutions there too. And then, we need to experiment upon these ideas in relative zones of safety to see if the solutions really work. Only then we should act. What we are doing now in electing a president is not only dangerous, but it's stupid. We have all bought into a collective decision making process that is flawed, that is wrong and is a recipe for making wrong decisions. Let's wake up from this illusion. Let's get smart. Let's use the smarts of the entire nation. Great things are possible when we all put our heads together. Kabir Jaffe http://www.essencetraining.com kabir@iucis.edu