e utopia Principles
80 Eighty percent of us agree on eighty percent of what makes a Good Place.* We all pretty much agree that a Good Place is safe for children, that kids should have opportunity and encouragement to get good educations. We want good housing to be available, not just for ourselves but for our neighbors. We want good jobs to be available, not just for ourselves but for our neighbors as well. It doesn’t help if your are the only one in your neighborhood who is having a good time while everyone else’s life is miserable. That is not a Good Place. It needs to be a Good Place for everybody. We want low crime, beauty versus trash and so on. Party politics focuses and magnifies the twenty percent * about which we disagree. The people who often come to mind first as the stewards of our places, our elected officials, tend not to focus on the 80 percent we all agree about. In order to get us to vote for them versus their rivals they need to differentiate themselves from each other. So the people we largely entrust with the care of our community - elected officials - as they are being elected, they want to focus on the things people disagree about. Politicians have created a whole industry around making subtle distinctions between themselves and other candidates. They focus on and magnify tiny elements from the 20% we don’t agree about as if THESE were the key factors that will make a Good Place or not. They make these smaller differences seem like they are the whole world. The whole world will either march on to triumph if you choose one candidate, or else we will plummet into disaster if we choose the other candidate. So it seems if we listen to opposing candidates. Our elected officials, generally, skip over the 80% that we all agree about and focus on a few, divisive issues to rally personal support. Once elected they need to follow through on their promises and continue to focus on these issues, to the detriment if not exclusion of the 80% that the rest of us all agree we need to have in order to make our places Good Places.
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