I feel you, this is partly why I don't follow politics or the news. Politicians are great projection screens for my unconscious guilt or whatever, great ways for me to feel justified in my anger but in the end myself and everyone else worse off for it. I'll take a crack at your questions, although for me "UpTrust" is basically my attempt to answer all of them at a practical level:

How do we create unity? We learn to take more self-responsibility for our own pain and suffering, we learn to listen, to steelman, and disagree with respect and without forgetting what we share. We learn how to set and enforce boundaries and accountability without resorting to anger, name-calling, or making anyone else wrong. (Maybe this is just because I'm father of a 2 year old and 4 year old haha, but I agree with you honestly both sides of American politics often feel like they're operating from the toddler level). We keep asking "what's it really for?" and we remember what you said about our children, and their children, and focus on that long term.

How do we align the government with the will of the people? We leverage technology, like Audrey Tang with Polis (check out this: "By systemically applying such bridge-making algorithms, public trust climbed from 9 percent in 2014 to over 70 percent by 2020. We showed that the best way to fix a system is to build a better one.")

How do we bring corporate power and institutional motives back into balance with humanity? I think Eric Ries' upcoming work on Incorruptibilite organizations is the right direction (he'll be doing an AMA here on UpTrust next Wednesday Feb 4th at 3p Central); but I think there's a lot more work to be done to shift the incentive landscapes that push in the wrong direction. UpTrust's success will be a small part of this; we need companies in every industry outcompeting the incumbents while being wildly mission aligned. And we need new policies and laws, probably a mix of "left" style limitations on campaign financing and "right" style limitations on government overreaching.

Also this is an unpopular opinion, but we should leverage social pressure... if you're super successful and you're not giving back in a creative or obvious way, then that's not cool. 😎

And how do we do all of this without shedding blood? We've got to stop demonizing the other side, but I think this only really happens by facing our inner demons. If we just try to "not demonize" others, all the stuff inside ourselves we're unwilling to feel that's getting put onto them will find somewhere else to go.

"Sometimes it feels like our fathers and forefathers have forsaken us." — I think this is true, so it's time for us to step up and be the fathers.

All that said, a friend of mine likes to say "it's much more simple than that. Just love everyone, all the time, no exceptions." I think she's wiser than I.

I'm with you in prayers my friend scuba steve!

government reform