First, I questioned my own priorities and goals in life, specifically the importance of a partner to my own happines after watching this Ted Talk:
Quite a good talk, worth a watch
In the end, my priorities remain unchanged. Then I watched a couple of other relatively interesting Ted Talks, but nothing really spiked my interest until I saw this one about IT projects in governments:
Not sure if it was good, It got me thinking about something and then I stopped paying attention
I actually only caught maybe 20% of it, because I got lost in my own train of thoughts throughout the rest of it. Before I proceed I also quickly want to list this Ted Talk that I recently saw about the way N.P.O.'s are handicapped:
Pretty interesting. If you're interested in business worth a watch. If you're interested in N.P.O.'s a must watch.
The talk about IT projects in governments basically talks about how some tech experts go and work for the government for 1 year and make some applications for the government that vastly outperform the projects the government does by themselves. This sounds very familiar to me, because my dad has done a lot of(and currently does) IT projects for the government and the stories I've heard about some of the people he's run into over the years sound pretty bad.
So I started to question why it is that the government sector performs worse than the business segment until I remembered the Ted Talk about N.P.O.'s. Just like N.P.O.'s, governments aren't as incentivized as corporations to produce great results, because the prospect of a big pot of gold at the end of the road just isn't there. There's a few more factors like (excluding politicians) it's a little harder to be recognized for your successes and it may not be as 'cool' as working in the business world, but money is most likely the biggest hurdle.
So what could we do to change this? Well the easiest solution would be to turn countries into corporations, privately owned. They're not thát different as they are, both are organizations that in many cases are trying to improve themselves and trying to become more effective and efficient.
There would be some issues, but I think many of them could be resolved by having much more liberal laws about deciding to migrate between countries. That way countries would have to stay competitive and treat their citizens well, provide good healthcare and such in order to keep their citizens and in order to keep receiving their tax money. Of course this would also mean countries would have to be run much more efficiently, because if it can offer lower taxes it will attract more citizens as is already the case with attracting businesses.
Obviously one small caveat is that you may have to put some restrictions on the maximum number of people in a country and it's interesting in and of itself whether you could implement a system to allow you to select whom you allow into your country or that it is too sensitive to racism and cannot be done or only up to a certain extent. Maybe I'll write about this next time, because this and immigration laws are quite interesting subjects too.
The biggest reason of why I currently don't even waste a second of my time on politics is because it is nothing but a popularity contest. Not the smartest, best suited for the job, hardest working person wins the election and runs the country. No, the one who's the most popular in the eyes of the public, the most charismatic and the one with the best campaign(in other words richest, best connections etc.) wins the election and runs the country. I could go on about the flaws of democracy for a while, but I don't have an easy to implement better solution as of right now, it definitely has it's upsides too and I want to get back to my main thoughts, so I'll stop talking about democracy's flaws.
Other advantages of the privately owned nations would be the fact that certain more wealthy countries could buy and invest in poorer countries and 'renovate' them and turn them 'profitable'. This may be a quicker way to raise some of the third world countries into the second and eventually first world. Of course I'm skipping over a ton of details here, but if I covered every little detail this blogpost would turn into a book.
Furthermore financial institutions would become less powerful. Right now they hold a lot of power over countries who are dependant on their loans. The flipside of this coin is that countries would become immensely more powerful and they would be privately owned. It would sort of turn them into mafias, because they have armies to fight things out in case they can't talk things out, but aren't countries already sort of like mafias in that sense?
I guess what we
Another question is: Is there a set of rules that will make everybody happy? Highly unlikely. Would we need a 2nd Earthwide-UN like organization with different rules catering to different people? Then some countries can register under that one and cater to the people who have different needs. There's undoubtedly a small subset of the population who would be the happiest in a society where things like rape and murder are perfectly legal. I guess in some sense we're wrong to force people like this to adapt to our rules and force them to live in a society that is not optimal for them.
The general concensus seems to be that the human race is evolving over time into a more civilized species and if we're to believe some movies, eventually we'll all unite under the banner of the human race, cooperate in relative peace and live in some sort of utopia with our only threats coming from other species from different planets. At the very least in the very distant future we'll all realize we should just get along and live in an utopia, right? Well... with the way it's going... quite possibly, because people who like rape and murder and 'don't get along' don't particularly thrive well and generally don't get to 'reproduce'. So survival of the fittest dictates eventually these genes will go extinct.
However, in the end we're all just chasing 'happiness' aren't we? And what makes our 'good' way of chasing happiness better than their 'bad' way of chasing their happiness? Of course a murderer chasing happiness by murdering people hinders the happiness of others who don't like a murder society and a non-murderer doesn't hinder other people's happiness in the same way, but there is no way for a murderer to currently opt into and live in his own perfect society.
I think this is where my little philosofical adventure is going to end for today. No superclear conclusions, besides the fact that there are PLENTY problems left in the world worth solving, but it would be pretty boring if there was nothing left to do, no?
I guess my final question to you is. Do you think there will come a day that humanity will have created a perfect self sustaining society with no problems left to solve where a baby can instantly retire the second he is born?
I think the chances aren't very high, but...
