This is a copernican idea. Democracy is not the centre of right government policy, engineering is the centre of our well being!

I am a naive, nerdy engineer who has a dream, a vision that we can engineer a better government than democracy has been able to deliver. With a population of over 7 billion, we need a government that makes policy and enforces it in a fair and moral way. Our own ingenuity must create this government, we the 7 billion agents must design how we will govern ourselves before democracy wipes us out.

We can’t wait for evolution to evolve a workable government. Democracy was a good mutation, but evolution can afford to let our species go extinct and let a new species with greater survival skill try their hand at government. We can’t afford that luxury. We need better government without waiting for evolution.

Complex things can only be created by evolution, because no one can predict how all the pieces of a complex system will interact together. We need to run it and observe. Biological evolution waits for random mutations and selects them by survival capability. Engineers have developed a faster evolution, evolution by design, where new mutations are designed, albeit imperfect design, and tested by functionality. The 747 aircraft evolved in 70 years. Many mutations of aircraft crashed and burned in the process because our design is imperfect but it is much faster than random mutations Many subspecies of aircraft were created that are still evolving.

Let’s apply the engineering model to government design. First we need to know what is “good”. Our democracy bias would say that which the majority support is good. There must be an intrinsic measure of good that could be the survival function for good policy design.

There is an elusive concept called the “grater good” which will be the survival function for good policy. It is an extension of what would make us as individuals feel good extended to everyone around us. It is selfishness for our own good feelings merged with empathy for the feelings of others. Democracy addresses the selfish aspect and merges it with our well developed use of tools and methods we have learned to control and manipulate. The great divide in our partisan debate about right vs left is largely about the role of empathy in our polices.

The first step in engineering good government is to research and develop the concept of the greater good. We must have greater good departments at all university’s, establish research chairs in greater good and make research grants available. It is a switch from the good of an individual to the good of a group. We have learned this for family group but need to expand this to communities, nations and the world.

Engineering is science based on evidence and good exhaustive rationalizing. Truth comes from good measurement and good logic. The greater good is a very complex concept especially for a species like ours with so much self interest bias. The survival function for our own species needs to be the greater good.

Once we can define a greater good survival function we can apply all the well understood engineering methods like specialization, reuse, compartmentalizing and redundancy. Future posts will explore these topics