People are generally decent to those around them. At the least, they have a clear understanding more or less of right & wrong. But when it comes to setting *policy*, then you have to shift your thinking to a mass scale. Then theory and abstractness enter the equation and many people's understanding breaks down, their intuitions fail them. Face-to-face means of making judgments no longer suffice. Good people accept bad *theories* (at one level or another - but more abstract than the implicit theories behind face to face interactions) and cruelty and needless suffering result. This is why anecdotal stories play such a disproportionate role in policy-making -- they connect the two realms, if not particularly reliably.
The vast majority of people the vast majority of time are good people more or less to those who are in their community with them. But when you go beyond that community, whether through how to treat the poor in America, or how to deal with the tribe across the river, that breaks down. Perhaps the mistake people make is of viewing other groups & communities as single persons, trying to evaluate their intent, mindset, objectives, etc., as a unitary thing. That works with another individual, more or less, but fails with these larger groups because unlike (or at least less so than) individuals, they are not coherent consciousnesses but ever-shifting, faction-filled groups with all human impulses from the generous to the selfish, the humble to the aggressive, represented in a shifting degree -- and in degree that responds dynamically to how they are treated.
So it’s a problem with democracy. But it’s still the worst form of government, except for all the others.
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