Security and Surrender

If we reach a point at which our government becomes corrupt, a point at which it becomes wise to invest in lobbying and campaign advertising, because that's what works, here's what we might notice:

1. Votes would be bought through trickery, rather than through bribery. Psychologists such as Donald Kinder have established that most Americans vote for what they think is in the best interest of the group over their own personal self-interest. To buy votes would require complicating the situation (long bills, unintelligble financial derivatives, etc.) enough that voters cannot tell what is right, and then using economics to control what voters cannot.

2. Legislation would have multiple faces. The popularity of a balanced budget amendment, for example, might reflect a national desire to be fair to future generations, but some might support it to reduce fairness—they might consider it practically impossible for government to save for a rainy day, and therefore expect the amendment to allow disaster to weaken government's ability to limit corruption in business.

3. The limits of voters cannot be fixed internally.  A modern non-profit devoted to ensuring equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would not rely on voters. It would be accountable to an expert board who would require third-party audits which would measure success and demand adoption of the best practices of best-performing nations. An election was the closest one could get to such an audit two hundred years ago, but neither election nor recall nor redistricting nor campaign finance reform nor the right to bear arms can fix voter's vulnerability to trickery.

We all know the obvious solution to such a problem: get help. Americans can name plenty of countries who escaped corruption by using (aspects of) America as a role-model. However, Americans have a difficult time imagining themselves on the receiving end of this relationship. Is there a threshold we can cross, a "humbling event" that would empower us to face our situation realistically? That question deserves serious study—a nation, after all, is not the same as an individual human being.

For a computer to become unresponsive, stuck in a loop, hung, or whatever, is like becoming corrupt. Although computer designers attempt to prevent this from happening, they are humble enough to admit that design is never perfect, so they enable a security protocol called "reboot". It means that the computer stops trying to do what it thinks it should, and instead trusts an authorized user to get it back on track. "Reboot" is a fancy term for "surrender".

As Mesmer knew, individual animal brains support a similar protocol. Restrain the animal and invert it, for example, and it suddenly becomes mesmerized—trusting its captor. Magicians still use this technique to convince doves to stay quiet while hidden. In humans, Mesmer's work has been refined into modern hypnotism, humans becoming receptive to suggestion (and accessing unknown abilities) under such stresses as public performance. Some hypnotists poke fun at this ability of ours, but many humans can testify that surrender can lead to salvation, an escape from something like an infinite loop. I submit that lack of a surrender protocol would be a grave security problem.

Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution give America such a protocol? They demonstrated political revolution, but changes in military technology make that less viable. Today, the framers might point-out that surrender can be triggered at various levels (e.g. flip the switch or pull the plug)—there can be many safeguards, and not all need be provided by our Constitution. For example, charities can (and do) gather and publish measurements of national success. They can leverage social media to enforce government transparency from a grassroots level. Perhaps most importantly, they can give each voter an online account with which to securely express their political opinions and view them in aggregate. This can provide transparency on the critical question, "Are we really fed up? Do we want to surrender?"