So, this is sort of a sequel thread to my Robots and the future of the sexual marketplace post. I bring up government on this forum for a simple reason: concern about government is central to what this forum is all about. This might be my favorite manosphere subred, because its large enough for diverse discussion, but unlike MensRights and TRP, isn't so large that every idea has been discussed to death and the topics start getting repetitive.

So, the future of government. I think people on this forum agree that there are two basic things that make men go their own way: the way society has raised both boys and girls, and the government. Neither men nor women are perfect. There are things about both genders that piss me off. There are things about both genders that I like. The reason why I'm not married, and have no plans to be, is that I only have one thing I'm looking for in marriage: she has to make my life better. I'm not stuck on having children (adoption is a perfectly good option. If she's post-wall or post-menopause, but she makes my life better, I'll take a good, hard look) the simple reality is that I've met so very few women in my life who I believed could make my life better, and most of the ones I have met were already taken (married) at the time I met them. Marriage is the place where the government and women meet, and marriage laws is a big part of the issue discussed on this forum.

So, what is the problem with government and why do we want to limit its scope? Basically, all of the problems with government have to do with three things: self-centrism, and human fallibility and hypocrisy. So, basically, all the problems with government are human ones. Every time you see a GOP member of the house rail against high taxes and tax and spend liberals (which means its lunch time today) but you see that same house member take a check for benefits in his district, go back to his district and pose with a giant check for the local newspaper to make sure people in his district know that he brought home the bacon, that's hypocrisy. High government spending is bad, but only when the money isn't spent in my home district. When it is, then government spending is good. You can't get more plainly hypocritical than that.

Also, there's the question of self-centrism. Regarding voting, I was reading an article by an obvious feminists the other day asking the question: why do women vote against their own interests? By "women who vote against their interests" I assume she meant "southern, religious, white, married women who have families and attend church regularly" and not "liberal, non-religious, unmarried, post-wall women who do not have families and are more concerned with careers and who wouldn't know a church if you served it to them on a silver platter with watercres around it". I could be wrong, but that's the impression I got. The trouble is that these two groups have only thing in common: they both have a vagina, and that's about it. The feminists don't understand how anyone couldn't be a feminists, the non-feminists don't understand how anyone could possibly associate with that BS. A pal of mine was once approached by a scientologists, to which she replied "get that sh*t away from me!" It was country mouse, meeting city mouse. A lot of our communication problems come from not understand who the people we're complaining about are. The Feminist takes it for granted that all women would be better off voting democrat, and that if they don't, they're being tricked. It never occurs to her that other women don't share her values, like at all, and that they aren't being suckered into anything. She's probably never been south of the mason-dixon line.

Similarly, people who believe in vaccines don't understand how anyone could be anti-vax. Instead of trying to engage the people who are anti-vax, the pro-vaxers ridicule them. That only makes people more defensive than they were before, and ignores science's own ridiculously bad track record at getting things right, but trumpeting that they knew the truth for all time anyway, only to have someone else come along and tell them that, no they didn't. Science, a system founded upon skeptism, should understand, more than anyone, why people would be skeptical of it. Example: science believes that the universe is filled with stuff called Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Its "Dark" because you can't see it, or measure it, but science is sure its there. They are sure because it is required to make the gravity in the universe make sense. Rather than observing something and saying "I do not know why this is", science makes up a plausible sounding explanation (to science) and then ridicules whoever doesn't believe in it. A 150 years ago, Science "made up" the concept of the Aether, despite no evidence whatsoever that there was any such thing, and science was sure it existed, because light needed a medium in order to travel through as a wave. Turns out, there is no Aether, and light can be a particle or a wave. Dark Energy and Dark Matter remind me of the Aether, things that science invented to explain other phenonmenon, and where the explanation turned out to have nothing to do with the invention, and then, later, science was forced to say "oops, my bad". Vaccines and global warming don't quite fall under this, but you can see why people would be skeptical.

As Lt. Commander Data once said, when Captain Picard told him that I don't know wasn't a very scientific explanation: "the beginning of all wisdom, of all knowledge, of all science is the phrase I do not know. I do not know what that is." People are terrified to say I do not know, they are terrified to say that other people, with different values that they don't understand, will have different priorities. It is the height of human arrogance to believe that what you think is best is what must be best. That's why politicians don't look around the world, see what has been tried, and steal other people's best practices, they instead have to do "what they believe in" and people will penalize them if what they do isn't what the people believe in, regardless of whether that's right or wrong.

This thing which we call belief is at the root of all the trouble. Even a Supreme Court Justice, the highest judicial officials in the land, each with a lifetime of brilliance at jurisprudence, aren't immune from crafting an opinion to fit their biases and, in so doing, make one opinion directly contradict another opinion that they previously wrote. Such government, staffed and run by humans with their inherent human frailty, are very susceptible to infiltration and co-option by a wide variety of interests. The SCOTUS recently declared unconstitional a ballot measure passed in Arizona, by the will of the people, that took legislative re-districting out of the hands of the legislature (that is, made sure the fox wasn't guarding the hen house). The legislature wasn't going to do anything to diminish their own power, so the people had to do it for them. If there was a bolder story of complete and total government incompetence, on at least three different levels, that nobody heard about, its the arizona case.

That's why government is messed up. Government does a lot of things right (like the way the ebola outbreak was handled, even though some pols in NJ and NY didn't want to handle it right): one American died, a few got sick and got better, and the whole thing was much ado about nothing. However, if Chris Christie or Cuomo were in charge and were able to do things that had proven ineffective at increasing public health (unlike dark matter and dark energy, containing disease outbreaks is something we have a lot more information on. My skeptism of science is when it declares something to be true with no proof, not when we have extensive proof and extensive evidence. That's why I'm also pro-vax and get all my shots) the situation might have been worse, or, at the very least, cost more money and inconvenienced more people than it did. Even when government does something right, there are always plenty of loudmouths who want to do it wrong, because of what they believe.

The family courts are the same way. Divorce has shifted the leverage towards women. All you have to do is ask the people who would know these things: divorce lawyers. They make their money by knowing, and advertising to, the person most likely to want one.

So, now that we know what the problems are, what are the solutions? Personally, I'd want to get people out of the business of government. I'd gladly pay my taxes, if I felt I was getting my money's worth. I still do pay because while the system isn't great, at least the trains run on time. I think, within the next 200 years, provided technology continues to advance as it is presently (which isn't a safe bet, considering how technology could stumble on something that sends us back to the stone age) that humans will develop the mind-machine interface.

We already have a rudimentary form of this, in that we have mental implants that, based upon a person's thoughts, can instruct a machine to do simple things. The next step is to implant a person's conscious mind, and thoughts, into a machine pattern. Yes, before you ask, I did consider the legal, privacy, technical and ethical considerations before I typed that last sentence. This is just a thought experiment, for now. However, if we ever could do this, it would completely solve the "emphany gap" and would lead to a civilization that was far more tolerant and far more willing to focus on the truth about their situation in the world. When everyone knows, more or less, what everyone's life experiences are, a source of confusion today becomes understood tomorrow. No, that guy who smiled at you was not being a perv, he was just being nice. If, at the same time, we also had a sorting algorithm that could extrapolate exactly what a person's experiences were and issue rules based on them, you wouldn't need actual laws anymore. Punishment could simply be meted out based upon "the common good". Right now, laws are like the strike zone in baseball. Judges (umpires) enforce them, and each umps strike zone is different. As a hitter or a pitcher, you know somethings are balls and somethings are strikes, but borderline cases? If she abused you and lied about it, will she get away with it? With the biases in calling balls and strikes of the current system, yes, she will. In a system where a machine would know what your situation was (ie, people would know the probability of one person being abusive based on personality traits and could combine memory, which is always hazy, with default personality traits to get a more accurate picture) it would much harder to get away with anything. Machines would make everyone, on earth, via the mind-machine interface, aware when a wall street banker was behaving badly and would assess the damage he had done and punish him accordingly in an open and transperant manner.

Government could also be run this way. Political advertising would be a thing of the past, no one would have a bigger mega-phone than anyone else, and you could tabulate, statistically, how many people would be helped by a change to the system versus how many would be hurt. You could also do pilot programs to gather data, and monitor the results of the inviduals in the program to determine if any positive results could be scaled. It would move away from government rooted on belief (as in "I believe there is a campus rape epidemic, no matter what the stats say" or "I believe women are disadvantaged in education, despite what the college graduation stats actually say", etc.) and towards a government rooted on trial and error, where best practices were the ones that worked, and if something wasn't working, people would at least be able to make everyone aware of how it wasn't and to implement appropriate changes.

Keep in mind, this is all a though experiment. I am fully aware that there are many issues, techical, legal, ethical, moral, political, etc. that have to be solved, but any country that could get this system set up right would dominate the world in a generation and would force every other country to join. That's the best part, it only requires one nation to get a system like this set up correctly, and once that happens, the momentum will be irresistable.

TL;DR - in the future, when our machine overlords run government, perhaps it will make taxes and the law come into focus and take it away from the irrational popularity contest it is today.