Does that seem like a strange question? Not to me as a systems scientist. The first quality of any complex system is its stability or the lack of it. Ours is seemingly very stable. To what can we attribute that stability? I have been thinking and writing about this for a long time now. Few agree with me. To me that is a sign of the system's stability because I think my analysis is sound. If people agreed with me the system would have to be radically changed. Our country's founders set up a very stable system. The way we are structured has endured for some time in spite of many very serious threats. Most of you, if I read you correctly here, place value on the substance of the rhetoric and its effect through electoral politics. Clearly the electoral politics is a stabilizing aspect of the system. I submit to you that it is not the outcome of elections so much as the very existence of the institution that is the big stabilizing factor. This brings us back to the question in the title. I think we have more in common than meets the eye. Read on below and I will elaborate.
This system survives by allowing he government to create theater without doing much. One party is very happy with this because that is its goal. As time goes on the memes and the rhetoric have made government an enemy. People are arming themselves against this enemy. The Democratic Party preaches a seemingly different set of values, but has never done much to demonstrate that government is worth fighting for. They speak about it, but do little to really make it effective. There is always the shell game that if only we could elect more Democrats we could change things. Obama was elected on the promise of change. Meanwhile the future of generations to follow is being squandered by the day.
We are destroying the planet's ability to sustain them. We are polluting the soil that we need to grow food, we are contaminating the genetics of what we grow, we are polluting the water and causing it to disappear, we are burning fossil fuels while so much of the rest of the world is moving to sustainable sources of energy, we are supporting a pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies that see sickness and heath as a money making industry.
I could go on and on but you get the picture. So stabilizing this system is basically insane! Yet we play the game. Enough resources were squandered on the last election to solve so much if the resources were used for peoples well being.
So maybe if an extraterrestrial came and view us they would see little difference between the so called opposing factions that lead to how we function (or fail to) as a nation How do you feel about that?