Success is an interesting thing to think about. Seven Habits of Highly Successful People is a self-help book that starts with an assumption of what constitutes a successful person, and then tries to find out what those people are up to. Emotional Intelligence is a grab bag of traits that largely constitute self-control over one's emotions, and is supposed to be linked to being successful. The things is that I have a problem with the concept of what is thought of as success. A sannyasa is someone who renounces relationships, a career, material worth, and so on, someone who rejects the common definition of success, but who is anyone to say that this dedication for spiritual understanding is a failure? There is a problem with the idea of Emotional Intelligence as well. While I have little doubt that having a high level of Emotional Intelligence produces a high percentage of people with graduate degrees, marriages, high income and so on, I bet it produces a very low level of music makers, dreamers of the dreams.
Perhaps my reservations about success and emotional intelligence derives from my relative low level of conventional success, and my emotional score being twenty or more points lower than my conventional intelligence. People tend enormously to think what they do is the best way of doing things, and I think there's something to that. Emotionally I am very much like my father, and he is a very successful person with the highest level of academic success, a marriage lasting beyond thirty-five years, financial well-off. But he has not been a happy person through most of his life, and his example has been the most important factor in my decisions on my own happiness and ambition.
In my search for what makes people happy that has continued apace over the last few months there are a number of things that I have learned. The first is that people report themselves to be happy, but are largely unaware of what they are talking about. Happiness is essentially thought of as being OK with your life, but in most cases it has nothing to do with transcendant experiences of beauty, with experiences beyond the mundane.
The second is that as a result I have determined myself to be on average substantially happier according to my definition than most people. With myself experiencing what most consider happiness seems inadequate to me, even though I think my experience of those factors to be similar to most people. What I mean is the equivalent of having been raised on fishsticks, still tasting fishsticks in the same way, but having had fresh salmon I know that there are better experiences, I want those better experiences, and the existence of salmon leads me to believe there may be better things to look at than a sitcom.
The third is the emphasis on meaning. That happiness derives not from pleasure but from feeling that your life serves some sort of purpose. While I fundamentally disagree with the premise (the happiest times of my life were purposeless, purposeless is the aim of much of the wisdom of the East) I do think that meaning does contribute to happiness. I think meaning contributes to happiness in that it helps to mitigate the costs of doing things that you dislike, because you are doing some good. It's rather like a spoonful of sugar with your medicine. There is also the momentary high of having done something you think is worthwhile.
From the concept of meaning helping one's happiness I have thought about what would be meaningful in my life beyond the pleasure it gives me. While I struggle to find such a thing, and as a result I have a very low level of conventional ambition, in times of contemplation on the subject I have come up with the following ambition. For me success would be to become the equivalent of the metaphorical sage on the mountaintop, dispensing wisdom to those who wish to seek it out. When I meditate I think of the phrase "Radiating bliss." Success for me, the fulfillment of my primary ambition, would be for me to be someone who by their nature helps those around them lead better lives.
Now the twist. This has been a meandering path to a piece of self-congratulation. Over the previous weekend, while talking to someone going through a hard period in their life, someone I have not known for long, I was told that I was like "The wise, old Indian on the hill." Twice in the last week I have had people who I barely know open their heart up to me and thank for me for my help. I have been a success, and have had an ambition fulfilled. It feels good. But the nature of success and ambition is that the positive feelings quickly fade. What is important is not what you do, but who you are.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Blindspots.
When I tell people that I am depressed (which I am not at the moment) a very large proportion of the time I am given advice to "Look on the bright side", or told given encouragement about my situation. This is because for most people how they feel in terms of happiness or misery is largely based on their circumstances, the external environment. For myself, my emotional state is more largely based on my internal environment, on chemicals within my brain. As a result the advice given is entirely useless, although well meaning. It is a blind spot for many of those whose happiness doesn't change for similar reasons, because they don't have such experiences they don't imagine others to have such experiences.
A blind spot for me is others anxiety. Now, I have experienced anxiety, even phobias. When I was a teenager I was a painfully shy, the sound of the telephone ringing would get my heart racing. I have had similar feelings with dentists, and I get the usual pitter-patter of the heart with tests or interviews, or performances. However, these are all environmentally based. They are all based on experiences that were extremely unpleasant, and I have been able to "Buck up" face these fears, and overcome them. As such, my immediate tendency when faced with the anxiety of others is to think that these other people should directly face their fears and get on with it. My natural reaction is to understand that anxiety is difficult but to also know that overcoming fears is a hugely rewarding experience.
My natural reaction is often unfair to those who suffer from anxiety as a basis of the brain chemistry, or brain structure, anxiety because of who they are. One time in my life, after I had tried an anti-depressant I experienced panic attacks as a result. It was terrifying, and completely unconnected to the rather mundane situation in which I found myself. Bucking up and facing my fears was completely useless, my brain was chemically in a fight or flight state and no thought would move it.
This experience has made me aware of a blind spot with regard to others, and that having a blind spot can cause pain and discomfort to others. I hope I have done a better job with regard to those with anxiety, although I am fairly certain I still have not done a good job. I am a very confident person, and people's first reaction is to assume other people are like themselves.
The really alarming thing about this is that by their very nature we are usually unaware of blind spots in our attitudes towards others. Incompetent people don't know they are incompetent, and those who's empathy is lacking in an area are usually unaware that this is so because people generally wish to be empathic towards their neighbors. Most of us think that some people are weak, or stupid, or cruel, or wicked, or ignorant. How many of these attitudes towards others derive from our own inadequate ability to empathize as much as any characteristic of the other people? How will we ever know hat we have a blind spot unless we take the time and effort to look for them?
A blind spot for me is others anxiety. Now, I have experienced anxiety, even phobias. When I was a teenager I was a painfully shy, the sound of the telephone ringing would get my heart racing. I have had similar feelings with dentists, and I get the usual pitter-patter of the heart with tests or interviews, or performances. However, these are all environmentally based. They are all based on experiences that were extremely unpleasant, and I have been able to "Buck up" face these fears, and overcome them. As such, my immediate tendency when faced with the anxiety of others is to think that these other people should directly face their fears and get on with it. My natural reaction is to understand that anxiety is difficult but to also know that overcoming fears is a hugely rewarding experience.
My natural reaction is often unfair to those who suffer from anxiety as a basis of the brain chemistry, or brain structure, anxiety because of who they are. One time in my life, after I had tried an anti-depressant I experienced panic attacks as a result. It was terrifying, and completely unconnected to the rather mundane situation in which I found myself. Bucking up and facing my fears was completely useless, my brain was chemically in a fight or flight state and no thought would move it.
This experience has made me aware of a blind spot with regard to others, and that having a blind spot can cause pain and discomfort to others. I hope I have done a better job with regard to those with anxiety, although I am fairly certain I still have not done a good job. I am a very confident person, and people's first reaction is to assume other people are like themselves.
The really alarming thing about this is that by their very nature we are usually unaware of blind spots in our attitudes towards others. Incompetent people don't know they are incompetent, and those who's empathy is lacking in an area are usually unaware that this is so because people generally wish to be empathic towards their neighbors. Most of us think that some people are weak, or stupid, or cruel, or wicked, or ignorant. How many of these attitudes towards others derive from our own inadequate ability to empathize as much as any characteristic of the other people? How will we ever know hat we have a blind spot unless we take the time and effort to look for them?
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Responsibility of Happiness.
Happiness is good.
Take a moment with that, swill it around in your brain and get the full flavor of it.
That's a number of things in one statement, not all of which I will probably get to. Happiness is good, it feels good, is it the essence of feeling good? I don't think so, but what it is happens to be the awareness of feeling good. That's really something wonderful.
Feeling good and happy is great, it is absolutely and completely enough. Just that is enough. What I want is simply more of that, and so when someone feels it, I approve. I also don't think that there are many cases where people feel good and happy at the expense of someone else's misery. It happens sometimes, and then decisions become complicated. More often people think they will be happier if they do stuff that results in others' misery, and are wrong. As a rule of thumb, try to be happy and don't worry about it.
But what I want to talk about today, as a matter of responsibility, is the matter of your own happiness. Your own happiness is probably of some importance for yourself, although you probably don't actually spend enough time and energy on it. Generally people have ambition, or success, or achievement, or fear, or responsibility as equally important goals. What you may not know is how important your happiness is to the happiness of other people. Happiness is something that is transmitted from one person to another. Your happiness directly effects the happiness of other people. If you are committed to your own happiness, and so are your friends, then a feedback loop of happiness is created.
From the all-knowing Wikipedia:
Take a moment with that, swill it around in your brain and get the full flavor of it.
That's a number of things in one statement, not all of which I will probably get to. Happiness is good, it feels good, is it the essence of feeling good? I don't think so, but what it is happens to be the awareness of feeling good. That's really something wonderful.
Feeling good and happy is great, it is absolutely and completely enough. Just that is enough. What I want is simply more of that, and so when someone feels it, I approve. I also don't think that there are many cases where people feel good and happy at the expense of someone else's misery. It happens sometimes, and then decisions become complicated. More often people think they will be happier if they do stuff that results in others' misery, and are wrong. As a rule of thumb, try to be happy and don't worry about it.
But what I want to talk about today, as a matter of responsibility, is the matter of your own happiness. Your own happiness is probably of some importance for yourself, although you probably don't actually spend enough time and energy on it. Generally people have ambition, or success, or achievement, or fear, or responsibility as equally important goals. What you may not know is how important your happiness is to the happiness of other people. Happiness is something that is transmitted from one person to another. Your happiness directly effects the happiness of other people. If you are committed to your own happiness, and so are your friends, then a feedback loop of happiness is created.
From the all-knowing Wikipedia:
Human relationships are consistently found to be the most important correlation with human happiness.
A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person.[17] Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness that spread up to 3 degrees of separation on average. Happiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, and the researchers reported that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.[18][19]
This means that if you care about those around you, and I think you do, you have a duty and responsibility to try to get yourself happy. If you don't, you are causing misery and happiness to those around you, so cut that out right away.
I would like to thank the Jim and Leslie-Ann for their recent visit, as they took this duty seriously with fine results.
This post was produced while I feel a deep sense of love and humor for my position in the world, surrounded by beauty, and fabulously optimistic about the future. Because of my basic make-up, my bio-chemistry, I have times of dark horror, and times of splendid Wonder. I tend to talk about the dark times more than the Wonder, but that isn't because the times of Wonder aren't as significant, but rather that I'm too busy experiencing them. I truly wish you could feel this, perhaps you do, and that is wonderful. At least one of the Emilys understands.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Near Perfect President?
In the last Presidential election my initial choice was for James Edwards because he ran on a blunt and direct agenda of wealth redistribution. I think the US system is an excellent system, that works well for the vast majority but needs to be tinkered with and adjusted from time to time. The way the US got out of kilter in the last two decades is that while the country continued to get wealthier at the usual fast pace this wealth was concentrated with the wealthy. What was called the Middle Class, and now basically consists of everyone with a career who isn't rich, for the first time in US history got poorer while the country got richer. The long term health of the country depends on an educated, skilled, productive and solvent Middle Class, so I was in favor of the person who had identified this problem and said they were going to fix it.
One of the problems with the US electoral system is that each party picks their candidates through an extended "primary" process that goes state by state. I lived in Oregon, and Oregon has its primary election near the end of the process. By that point James Edwards had dropped out of the running. It turned out that Mr. Edwards had been sleeping with someone who wasn't his wife, and for some reason large portions of the American electorate will not vote for someone who sleeps with people who are not their spouse (although what this has to do with the ability to run a country I do not understand) and so he would have lost anyway.
So what we had was a choice of Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John McCain, and I chose Barak Obama because he seemed to correctly identify problems and said he was hopeful that the US could fix them. This was an emotional choice rather than a reasoned choice, I thought Hilary Clinton would be more skilled at producing useful (if compromised) legislation, but since I know that in a first-past-the-post system your vote only matters if the result is within one vote, I went with my heart so I could feel good about myself.
Obama got elected and I have been enormously impressed with what he has done. What he has done mostly is avert catastrophe, the result being that while the country is not in a good place, everyone knows that it will recover while a year ago many predicted absolute disaster. The USA is respected around the world again, the rule of law has returned, and there are plans to address basic problems such as health care, education, banking and global warming. At the end of Obama's first four year term we can reasonably expect a growing economy and a country at peace when he started off with two wars and an economy on the verge of depression. For me that's good work.
What really has convinced me that Obama is as close to a perfect President as I will ever see is the following transcript in which he answers questions from Republicans in a setting entirely made up of Republicans. It isn't his obvious intelligence, knowledge or communication skills that got me, it is the following unprepared quote, "I am not an ideologue. I'm not. It doesn't make sense if somebody could tell me you could do this cheaper and get increased results that I wouldn't say, great. The problem is, I couldn't find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made."
This approach is repeated throughout the whole transcript, and I want to summarize it here. Obama identifies goals that Americans can all share, such as reducing the cost of health insurance, creating more jobs, improving education, and so on. Then he asks for ideas on how to achieve those ends and he doesn't care where those ideas come from or what philosophy those ideas derive from. The next stage (the most important bit for me) is that these ideas are then taken to experts in the subject area to find out if they will work. If they work then they are implemented.
This is the exact system of government that I have been wanting all along. A results-based government that uses ideas that will work rather than ideas based on one person's ideology. If socialized medicine produces better results, then use socialized medicine. If pseudo-fascist corporate policies produce the best growth rates for the economy then run the economy like fascists. If free hardcore porn reduces the number of rapes ensure hardcore porn is available for free to all citizens.
Simply within the economic plans of the government you can see this happening because the economy has stabilized and is heading in the right direction and the ideologues at both ends of the spectrum are wildly furious with elements of what has happened. Bail outs for big banks are seen as fascism from the left, and bank take-overs are seen as socialism from the right. The end result has been a stabilized banking system, that is paying back the money it has been lent because of free market incentives, which is then being channeled towards community banks and middle class mortgages. Socialism, fascism, payouts to fat cats, government takeovers, just as long as it works.
Now, the most interesting thing for me is that now there is a President in office with whom I pretty much agree on everything. This then gives me the opportunity to find out whether what I have believed politically is right or not. This so rarely happens that I must view it as a wonderful opportunity to scientifically evaluate my own beliefs. If I was a pure progressive, left-leaning, borderline socialist like my friend Dade I would never get to find out if I was right or not unless I moved to Denmark. If I was a Christian, "moral majority" believer like my friend Dave I would have just endured the evidence that my brand of politics is an absolute failure through the eight years of Bush. So, in about two and a half years I can check to see whether this brand of politics not only appeals to me, but also works, or whether the cynicism of politicians and the ignorance of experts renders this style a failure.
I am hopeful.
One of the problems with the US electoral system is that each party picks their candidates through an extended "primary" process that goes state by state. I lived in Oregon, and Oregon has its primary election near the end of the process. By that point James Edwards had dropped out of the running. It turned out that Mr. Edwards had been sleeping with someone who wasn't his wife, and for some reason large portions of the American electorate will not vote for someone who sleeps with people who are not their spouse (although what this has to do with the ability to run a country I do not understand) and so he would have lost anyway.
So what we had was a choice of Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John McCain, and I chose Barak Obama because he seemed to correctly identify problems and said he was hopeful that the US could fix them. This was an emotional choice rather than a reasoned choice, I thought Hilary Clinton would be more skilled at producing useful (if compromised) legislation, but since I know that in a first-past-the-post system your vote only matters if the result is within one vote, I went with my heart so I could feel good about myself.
Obama got elected and I have been enormously impressed with what he has done. What he has done mostly is avert catastrophe, the result being that while the country is not in a good place, everyone knows that it will recover while a year ago many predicted absolute disaster. The USA is respected around the world again, the rule of law has returned, and there are plans to address basic problems such as health care, education, banking and global warming. At the end of Obama's first four year term we can reasonably expect a growing economy and a country at peace when he started off with two wars and an economy on the verge of depression. For me that's good work.
What really has convinced me that Obama is as close to a perfect President as I will ever see is the following transcript in which he answers questions from Republicans in a setting entirely made up of Republicans. It isn't his obvious intelligence, knowledge or communication skills that got me, it is the following unprepared quote, "I am not an ideologue. I'm not. It doesn't make sense if somebody could tell me you could do this cheaper and get increased results that I wouldn't say, great. The problem is, I couldn't find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made."
This approach is repeated throughout the whole transcript, and I want to summarize it here. Obama identifies goals that Americans can all share, such as reducing the cost of health insurance, creating more jobs, improving education, and so on. Then he asks for ideas on how to achieve those ends and he doesn't care where those ideas come from or what philosophy those ideas derive from. The next stage (the most important bit for me) is that these ideas are then taken to experts in the subject area to find out if they will work. If they work then they are implemented.
This is the exact system of government that I have been wanting all along. A results-based government that uses ideas that will work rather than ideas based on one person's ideology. If socialized medicine produces better results, then use socialized medicine. If pseudo-fascist corporate policies produce the best growth rates for the economy then run the economy like fascists. If free hardcore porn reduces the number of rapes ensure hardcore porn is available for free to all citizens.
Simply within the economic plans of the government you can see this happening because the economy has stabilized and is heading in the right direction and the ideologues at both ends of the spectrum are wildly furious with elements of what has happened. Bail outs for big banks are seen as fascism from the left, and bank take-overs are seen as socialism from the right. The end result has been a stabilized banking system, that is paying back the money it has been lent because of free market incentives, which is then being channeled towards community banks and middle class mortgages. Socialism, fascism, payouts to fat cats, government takeovers, just as long as it works.
Now, the most interesting thing for me is that now there is a President in office with whom I pretty much agree on everything. This then gives me the opportunity to find out whether what I have believed politically is right or not. This so rarely happens that I must view it as a wonderful opportunity to scientifically evaluate my own beliefs. If I was a pure progressive, left-leaning, borderline socialist like my friend Dade I would never get to find out if I was right or not unless I moved to Denmark. If I was a Christian, "moral majority" believer like my friend Dave I would have just endured the evidence that my brand of politics is an absolute failure through the eight years of Bush. So, in about two and a half years I can check to see whether this brand of politics not only appeals to me, but also works, or whether the cynicism of politicians and the ignorance of experts renders this style a failure.
I am hopeful.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Government by Whom?
This post is inspired by a blog post by my friend Dade entitled Plutocracy. The essential point of the post is that government should be run entirely for and by people, rather than special interest groups and corporations. A recent Supreme Court ruling has determined that there are no limits to the spending of corporate and special interest groups in elections in the USA. Clearly this means that corporations and special interest groups will have some influence over elections, and therefore government. Dade puts forward the case for this being a bad move, and my first response to the ruling and the post is one of agreement.
My second response is to think about the various merits of the different people in Government. We generally think that the more pure a democracy we have the better off we will be. People making decisions for people must result in the best circumstances for people, it seems simple. But there is a problem with this, and that problem is that most people are idiots. Most people are astonishingly ignorant of basic things, their focus is personal rather than societal, and the time period over which decisions are made is mind-bogglingly short.
Here are a few examples of how stupid the average person is and an idea of what the consequences of public opinion being directly transferred to government policy would be a nightmare. President George W. Bush was elected with half the votes of the electorate. Within eight months of him being elected he was the least popular president in history with less than 30% approval ratings. A month later he was among the most popular Presidents in history with 80% approval ratings because crazy people had killed lots of Americans. By the end of his second term Bush had essentially understood that all the things he had done had failed and had returned to standard Washington policies, essentially the same basic approach that Obama has used. However, his approval rating had returned to the low 30's. So, within eight months at least one fifth of Americans had changed their mind about what was the right stuff to do, then over half of them completely changed because of something that Bush didn't do, he was most popular when actively failing, and least popular when ineffectual but conventional.
Evolution is a scientifically proven fact. It has been seen to happen. 39% of Americans believe in evolution. So the solid majority of people don't believe something that they were taught in school and is a scientific fact. This is idiocy. As further evidence that this is idiocy, the smarter and more informed you are the more likely you are to believe in evolution. So high school drop outs are the least likely to believe in it while scientists who spend decades studying the subject are the most likely to believe in it. The theory of evolution is the most important explanatory theory in Biology, the area in which the greatest growth in scientific knowledge and technology is expected to happen in the next few decades.
Americans will not elect people if they are not Christians or Jews, and will not let them run a country if they have sex with people they are not married to. This is idiocy, as if Muslims or Atheists cannot make good decisions about how to run a country, or people who sleep around can't make good decisions about government.
So the will of the people is ignorant, reactionary, short sighted and has little connection to what actually works. Having a government that accurately reflected the wishes of the people would be an absolute nightmare. Which is why government in most places is a representative government. People who are less stupid and ignorant are elected to run things for the people. While it is easy to despise politicians, compared with the average person they are educated, articulate, with wider perspective.
Corporations and special interest groups get zero votes. But corporations are the most important institutions in the lives of most Americans. Special interest groups are the organizations of groups o people who are most interested in the actions of the government. In a good system of government shouldn't the most important institution in people's lives have some influence on that system of government? Shouldn't those most interested in the running of the government have some influence in the running of the government? At the moment the only influence these institutions have is in trying to persuade people to do what they want. Now, they have lots of money, and money can be very persuasive.
So, to answer the original question, government by whom? I answer that government should be by people who agree with me, for people in general, but that isn't practical. My weak and rather disappointing compromise position is that government should be by people who represent the various forces in society, in balance, subject to removal if they go too far in any direction. So Congress should just write a law that means corporations and people spend the relative amount of money trying to influence elections that produces the best result for the USA.
The best government is messy, confrontational, slow to act, and removed somewhat from the people because people are stupid and can't be trusted and must be played off against each other in a balance that promotes the welfare of the country.
My second response is to think about the various merits of the different people in Government. We generally think that the more pure a democracy we have the better off we will be. People making decisions for people must result in the best circumstances for people, it seems simple. But there is a problem with this, and that problem is that most people are idiots. Most people are astonishingly ignorant of basic things, their focus is personal rather than societal, and the time period over which decisions are made is mind-bogglingly short.
Here are a few examples of how stupid the average person is and an idea of what the consequences of public opinion being directly transferred to government policy would be a nightmare. President George W. Bush was elected with half the votes of the electorate. Within eight months of him being elected he was the least popular president in history with less than 30% approval ratings. A month later he was among the most popular Presidents in history with 80% approval ratings because crazy people had killed lots of Americans. By the end of his second term Bush had essentially understood that all the things he had done had failed and had returned to standard Washington policies, essentially the same basic approach that Obama has used. However, his approval rating had returned to the low 30's. So, within eight months at least one fifth of Americans had changed their mind about what was the right stuff to do, then over half of them completely changed because of something that Bush didn't do, he was most popular when actively failing, and least popular when ineffectual but conventional.
Evolution is a scientifically proven fact. It has been seen to happen. 39% of Americans believe in evolution. So the solid majority of people don't believe something that they were taught in school and is a scientific fact. This is idiocy. As further evidence that this is idiocy, the smarter and more informed you are the more likely you are to believe in evolution. So high school drop outs are the least likely to believe in it while scientists who spend decades studying the subject are the most likely to believe in it. The theory of evolution is the most important explanatory theory in Biology, the area in which the greatest growth in scientific knowledge and technology is expected to happen in the next few decades.
Americans will not elect people if they are not Christians or Jews, and will not let them run a country if they have sex with people they are not married to. This is idiocy, as if Muslims or Atheists cannot make good decisions about how to run a country, or people who sleep around can't make good decisions about government.
So the will of the people is ignorant, reactionary, short sighted and has little connection to what actually works. Having a government that accurately reflected the wishes of the people would be an absolute nightmare. Which is why government in most places is a representative government. People who are less stupid and ignorant are elected to run things for the people. While it is easy to despise politicians, compared with the average person they are educated, articulate, with wider perspective.
Corporations and special interest groups get zero votes. But corporations are the most important institutions in the lives of most Americans. Special interest groups are the organizations of groups o people who are most interested in the actions of the government. In a good system of government shouldn't the most important institution in people's lives have some influence on that system of government? Shouldn't those most interested in the running of the government have some influence in the running of the government? At the moment the only influence these institutions have is in trying to persuade people to do what they want. Now, they have lots of money, and money can be very persuasive.
So, to answer the original question, government by whom? I answer that government should be by people who agree with me, for people in general, but that isn't practical. My weak and rather disappointing compromise position is that government should be by people who represent the various forces in society, in balance, subject to removal if they go too far in any direction. So Congress should just write a law that means corporations and people spend the relative amount of money trying to influence elections that produces the best result for the USA.
The best government is messy, confrontational, slow to act, and removed somewhat from the people because people are stupid and can't be trusted and must be played off against each other in a balance that promotes the welfare of the country.
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