The Function of Government (Accessible)
The Problem Isn’t That Government Is Broken — It’s That It’s Doing Exactly What It Was Built to Do
Most people feel something is wrong with government.
It feels slow, unresponsive, and increasingly disconnected from everyday life.
The usual explanations blame corruption, bad leaders, or ideological extremism.
Those factors matter, but they miss the deeper issue.
The truth is more uncomfortable and more important: Our political system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed, just not for most people.
Modern governments are complex systems. Like any system, they evolve toward stability. Over time, they optimize for survival: maintaining order, enforcing rules, and keeping the people who hold real power invested in the system.
When public outcomes consistently diverge from public preferences, that’s not necessarily dysfunction. More often, it’s a sign that the system’s incentives are misaligned with the public’s goals.
Why Representation Feels Broken
Our electoral system forces people to make defensive choices.
Voters are pressured to choose “the lesser of two evils,” not the candidate they actually prefer. Over time, this compresses a wide range of beliefs into two opposing camps. Once politics becomes a binary fight, compromise becomes risky, cooperation breaks down, and gridlock becomes normal.
This isn’t a cultural failure. It’s a structural one.
When meaningful cooperation becomes hard, only groups with concentrated resources — money, organization, and access — can reliably influence outcomes. Ordinary citizens, acting individually, simply can’t overcome those barriers.
The result is a system that preserves order and legitimacy, but increasingly serves a narrow set of interests.
The Goal Isn’t Chaos or Revolution, It’s Realignment
This doesn’t mean government needs to be torn down.
It means it needs to be realigned.
If we want a government that works for a broad public, the system must make it easier — not harder — for people to express what they actually believe, and for representatives to reflect that diversity without being punished for it.
That requires structural change, not just better personalities.
Two reforms matter most:
How we vote
Voting systems that allow people to express support for more than one candidate — or to rate candidates — reduce strategic voting and encourage broader representation. They lower the pressure to “pick a side” and reward candidates who appeal across differences.How much representation we have
When fewer people are represented by each official, communities gain more meaningful voice. Political inclusion becomes practical instead of symbolic.
These changes don’t guarantee perfect outcomes. No system can.
But they reduce the incentives that drive polarization, gridlock, and elite capture.
Why This Also Requires Us
Structural reform alone isn’t enough.
Large-scale change only happens when people can cooperate across differences long enough to implement it. That requires something unfashionable in modern politics: patience.
Empathy isn’t a virtue signal here, it’s a strategy.
Real change depends on people being willing to listen, to separate policy disagreements from identity, and to work with those they don’t fully agree with. Protests have a role. So do institutions. But lasting reform is built through everyday conversations, trust, and persistence.
That’s how broad coalitions form. And without broad coalitions, reform fails.
What This Text Stands For
This text is not about left versus right.
It’s about building a political system that:
represents people as they actually are,
reduces the pressure toward constant conflict,
and allows cooperation to be rewarded instead of punished.
We don’t need perfect government.
We need a system that gives ordinary people a fair chance to shape the rules they live under — and the ability to work together to improve them over time.
That is not radical.
It’s practical. And it’s overdue.
