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Solving the hardest problem in democracy by finding the right high leverage points [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-02-14  

SOLVING DIFFICULT SOCIAL PROBLEMS is all about finding the right high leverage points that solutions need to push on to solve the problem. The higher the leverage, the less effort required. This is critical since progressive activists have a limited amount of change force compared to the opposition. If Archimedes was alive and with us today, he would agree completely.

Using a social force diagram, the previous article defined the Progressive Goals Problem and found the first intermediate cause to be the Money Drives Politics Problem. The previous article then proposed the hypothesis below and supported it with a causal loop diagram and considerable evidence:

When it comes to most important progressive problems, the Money Drives Politics Problem is causing them all.

This article takes the next step by summarizing the entire completed social force diagram. Later articles will describe the details.

This article is the fifth in a series. Each article builds on the ones before it. The previous articles are:

The supreme importance of high leverage points

ONLY IF YOU FIND A ROOT CAUSE can you find the high leverage point for resolving it, which then allows you to develop fundamental solutions that can be expected to work because you know why the system behaves the way it does.

Intelligently finding and using high leverage points employs one of the most powerful early laws in all of science. This became a law and not just a common sense tradition when Archimedes proved the Law of the Lever and much more skillfully applied it to a variety of inventions. Historian John Tzetzes, writing in the 12th century, wrote that Archimedes said "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the world."

In systems thinking a leverage point is a place in a system's structure where a solution element can be applied. It's a low leverage point if a small amount of change force causes a small change in system behavior. It's a high leverage point if a small amount of change force causes a large change in system behavior.

Activists must apply their low amount of change force wisely

If you are a social activist, here’s a key insight:

Change force is the effort required to prepare and make a change. In social problems the effort to prepare to make a change usually dwarfs the final effort to actually make the change. For example, in the US civil rights problem it took decades of demonstrations, rallies, speeches, personal conversations, legislative lobbying, and new law proposals to prepare to make the change: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To actually change the system required the mere signing of a new law and then enforcing it.

The takeaway is that the higher the leverage point, the less the change force needed to solve the problem. Progressive activists and organizations have relatively low amounts of change force to apply. By using Archimedes’ Law of the Lever in an intelligent manner to avoid low leverage points and find high leverage points instead, progressive activists can Move the World.

The complete social force diagram

This is shown below. It’s complex because this is a difficult complex problem. Open it in another tab or browser window so you can look at it as you read this article.

No one else is analyzing the problem like this. Take your time to slowly read the diagram from the top down, starting at Problem Symptoms. The diagram is mostly self-explanatory.

I’ve made a change from the previous article. On the diagram, problem symptoms are: Many unsolved problems hurting the common good. To make the analysis more generic and to agree with problem symptoms, “progressive goals” has been replaced by “common good goals.” We are now analyzing the Inability to Achieve Common Good Goals Problem.

Each arrow represents the causal force one node has on another. Nodes are connected by causal chains.

There are three sizes of solid arrows. Small ones have the least force, which are the ones in the 5 horizontal superficial rows. Those forces are too small to solve the problem because S is always less than R. Medium forces are what’s causing the problem. They flow from root causes to symptoms. Large forces can solve the problem. If fundamental solutions are well designed and tested, then F can be larger than R. This would cause the system to undergo a mode change from the undesired to the desired mode. Thereafter the dashed arrows are the forces arising from the new root causes that keep the problem solved.

Now let’s briefly explain how the social force diagram works, starting at the top.

Intermediate cause 1. The Money Drives Politics Problem

Root cause analysis works by starting at problem symptoms and asking “WHY does this occur?” until the root causes are found.

Problem symptoms are: Many unsolved problems hurting the common good. Our first question is thus: WHY do so many unsolved problems hurting the common good exist?

The previous article explained how the answer is: Key government decisions that mainly favor powerful monied special interests. This is also known as the Money Drives Politics Problem and is intermediate cause 1.

Given intermediate cause 1, what’s the best solution strategy to solve it? That would be to somehow prevent big money from controlling key government decisions. That’s the low leverage point. Then we ask, what specific solutions can implement that strategy? Historically these have been lobbying restrictions, regulatory capture prevention, etc. These are the superficial solutions.

Why aren’t lobby restrictions and regulatory capture prevention working? Because that force is weaker than the flow of money from intermediate cause 4, plus election of politicians favoring big money in intermediate cause 2. As we quoted in the previous article:

Once you’re elected and in office, corporate influence comes in the form of corporate lobbying—the behemoth on the legislative stage, drowning out all other lobbying competition by a spending ratio of more than thirty to one. From Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy, 2017, by US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Intermediate cause 2. Elections that favor big money

Next, WHY do key government decisions that mainly favor powerful monied special interests occur? What’s causing too many politicians to favor big money?

The main reason is fairly obvious: Election of politicians who mainly favor powerful monied special interests, which is the intermediate cause 2. When the Progressive Goals Problem is solved, we want that to change to: Election of politicians who strongly favor the common good.

The low leverage point is easy to figure out. To counter too much election of politicians favoring big money, concerned citizens need to: Elect more politicians who favor the common good. How can that be done? With the superficial solution of: Organizing to raise funds, find candidates, and promote candidates, parties, and concepts that favor the common good.

Superficial solution examples are ActBlue’s digital online platform for Democratic fundraising, Netroots Nation conferences for all aspects of organizing, the Democrat Party’s top strategy of “Rolling up our sleeves and organizing everywhere to build a better America for all. We’re working hard to elect Democrats.” and Daily Kos’s promotion of progressive concepts via news articles, progressive candidate fundraising projects, and “tools like petitions, letter writing campaigns, and information about organized protests to empower our readers to take action.”

The conclusion that organizing doesn’t work because it’s a superficial solution strikes at the core of today’s progressive paradigm. It says that paradigm is flawed. Is it?

Researchers have studied political system behavior for centuries. Lately, the evidence keeps piling up that those who favor the common good of all (aka democrats, progressives, the left, etc.) are losing. This shows up in the increasing polarization we see in many democracies, as well as how most important progressive problems are getting worse. The previous article used the causal loop diagram below to illustrate this ominous trend:

If all the problems shown are getting worse and progressivism’s central solution strategy is organizing, then only one logical conclusion is possible: Progressives need to self-examine and see if they have the personal courage to challenge long-held beliefs and change them. Perhaps you will be one of the first.

The analysis results are not saying stop all organizing. That’s necessary to keep the present level of common good politicians getting elected, to keep the ship moving so to speak. But that ship is sinking fast. If a large contingent of progressives do not switch their efforts to plugging the leaks, the inevitable will happen. The ship of democracy will sink, and plutocracy and authoritarianism will prevail.

Why doesn’t organizing work? Because that force is weaker than the force from intermediate cause 3.

Intermediate cause 3. Successful political deception

Intermediate cause 2 is: Election of politicians who mainly favor powerful monied special interests. WHY does that occur?

Because of successful political deception. That’s intermediate cause 3.

Powerful monied special interests (the infamous 1%) are a tiny minority. How can a minority persuade a majority to vote against their own best interests? The answer explains intermediate cause 3.

In a democracy, the main ways a minority can persuade a majority to vote for them are by force, threats, rigged elections, voter suppression, favoritism, bribes, or deception. Force, threats, and rigged elections are illegal. Voter suppression is mostly illegal. Favoritism doesn’t work on large populations, since there are not enough favors (like jobs or contracts) to dole out. Bribes are inefficient, as even the rich lack the resources to bribe millions of voters. This leaves deception as the main preferred strategy and explains why successful political deception is required in right-wing politics.

Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, reached the same conclusion in 1824:

…it is impossible by fair reasoning ...to justify the sacrifice of the interests of the many to the interests of the few.... It follows that for effecting this purpose they must have recourse to every kind of fallacy, and address themselves, when occasion requires it, to the passions, the prejudices, and the ignorance of mankind. Source: Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies, edited by H. Larrabee, 1952, page xxi. Bentham wrote the handbook to teach citizens how to spot political fallacies. Larrabee has revised and updated Bentham’s original 1824 book and added a fascinating preface. Bentham believed in “The power of reason in human affairs, once the veils of deception are torn from men’s eyes.”

Consider the evidence. In the US, the outstanding example of political deception is Trump. As I wrote in the second article in this series:

The evidence shows that in the US, the right lies much more than the left. The pattern may be seen in articles like these:

Next, let’s find the low leverage point and superficial solutions.

The third intermediate cause is successful political deception. If that’s the cause, then solution strategy is intuitively obvious: some form of more of the truth via misinformation correction, a low leverage point. The reasoning is that if people believe statements that are not true, then that can be corrected by providing citizens with corrected versions of deceptive statements pointing out the truth. Superficial solutions doing this are fact-checks, articles, social media posts, news, etc. pointing out the truth.

None of this has worked. In fact, these more-of-the-truth solutions have worked so poorly that we are now living in the post-truth age of politics:

The United States, much like Russia itself, has entered a “post-truth era,” in which lies and distortions carry as much weight as facts. Source: Breaking Down Democracy: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians, Arch Puddington, 2017, page 57.

Why does the strategy of More of the truth via misinformation fail to prevent successful political deception? In this case there are TWO causes: Main root cause 1 and intermediate cause 4. These are low political truth literacy (so lies work) and a high level of corporate proxy money to control voter preferences to favor Corporatis profitis (so there’s plenty of money to push lies in campaigns). Both are required.

Main root cause 1. Low political truth literacy

The main root cause 1 of successful political deception is low political truth literacy. The average voter has low political truth literacy. This was measured in the US by a Thwink.org controlled experiment using Truth Literacy Training. Ability to detect political deception is low, about 20%. This causes many undetected lies to flow from the low political truth literacy node to the successful political deception node.

Political truth literacy is the ability to tell truth from falsehood in political statements meant to influence voters and to make logically correct voting decisions based on that information.

Participants were exposed to political statements. Some were true. The rest used six common fallacies. These were cherry picking, ad hominem attack, appeal to emotion, strawman, false dilemma, and false fact lie, plus flawed application of the Strong Evidence Rule. Less than 20% of subjects could tell truth from deception and use that information to vote correctly.

If political truth literacy is low, then the high leverage point is: Raise political truth literacy from low to high. As an illustrative example of how to do this, Thwink.org designed fundamental solutions: A collection of solution elements, including Truth Literacy Training.

The last was the easiest to test and appears to have the highest potential impact for the lowest implementation cost, so it was selected for experimentation. Truth Literacy Training training took an average of one hour and raised political truth literacy from low to high. A follow up study 26 days later found it had dropped 10%. 30 minutes of refresh training brought it right back up.

This indicates that regular refresh training of some type can work and will be required. Or it may be that like reading and writing literacy, once truth literacy matures and becomes the reasoning default and is exercised often enough, little decline will occur. Long term it may even rise, if reinforced by regular exposure to political truth literacy topics in news media, such as a story centered on deceptive use of the cherry picking fallacy.

Two popular solutions similar to Truth Literacy Training are critical thinking and media literacy training. “Critical thinking is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment” (Source). This describes the ability to correctly reason in general, and is not the same as the specific skill of political truth literacy. Nor is media literacy, defined by the US National Association for Media Literacy Education as “The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication” (Source).

The first article said:

A root cause is the deepest cause in a causal chain (or the most basic cause in a feedback loop structure for more complex problems) that can be resolved by changing something in the cause, such as stopping it, increasing it, or fixing it.

While the Truth Literacy Training experiment was not a large-scale test on a real political system, it does provide initial proof the cause exists and can be resolved in a practical manner. Therefore, low political truth literacy is the main root cause 1 of the Progressive Goals Problem.

Definitions of corporate proxy and Corporatis profitis

Corporations cannot function without people carrying out the desired actions of a corporation. Corporations may directly control people as in the case of employees, or they may control them indirectly through financial influence, as in the case of bribes, donations, purchases, so-called consulting fees, threats to withhold money, SLAP suits, manipulative deception, and so on. In both cases people do what a corporation wants, knowing or unknowingly, and may be called corporate proxies.

Once a politician becomes dependent on corporate money to gain office, they are forever a corporate proxy, despite all claims to the contrary. All rich persons are corporate proxies since they are dependent on them for their income. It follows that plutocracies are controlled not by the rich but by their masters, large for-profit corporations, through the actions of corporate proxies.

Corporatis profitis is the modern large for-profit corporation. Its goal is short-term maximization of profits, which explains so much.

Intermediate cause 4. Lots of big money to control voters

The second cause of intermediate cause 3 is intermediate cause 4: a high level of corporate proxy money to control voter preferences to favor Corporatis profitis. Too much big money is being spent on controlling elections. If that’s the cause, then the low leverage point is obvious. Government needs to pass regulation to limit special interest money to control voter preferences. The usual superficial solution to do this is campaign finance reform.

Since it’s a superficial solution, campaign finance reform has failed just as badly as lobbying restrictions and regulatory capture prevention. Jocelyn Benson, in a paper on Saving Democracy: A Blueprint for Reform in the Post-Citizens United Era, summarizes the reasons for centuries of failure:

Since the founding of our democracy, attempts to curb the influence of money in the political process consistently fall short of their goal. In fact, a growing number of cynics see campaign finance reform—or any effort to reduce the impact of money in the political process—as inherently doomed to fail. The bulk of their argument is based upon the view that money is like water, and it will always find a way to influence the political ecosystem no matter how many barriers or regulations seek to mitigate that influence.

Money flows like water through the human system. Where it flows is determined by the incentives driving social agent behavior. Powerful monied special interests (large for-profit corporations and their main owners, the rich) have one top goal in mind: to maximize their power by maximizing their profits, income, and wealth. That causes a torrent of money to flow like water in order to ensure the election of politicians who mainly favor powerful monied special interests.

That torrent turned into a flood in January 2010 with the US Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Corporations had been chipping away for centuries at the rules of the game in order to tilt the system their way. Now they whacked down the biggest rule of them all. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can no longer be prohibited from promoting or defeating candidates in elections. Corporations could now spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. After the ruling, Senator John McCain somberly announced that “campaign finance reform is dead” (source).

Intermediate cause 5. The deepest intermediate cause at last!

We’ve been repeatedly asking “WHY does this occur?” in order to dig down to the deepest intermediate cause, below which lies the hard-to-find root cause. In this section we arrive at the deepest intermediate cause, which completes analysis of the superficial layer.

Intermediate cause 4 is a high level of corporate proxy money to control voter preferences to favor Corporatis profitis. WHY is that?

By now the answer is fairly obvious. The fifth intermediate cause is strong preference from corporate proxies to solve problems that would benefit the uncommon good of monied special interests.

That strong preference has not escaped the attention of progressive activists. This has led to the low leverage point of citizen actions to change corporate preference from undesired to desired behavior. This is done using superficial solutions that are forms of corporate social responsibility activism, such as boycotts, green investing, B Corporations, etc.

The leading solution to make corporations voluntarily change to desirable behavior is corporate social responsibility activism (CSR activism). This tries to push corporations into behaving in a socially responsible manner and self-manage their own social behavior. Good behavior is called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

CSR is essentially a voluntary form of losing money by taking action that would reduce profits. It has thus worked as well as a voluntary income tax would. In other words, it has failed:

A generation of activists has been raised on the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR)—that large corporations can be cajoled into [behaving better]. Where firms cannot be enticed, the strategy goes, they can be bullied. [Such as with boycotts, protests, lawsuits, movies, and books] to pressure companies [into good behavior]. Yet CSR campaigns have had limited success in actually changing corporate behavior in a meaningful way. More often than not, CSR crusades result in companies allocating a relatively small portion of their profits for public affairs advertising, community donations, and token changes—from signing on to “industry codes” to hiring CSR-focused senior executives or consultants. At the root of the problem is an inconvenient but implacable fact: Corporations care about profits. Corporations will not—and their shareholders do not expect them to—engage in behaviors that do not maximize profit. Indeed, shareholders would punish them if they did. In concept and in practice, therefore, CSR is at best a partial solution to solving social injustices and correcting for market externalities. (Source)

Main root cause 2. Mutually exclusive goals

By taking the time to learn from the past and analyze the superficial layer, we now have a laser beam pointing right toward main root cause 2. As the paragraph above said:

At the root of the problem is an inconvenient but implacable fact: Corporations care about profits. Corporations will not—and their shareholders do not expect them to—engage in behaviors that do not maximize profit.

Thus, part of the root cause is the corporate goal of profit maximization. But why can’t corporations also act in a socially responsibility manner, and get behind solving important common good problems like climate change, poverty, and systemic discrimination?

For the simple reason that solving those problems presents an irreconcilable conflict. Those problems are part of the goal of The People, also known as Homo sapiens. Applying the lens of systems thinking, we see that the goal of Homo sapiens is the long-term optimization of quality of life for all. That goal is mutually exclusive to the goal of Corporatis profitis, whose goal is the short-term maximization of profit. Unless the laws of physics change, both goals cannot be met. One or the other goal will prevail.

A fundamental principle of social system behavior is that over time, the goal of the dominant social agent in a social system becomes the implicit goal of the system. This raises a question: Who is the dominant life form, Corporatis profitis or Homo sapiens?

The winner is Corporatis profitis. The race is not even close:

Through their control of government, finance, business, and media, neoliberal adherents [corporate proxies] have succeeded in transforming the world into a globalized market-based system. The triumph of neoliberalism has led to the greatest inequality in history, where the world’s twenty-six richest people own as much wealth as half the entire world’s population. It also created the conditions for large transnational corporations to become the dominant force directing our world, more powerful than any government or nation. Through their influence on legislation, they have virtually eliminated regulatory limitations on their growth, their permissible industries, or their competitive playing field. Massive corporations are gobbled up by even vaster ones, creating commanding monoliths that set the terms for their own activities. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, sixty-nine are now corporations. (Source)

The corporate life form dominates the human system to such an extent that its goal has become the implicit goal of the system. Main root cause 2 is therefore: Mutually exclusive goals between Corporatis profitis and Homo sapiens. This causes the human system to have the wrong implicit goal, since Corporatis profitis is the dominant life form.

How dominant? One piece of evidence is quoted above, but here’s more. The fourth article presented four pieces of evidence to prove intermediate cause 1: Key government decisions that favor powerful monied special interests. The strongest was the first. A 2014 study statistically analyzed who was actually controlling policy in the US. The conclusion was:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy [Achieving their interests 78% and 43% of the time, see Table 4.], while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence [Achieving their interests 5% and 24% of the time.].

“Economic elites” are the rich. All are corporate proxies, since their income comes from large for-profit corporations. Corporations thus get their way 78% of the time on attempts to control policy, while average citizens get their way 5% of the time.

Which goal do we want to change to resolve main root cause 2? If “we” is The People, then it’s certainly not the goal of Homo sapiens. Thus, the goal of Corporatis profitis must be changed. Corporatis profitis is an artificial life form, so the high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. This includes not just corporations but robots and AI, two artificial life forms in ascendence.

This gives our central solution strategy: reengineer the modern corporation to have the correct goal, one that is fully aligned with the goal of Homo sapiens. This can be done by saying goodbye to Corporation 1.0, who was never properly engineered, and hello to Corporation 2.0, whose goal would be correctly engineered. That is the fundamental solution.

In the Corporation 2.0 solution, Corporatis profitis becomes Corporatis publicus, the most powerful public servant in the world. The explicit goal of a Corporation 2.0, as stated in its charter would be: To optimize long-term quality of life for all people and their descendants by serving its master, Homo sapiens, as best it can, in a socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable way. Its role is to do that by providing needed goods and services. This is the role of a trusted servant. It must be trustworthy because it has so much power.

The Corporation 2.0 solution element would be such a transformational change to the human system (and will provoke high change resistance from guess who) that it is treated at length in a later article.

This completes description of the social force diagram.

A comprehensive theory of the problem

The analysis presented above provides a comprehensive theory of the problem, one that goes far beyond any existing theory. Social force diagrams are so powerful they come with a built-in pattern for organizing that theory: the four forces of social force diagrams, as stated in the third article in this series.

The comprehensive theory of the Inability to Achieve Common Good Goals Problem is:

1. Social Force S. Why past solutions failed (S < R). – Due to lack of appropriate analytical methods, the fundamental layer of the problem was hidden by complexity. This caused problem solvers to be intuitively attracted to pushing on low leverage points with superficial solutions. The five sets of superficial solutions identified include all popular past solutions that I’m aware of except for two: critical thinking and media literacy training. These were addressed in discussion of the Truth Literacy Training solution.

2. Social Force R. Why the problem occurs (force R is unresolved). – The current system cannot achieve common good goals because of the two unresolved main root causes. Main root cause 1, low political truth literacy, was measured by the Truth Literacy Training experiment to be low.

Main root cause 2 is: Mutually exclusive goals between Corporatis profitis and Homo sapiens. This causes the human system to have the wrong implicit goal, since Corporatis profitis is the dominant life form. This root cause also clearly exists, as measured by Corporate profitis dominance in the 4 pieces of evidence for intermediate cause 1 listed in the fourth article.

3. Social Force F. Why fundamental solutions can be expected to succeed (F > R). – The long history of RCA has established the fact that all causal problems arise from their root causes, and that root causes can be routinely resolved with the appropriate mature process. If a root cause is identified using a rigorous form of RCA and the root cause hypothesis is tested by measurement and experimental application of solution elements, there is a high probability that the full-scale solution will work, though solution element adjustment is usually required.

Concerning main root cause 1, the Truth Literacy Training experiment provides initial proof that root cause can be resolved in a practical manner. Main root cause 2 can also be resolved, since Corporatis profits is an artificial life form created by and for Homo sapiens.

4. New Social Force R. Why the mode change will be relatively permanent (force F causes force R to transition to New R). – Resolving both root causes dramatically change feedback loop dominance, causing the system to lock into the new mode. This is so important let’s explain it in detail.

Correctly engineering democracy’s key feedback loop

A system dynamics simulation model called The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace shows that when political truth literacy changes from low to high, a striking mode change occurs. Loop dominance shifts from The Race to the Bottom Among Politicians to its opposing loop, The Race to the Top Among Politicians. Furthermore, the tendency of politicians to tell lies does not just fall to a low level. It disappears altogether, because now the winning strategy for politicians is telling the truth. Those who do not tell the truth die out. The effect is analogous to the eradication of smallpox.

Now consider the Growth of Plutocracy feedback loop, explained in article 4. Presently this loop is dominant.

It’s driven by intermediate cause 1, the Money Drives Politics Problem. Once the two root causes are resolved, so is intermediate cause 1. Loop dominance shifts to the Growth of Democracy loop as shown below:

The loops are symmetrical because each is a reinforcing loop that benefits a life form.

Both loops are controlled by their goals and the Level of Political Truth Literacy. Each goal controls who the system wants to elect. So that the two loops can be easily compared, the bottom node in the left loop has been changed from Money Drives Politics (as in article 4) to the one shown, which is intermediate cause 1. These are highly simplified causal loop diagrams and don’t show balancing loops.

Both loops work the same. The bottom node is key government decisions that favor plutocracy or the common good. As that increases, so does the key outcome, High Inequality of Wealth or The Common Good. As this goes up, so does the key motivator, power due to having lots of money or preference for Corporation 2.0 over 1.0. The latter goes up because 2.0 is obviously doing so much better to raise the common good.

As the motivators rise, so does election of politicians who favor plutocracy (if political truth literacy is low) or the common good (if it’s high). But this occurs only if the goal also motivates that election behavior. Presently there is no explicit Goal of Corporatis publicus. There are only the goals of non-profits and Benefit Corporations, who are too small in number and financial power to cause more than low amounts of election of politicians who strongly favor the common good.

But that changes radically once the main root causes are resolved with fundamental solutions. Modern democracy now has it’s correctly engineered key feedback loop, the Growth of Democracy. The Growth of Plutocracy loop collapses, because the Goal of Corporatis profitis no longer exists and political truth literacy is no longer low. Simultaneously, the Growth of Democracy loop soars, because now the explicit Goal of Corporatis publicus exists and political truth literacy is high. In the new mode, the desired symptoms are: Gradual solution of all problems hurting the common good.

That is a world that would be the greatest of pleasures to bequeath to the generations that come after us.

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