Belief in a Just World

I have an extremely conservative friend that sprang a comment on me somewhat out of the blue, that took me quite aback.  The comment was: life isn't good, but it's fair.  I was struck at how diametrically opposed I was to this viewpoint.  In fairness, his statement may have been: the world isn't good, but it's fair, but for me these are functionally identical statements, though I can see how they can differ for some.

There's two parts to his assertion: life/the world being good or bad, and life/the world being just or unjust.  The first (good vs bad) lends itself to more permutations on personal opinion.  I'm personally of the camp that life is good considering the options available outside of life.  This opinion on whether there is something outside of life, is probably the biggest differentiator in having a view that life vs the world being significantly different components in this statement.

The second part, life/the world being just vs unjust and its correlation to viewpoints, seems to have the largest ramifications.  I've held the viewpoint that the world and life aren't fair, but hadn't fixated on it as a marker to whether someone had conservative vs liberal viewpoints.  More importantly in looking at this, was the question of were there groups of self identified liberals who believe the world is just, and are there self identified conservatives who believe the world is unjust.

This may be a basic concept covered in some Poli Sci/Psych 101 courses, and I don't pretend in anyway to be the first to have stumbled upon the concept:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

To ask this might be very underwhelming based on the number of hits I get to my blog, but if you'll bear with me I'd like to run a poll to see what kind of a breakdown we have between conservative vs liberal and the world being just vs unjust.  If people could vote in this poll I'd appreciate it, and if you vote as a liberal who thinks the world is just or as a conservative who thinks the world is unjust, I'd love to have you post how these views fit together for you.

If we can get some info gathered/feedback, I'd like to expand this discussion based on input people can provide.

My Top 10 "Benevolant" Dictator ideas

To have some fun, here's the my top 10 list of implementations I would make if I was a "Benevolent" dictator of my country.  Yes, I know the framing of being a benevolent dictator is pretty much an oxymoron, and automatically puts you in a grouping with some fairly unsavory characters.  If you can't appreciate this as being somewhat tongue and check, try to absorb it as just a list of things I think we'd be better off if we had the stomach to make happen.

1. Voting reform: Institute federal voting standards for federal elections, and require an instant runoff system instituted for the top 5 vote draws in the party primary elections.
2. If we ever see a peace time again, establish a classification for certain military units to be designated as part time public service/job corp type functions while continuing training to keep battle readiness.
3. Make natural resource planning extend significantly beyond 40 years.
4. Establish a program to create a self sufficient population on an off Earth location (Moon/Mars/in orbit)
5. Tax capital gains as ordinary income, implement an added tax penalty for short term capital gains if there is a need to maintain a difference.
6. Make it illegal to require green laws via HOA during droughts.
7. Require legislated financial limits financial minimums (minimum wage/tax codes) be linked in some way (possibly with a delay) to inflation.
8. Standardize car bumper heights.
9. Implement national referendums.
10. Work toward a cure for IPv6.

I'm toying with keeping this as a dynamic post, so I'm starting it out with a section for ideas that get "bumped".  If you have a list of 10, or close to it to, I'd love to see them.

Ideas voted off from the top 10:

<none yet>

The dilema of "voting for the lesser of two evils"

There is a frequently expressed statement of having a reluctance to vote in a political race because it turns into "a pick between the lesser of two evils."  Some will leave a ballot blank, others may cave in and vote for the "least offensive" candidate, but this sentiment persists.  How can one vote for someone who doesn't represent one's views?  Seems reasonable, but I think there's some issues to consider, "about the issues".

We are a nation of 314,447,627 people (those of us in the US at 09/25/12 at 00:36 UTC (EST+5)). There are certain groupings of aligned thought, but to a certain extent, we're still individuals, and regardless of what our party bosses tell us, we don't always think along the party designated lines.

If we could imagine a scenario where there were only 4 issues that were of concern, and were able to simplify them to yes or no answers, how many combinations of differing opinions could we come to?  Two would be the dilemma we sometimes feel we need to face in the two party system, but the answer math tells us using 0 as one answer and 1 as the other in binary notation is:

Binary	Decimal
0	0
1	1
10	2
11	3
100	4
101	5
110	6
111	7
1000	8
1001	9
1010	10
1011	11
1100	12
1100	13
1101	14
1111	15

15!  Err, that would be 16 counting the zero, but you get the idea.

So if we could have a simplified world, where there were only 4 issues, with yes or no answers, we'd have to contend with 16 different groups of people that held differing view sets.  If we could imagine a world with as many as 8 different issues (yes, I realize my audience is getting the point, but I made the stupid diagram, so bear with me) we could see a situation shown in the picture below:

(Imagine there's a column on the left that has [1,2, --------,254,256])

To state what a better graphic would show, from 8 issues, we end up with 256 permutations of view sets.  If we need to have 100% agreement with a candidate in this scenario, we'd have to establish a set of 256 candidates with each potential view set to get a guarantee that our views were being represented.

Ok, you say that's not fair, some views are related:

like guns == wants prayer in school

wants civil rights == likes pot

But wait, there might be people who like guns AND like pot.  Some view sets are beat into us held in common by larger groupings of people, that throws a very obvious flaw into my analogy.  Most will hopefully agree with me that this set of 8 questions proposed as, yes or no, equally weighted issues, presents an incredibly impractical analysis, and runs far short of being close to the scale of issues we have at play in politics.  I think my whole point still works for a much larger set of issues, with the added complication of multitudes of viewpoints within a single issues, even with the discounting of tendencies for groupings of issue sets.

So maybe we need to take the tragedy of our two party system, and accept that it is marginally useful.  If we disagree with a candidate on two issues in this grossly simplified country simulation, we'd only have 78,611,907 (1/4) of the people on agreement with us in having the same viewpoint.

Did I just try to frame an argument to endorse a two party system!?!?  Ugh, well it probably deserves its own blog post, but if you want a look into what would do a lot to solve these voter choice issues (and lower the cost of some elections), take a look into Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).  This involves thinking outside of two parties, and bringing in what we refer to as third party candidates in the US.  Did a brief search and found a number of good sources to read if you're unfamiliar with IRV:

• FairVote.org's take on the issue
• An interactive demo of IRV by Chris Gates
• Wikipedia page for IRV

We're probably stuck with a two party system without election reform that moves us to IRV.  My math may not have completely illustrated it, but I think the math shows us that it's extremely hard to get a candidate to match all of our views.  If we could find one that that matched all of a voter's particular issues, that still doesn't bridge the gap across the differing view sets of the rest of the population who are not in lock step with "like guns AND like pot."