I see people who are idealists. I am friends with many of them. They are young in spirit. They really do believe that you are here to bring something to the world, to dream, to see something through. They have not lost the spark.

Lived experience is a natural force towards cynicism, at least in my experience. I think reading could be an important part of re viving this idealism (Any recs?).

The lived experience of optimism has to be better. I am optimistic that the optimism wins. Meta optimism

It’s a similar thing with agency. Obviously you don’t have much but it never serves you to see things that way. As intelligent and good planners of a society we should design systems that treat humans as deterministic but we can’t make this public because it would seep into the first person view. So you have to play this weird game. You need to keep up the charade of a meritocracy all while knowing it’s complete horse shit. and when they find out they will bring the pitchforks. So you need to give them small wins, or the illusion of a small win, like voting for a president. All while the lobbies own the politicians

Lobbying is publicly accepted corruption. Lobbying is an auction for political capital. Auction bidding is good when you want efficient prices so the market clears. But we don’t want political capital to be liquid. We actually want the opposite, we want it in the hands of the people we voted in, and we don’t want it to leak anywhere else, because it’s zero sum and that means less for the citizen