Evolution and Government

Genre: Essay
Word Count: 1849
A/N: Yes, I wrote this a long time ago. Yes, it is probably riddled with logical fallacies. Yes, it was fun to write. That's what counts, right? o.O (Note: apparently, I seemed to lack appreciation of the two-party system before. That has changed now, but... meh, I'm too lazy to rewrite this. :P)

Evolution. Political theory. Two radically different things at first glance, but are they really that different?

Evolution concerns changes in living things over time; political theory, the structure and function of government. But let’s take this further. Let’s attempt to apply the principles of evolution to the workings of government. To do this, we must look at government as a living organism.

What is a living thing? Let’s look at the criteria:

1.) Living things are organized: their parts are specialized for specific functions

2.) Living things take materials and energy from the environment: they need an outside source of nutrients

3.) Living things are homeostatic: they stay just about the same internally despite changes in the external environment

4.) Living things respond to stimuli: they react to internal and external events

5.) Living things reproduce: they produce offspring that resemble themselves

6.) Living things grow and develop: during their lives they change, sometimes undergoing various stages from fertilization to death.

7.) Living things are adapted: they have modifications that make them suited to a particular way of life.

Now that we know the characteristics of living things, let’s try comparing a government to them. For the purposes of this essay, I will use the United States government.

1.) Living things are organized.

Is the government organized? Yes. Does it have specialized parts? Yes. Just think of the three branches, one for creating the laws, one for interpreting the laws, and one for enforcing the laws. Remember? That’s about all they teach you about the government from first to fourth grade. You want more evidence? How about the president’s Cabinet? The Senate’s committees? Who knew that being a living thing meant bureaucracy?

2.) Living things take materials and energy from the environment.
Need I explain this? The government leeches those tax dollars like a yeast squanders sugar! In case you don’t get what I mean, I’ll just explain that yeast produce energy in the form of ATP via fermentation, a horribly inefficient method compared to that of aerobic respiration, which is what we use most of the time. But I digress.

3.) Living things are homeostatic.

One word: bureaucracy. That’s making sure we aren’t going anywhere fast. And what does the government do but try to maintain the status quo?

4.) Living things respond to stimuli.

Islamic extremists attack the World Trade Center. Did the government react? Okay, that’s external stimuli. How about the Rodney King riots? There’s internal stimuli for you.

5.) Living things reproduce.

You’re probably wondering how I’m going to pull this one off. Well, I’m going to bring us over to Iraq. Yes, that place over there. Is the U.S. forcing a democracy onto the people over there? Yes. A little U.S. Jr. Granted, it may not resemble its parent exactly, but then, what child does?

And if that doesn’t work for you, there are plenty of other historical examples I can draw from. Think imperialism.

Now, I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s going to point out that the government isn’t completely reproducing without help. The U.S. is reproducing by knocking off another government. Sort of like a virus, actually. I concede that point. We can have a parasitic virus-government.

6.) Living things grow and develop.

Was the government of the late 18th century the same as it is now? No. It wasn’t. Apparently, the U.S. government has changed since then. Instead of developing new cells and tissues like we multi-cellular organisms do, it grows with the addition of new laws and amendments, new immigrants and newly fledged voters.

7.) Living things are adapted.

Finally, the last point. Let’s go back in that time machine of the mind to September 11th. Obviously, the U.S. became more aware that it needed a new way of operating to fit the new order of life. The Department of Homeland Security. The Patriot Act. These are just a few of the modifications made by the government to make it more suited to surviving in the 21st century. Adapted? I think so.

Now, we have established that government can qualify as a living thing, albeit a parasitic, virus-like one. One can now reasonably conclude that it must be subject to evolutionary forces.

What are these forces? Let’s list the prerequisites for a particular form of evolution, Darwinian, governed by natural selection. This requires four factors:

1.) Variation: individual members of a species vary in physical characteristics

2.) Struggle for existence: members of all species compete with each other for limited resources.

3.) Survival of the fittest: unequal reproduction

4.) Adaptation: natural selection causes a population to adapt to its environment

As with before, let’s apply this to government. We will replace species with government and individuals with politicians.

1.) Variation

As we all know, those pesky politicians all differ from each other… physically. We know that they’re all about the same inside: loving, kind, caring, altruistic—oh wait a second…

2.) Struggle for existence

Think Cold War. Competition? I think so. Or just think economically. What country isn’t trying to boost their economy?

3.) Survival of the fittest

Again, think Cold War. What happened to the USSR?

4.) Adaptation

This was already covered before, but this time, it applies more to government-government interaction. Yes. Diplomats. ‘Nuff said.

So, government can be governed by natural selection. Then what kind of government would be best fit?

Generally speaking, the ones that can adapt the fastest win out, but one can’t forget those that are just plain, dumb lucky.

This brings us closer to my main point, but not quite. Let’s look at the following question: How can a government adapt quickly?

Obviously, a government with just one part will be able to move faster than one that involves a million parts. Let’s just say, a dictatorship versus a direct democracy.

Let’s also just say that, theoretically, some unknown third party just suddenly decides to get medieval on the two countries.

Who is going to react faster? By the time the direct democracy can gather everyone together for a vote, they’re done for.

But, as we all know, dictatorships tend to get corrupted, making them less feasible there. So, we’ll settle on a nice, in-between representative democracy that strikes an acceptable balance between pure bureaucracy and corruption.

You’re probably wondering if I’ll ever get to my point. Well, I will… eventually. I thought it would be ready to be introduced by now, but apparently, it got held up by the airport security. Random background checks, yeah right.

Anyway, now we have to decide how to choose those who will represent the people. Here in the good U.S. of A., we do it by a simple vote. The politician who has the most votes wins.

Now, this brings up a few problems. I’ll try to address the most pressing ones in turn.

The first is what is often known as the “tyranny of the majority”. With the current system, all one of those scheming politicians has to do is get 50.1% of the votes and he or she in! What about the other 49.9%? Do they just lose their representation? This particularly applies to minorities, who are usually the ones who lose out in this form of election.

A second issue is the concern of money. Campaigns cost money. Lots of it. I’m sure if someone looks at the data, there will probably be a strong positive correlation between money spent and success of the campaign. Now, who has this kind of money?

I’m sure how people have noticed that politics is primarily dominated by the same patrician, upper-class people, year after year. Sure, there may be the occasional oddball, but generally, it works this way. So, the same type of people are dominating the representation spots.

In evolution, we would probably refer to this as inbreeding, which is usually regarded as a no-no.

I’m sure there are more issues, but we are just going to deal with these two.

We are slowly getting closer to my proposal. Yes, it concerns election reform.

As we know, randomness is something essential to life. Otherwise, an organism or species runs the risk of completely folding in the face of some unforeseen change in the environment. In the same way, randomness can benefit government, although the consequences may not be as dire as species extinction. All we need now is to find a way to generate this randomness. Living things have genetic mutations; representative democracies have elections.

Are elections random? Yes, maybe slightly. You have to realize that we have to look at this from a larger point of view: Are the type of people in power changing? Yes. But is this enough? Let’s look back a few years into history. For much of the life of the U.S., this country has been dominated by a two-party system. So basically, power is just constantly shifting between these two parties, back and forth. Is that a lot of randomness? I don’t think so. We need some new blood, more than just the sprinkling of independents one sees every once in a while.

How can we fix this? Let’s look at the elections, standard majority rule. What if we have an election based on chance? How is that possible, you ask? Well, allow me to present a possibility.

Imagine an election in which every vote is thrown into a giant lottery. The politician who was voted for on the ballot that is randomly drawn out wins. Maybe it can be a bit more high tech that that, but the principle remains the same.

What does this do? Firstly, this increases randomness. Secondly, well, let’s go back to those two issues we discussed earlier.

The tyranny of the majority fact is eliminated, or at least greatly reduced. Even if the politician gets the majority of the vote, the other candidate still has a chance to win. In addition, politicians can’t be happy with just 50.1% of the vote anymore. That’s just not good enough to hope for an outright win.

Also, this gives lesser known people a chance to win an election, the occasional wild-card candidate, bringing new blood into the system. And under this election system, he or she may actually have a chance at winning without having to spend gobs and gobs of money. Of course, money will still be a factor, but the near-complete dominance it had over politics now may be greatly weakened.

Of course, this also brings up the chance that some complete psychopath would get lucky and win. Simple measures can be taken to reduce this possibility, such as counting every 500 votes as one “vote” in the lottery. In the rare occasion that a psychopath is elected anyway, chances are, one psychopath won’t be enough to really affect the normal functioning of the government.

And there it is. The principles of evolution applied to government. Would this be good enough to decrease the apathy of today’s representatives? They are always the same type of people, always pushing the same views, always presenting the same proposals.

What about it, eh?