If You Meet Me Halfway

It's been interesting talking to people about who they would vote for. Voting is great. It gives people a sense of ownership and it gives people a voice. But I wonder if voting is the best. The Wife and I were talking about playing games and how a game would be affected if people started playing to increase the total score of the people playing instead of just trying to maximize their own personal score. Granted, this would make some games stupid (think of a chess game) but it would have some interesting effects. For example, in a race all the contestants would add up their times to try and collectively beat the best collective time before them. The emphasis would be on a collective effort to maximize results. Critics of this mentality would rightly point out an analogy to communism and we would all agree that communism as an expression of government is not really tenable. The tendency of people to be selfish would be the demise of this kind of thinking. But our own country exemplifies the problems with pursuing individualism. In voting we have winners and losers. Everyone votes and whoever has the most votes, for some definition of most (see the electoral college), wins. I get pretty grumpy if when I lose. Even if it is for 37 nano seconds, I can feel in me a reluctance to assist or help the other person. Take that feeling, multiply it by millions of people who have much more invested in the election than in a game of Settlers. And you can see how our system does not necessarily promote the greater good. If you were a Democrat and part of the minority, why would you help Republicans, who consistently see it as their mandate not to consult you in deciding policy because "they won". Of course, not all politicians think this way, but it is clear that many do. This is the problem with a two-party system. There is little cooperation or collaboration needed. When you read about politics in other countries you read how even the most powerful political parties are forced to collaborate with other political groups because there is a need to have a majority. Granted, this still doesn't solve the problem of winners and losers but at the very least it provides a measure of cooperation that isn't seen in a two-party system. The downside of a multi-party system (defined here to be more than two) is that it takes longer for things to get done. But things already take a long time to get done and the reality of compromise, consensus, collaboration, and cooperation provides better for the ideal of government. It makes me wonder what our country would be like if whoever won this election was forced to take the other as their vice president.