An adjunct

The following is born of a reader's comment. She also suggested that I post it on my blog. So here goes:

Thank you for you comment. It triggered in me a thought, something I haven't explained well, something that is central to the way I think about the nature of our human governance and the need for an antithetical system like capitalism and democracy (Democracy). It has to do with our imperfection and fallibility and that it will always be that way. Because we are naturally like that we must have a system of governance that deals with it as reality. The system I tout deals head on with this reality, doesn't avoid it, and does the best with it under the circumstances and also contains it. The system of Democracy acknowledges the imperfection and fallibility in human beings and turns it on its head, so to speak, into something workable. Unlike Communism which manipulated and forced people to change against their will, Democracy uses more a carrot and subtle coercion to influence and change people's less desirable tendencies. Democracy also realizes that people are naturally complacent and lazy and tend to fall back into their natural patterns. Democracy has fashioned itself for this inevitability. One thing I believe is that we develop through perverse means, which I think I have implied above, and meaning something like we don't do the right thing from the start even though we know its right. It's like applying reverse logic to function. We generally have to be encouraged to do the right thing through perverse, illogical means. Democracy deals with this like no other system.

We can all see in ourselves the weakness I speak of, such as our tendency to cheat on our taxes, to be corrupted, to cut corners when we can and to avoid doing what we know we should do. But often our weaknesses are not known to us so we have to be shown them. The system of Democracy we have, with it's bipolar make-up, constantly jolts us to keep with the "program". We always have to be reminded of who we used to be and what we could go back to being. So we have to have a system of governance that can deal with all this. And it always has to reinvent itself and us.