The Most Dangerous People

tldr: Politicians are the most dangerous people in your life by a massive margin. Regardless of whether they’re good or bad – because we give them power and then don’t limit them. Power changes any person, regardless of their intentions, and we are not doing enough to limit their damage.

Politicians are the main threat of your life

When you think about what are the threats typically?
A disease, crime, accidents, financial problems, job loss.
Yet – they are always present in the background, and partially under your control – you can insure, be careful, etc.
Not a guarantee of anything, but no one has that anyway.

However, we have another source of catastrophes, which are very much not under your control.
They are as much of a threat to your life as everything above.

A bad law. A war started for some bogus reason. A policy that destroys the economy you built your life around. A regulation that makes your profession illegal. A decision made in an office somewhere by a person who has never seen your face and will never bear any consequence for what they did to you.

Can you insure yourself against it? Really not. You have one vote. You use it once every couple of years. And basically that’s it.

No other group of people can cause harm at this scale. A bad doctor hurts patients. A bad CEO hurts shareholders.
A bad politician can pass a law that affects millions, destroys markets, ruins lives, decimates industries or societies for generations.
The range of damage is unparalleled. Other groups of humans can only make lives worse for a limited number of people.

A politician by default affects millions. Even millions who aren’t even born yet.

And we voluntarily give them power to do all that. With almost no limits and accountability. Whatever current way is – that is not enough.

Both power and position corrupt, and attract a specific kind of person.

First: the office changes the person. Once they step in, they become part of a different tribe. They change.

They’re no longer your just representatives – they’re politicians, navigating a landscape of compromise, alliances, and enemies.
You may judge them from the past, how they behaved previously, as a basis for your decision to vote for them.
Regardless whether it is the first term or the second, the past does not mean they will continue the same way.
Once they’re in the office, you should forget about it and start judging anew.

Even genuinely good people cannot know how they will behave once inside that system. They enter a Game of Thrones environment, and the game rewires them.

Second: the kind of person who wants this job is already selected for certain traits.

Politics is not a normal profession. The scrutiny is brutal, the pressure constant, the work inherently adversarial. Normal well-adjusted people with rich inner lives generally do not want to spend their lives fundraising, campaigning, and navigating endless conflict.
The people who do want this, who need it – are already different.

Why would anyone want a second term so badly that they’d bend rules, break promises, or dismantle institutions to get it? What does it say about a person that they cannot imagine stepping aside and letting someone else carry their ideas forward?

The people who wouldn’t be corrupted by power also wouldn’t run in the first place. The selection bias is there before they even take their seat.

But there’s more – not just simple corruption like wanting better for themselves or wanting to lobby something that benefits them financially.
The people who want power are already accepting that they have the moral right to dictate how others should live.
Many already consider themselves as designers of society at this point – and that it’s okay for the state to enforce their will.

And once they are in the system, they start to like it. Not just because they like the power or the capabilities it gives them.
But also because staying in power becomes part of their identity, their experiences, their everyday.
It is not easy for them to just sever that part of their life.

Imagine if suddenly the profession or the area you cared about most, what you dedicated your life to, suddenly became unavailable, broken. Or you lost interest in a way that surprised everyone.
Imagine if you are a mother who suddenly lost their child, or just stopped loving them. Imagine if you were a businessman who lost half your capital and now carries great debt with no desire to continue.

It becomes not just a job – it becomes part of their life’s meaning.
Staying in power becomes a desire layered on top of whatever they originally wanted.
Two goals now compete: "do good" (whatever they think it is) and "stay in office."

And not just to stay in the office, but keep the state alive too. Keep the system the same. Maintain the status quo.
Which means not only to keep the things as it is now. Because our lives are constantly improving we are getting better and more smart every day. We generally getting less dependent on them.
Which means they have to keep the pressure on us too. Which means they have to make new methods to increase the state power. All of this so they could continue to occupy the place.

And they never think of themselves as evil. We all think we are genuinely doing a good job, whatever it is.
Hardly any conscious and self-critical person can survive in an environment that rewards being bold, selfish, and dismissive of others’ opinions.

Every dictator who waged wars, did oppressive shit, did whatever shit really – they all thought they were in the right. Hitler never doubted himself. Mao did not stop to question whether the revolution was worth it.
Yes, you might say they’re all examples of pure fanatics. But expect similar thinking from any other politician.
From people in general, I would say – but politicians are typically more confident, else they’d be unlikely to get elected in the first place.

Treat them accordingly.

For everyone else, the default is "presumed good." Innocent until proven guilty.
Not for them. They should receive distrust until they prove us otherwise.
And prove it again and again and again.

We should treat them with distrust, contempt, and the presumption that they will do harm. Not if – when.
Don’t think about whether they are good or bad people, that is up to your specific ideology to judge.

Zero trust even before you see their name on the ballot.
They cannot be exempt from your skepticism. Even if you really like them now, there is no guarantee you will like them later.

We must treat them this way because we cannot afford to be wrong about them.
We literally give them a gun and a license to shoot us in the head with zero consequences.
Except it’s not a gun – it’s a weapon of mass destruction.

You don’t "hope" the person holding it will be good.
You design the entire system around the assumption that they will not be.
You put restrictions, limits, oversight, and fail-safes they have to stumble on every step.

Yet in practice we do the opposite with politicians. We hope they’re good, we trust them because we liked their speech, and then we’re surprised when they turn bad.

Stop hoping. Start treating them as what they are: the most dangerous people in society.

They are as dangerous as the system allows.

They never exist in a vacuum. Well, nobody does – but they specifically have to work inside the system. At least initially they start in some kind of system and then they try to destroy and undermine it.

Yet, they are as dangerous as the system allows. In a system with strong restrictions and protections, even assuming the worst, they cannot do much damage.

Sadly, most of our current systems are letting them roam free and do whatever.
There is no real oversight. Nobody watches them enough. We grant them power, immunity, privacy, privileges and blindly hope they won’t abuse it.

• They can pass a bad law in days. Repealing it takes years, if ever.
• You equate them doing the job with amount of laws they pass – and that leads to what? Endlessly growing bureaucracy.
• There is no personal liability for the harm they cause. A CEO can be sued. A politician gets immunity. They vote together as a small group of people – we suffer all. Nobody responsible.
• By the time you vote them out, the damage is done. Often irreversible.
• They have initiative without checks. They can spam their crazy ideas however they like. We cannot mobilize each time, some of that get passed thru eventually.

Elections are not enough. They’re a feedback loop that takes years to complete, and by the time the feedback arrives, the damage has already compounded.

They have no incentive to behave. The system rewards activity, not restraint. Every law they pass is a notch on their resume. Every regulation they add is proof they’re "doing something." Even if nothing needed to be done in the first place.

And when they turn bad? There are few mechanisms to stop them in time, or it’s done way too late. We have no protection.

All this time we were building the systems presuming that the people in power will be good, instead of treating them as a monkey with a grenade.

I hope I opened your eyes.

Think about the instances in your life made worse by politicians.
Yes, your life – the specific moments you suffered because of them.

"Because of the politicians, my life is ruined and I may never see my family again."
Your situation might not be so dramatic, but it is for now. Your future could be different.

Economies damaged, freedoms lost, friends who turned against you because politicians caused the strife. That’s just the local level. Think on a global scale how much damage they do, how much suffering they inflict on their own populations.

(This leans heavily on the idea that action is always worse than inaction. But action is a choice by someone, while inaction allows the community as a whole to figure things out.)

You need to shift how you see them. Not "my representatives who I think are nice and will do good."
But: "a person with massive power and every incentive to abuse it, hell-bent on keeping that power forever, and throwing away everything they promised the moment they got an office."

The demand follows from the shift. You may start demanding:

• Real transparency – zero privacy for their official conduct
• Personal liability – they should answer for the harm they cause
• Term limits – nobody sits in power long enough to entrench
• Constant oversight – not just at election time

See how it’s all about the systems.

We cannot change human nature. We cannot design a magical screening process that picks good people and rejects bad ones.
The very idea of a protocol to "weed out the bad" implies a moral judgment – and who gets to make that judgment?
That is a political question to begin with.
(And who would be designing such a screening? Those already in power.)

The solution is never about finding better people. We can hope and expect, but not bet on that.
The solution is to make the system so that it doesn’t matter who the person is. You design for the worst case, not the best case.
The system should treat every politician as a potential threat until proven otherwise, over and over, continuously.

Demand better. Your future depends on it.