A Virtual Government Would Be Nice (3)
ca. 1501,
Albrecht Dürer, German
The words “government” and “change” are often paired with “ties to the past.”
Even if there is a better and newer system, laws and interests established prevent its adoption.
The threat “Look at the reality!” is often given in telling people to face this kind of conflict and concentrate on the task at hand (something that can be done immediately).
Indeed, the system’s reform generally requires time on the order of ten years, or even a hundred years if it is poorly done.
In today’s fast-moving world, you will lose your whole life if you are caught up in such things.
You only live once. Being indifferent to politics is wise indeed.
Furthermore, in many cases, when reform has been finally achieved, it turns out to be an incomprehensible system resulting from a compromise with vested interests, working the opposite of what was intended.
Isn’t this situation analogous to the “installation of development tools” story?
Suppose your environment (Windows, Linux, or Mac) has a special history unique to you (i.e., the settings specific to you due to installing various development tools in the past). In that case, unintelligible errors will occur, causing you to spend excessive time dealing with them.
In this case, the “unintelligible error” would correspond to the situation where you want to install a new and wonderful system (such as a new development tool). Still, it is forbidden for reasons you cannot understand due to past ties ( i. e., settings you have made to the OS in the past), and it blocks a new tool from working correctly. This is a situation to be addressed.
If the previous estimate of “a malicious error costs a hundred times more” is correct in the case of political reform, institutional renovation requiring only one year will be replaced by “a hundred years of pointless efforts to deal with the existing system.”
Rather than telling an environment that will not change to change, we should create and discard different environments but create a mechanism in which no user is damaged despite the change, that is, a virtual environment.
That was the wisdom the developers gained.
Of course, the REAL government or nation is not an OS, the OS + PC can at worst be physically thrown away, and a clean new one bought.
For example, Snowden, who made a splash by revealing confidential government documents, ordered a brand new computer to connect to the Internet once in his documentary film.
Unlike OS + PC, however, governments are responsible for people’s lives, their survival, and death. We cannot just throw them away just because they are useless. Besides, we don’t know how to “throw away” them properly.
