reflection and choice

Four days ago
wrote in my Practice Notebook --
It's in human nature to fuss. Complain, bitch, criticize others.
It's not my favorite part of human nature.
After all, as Katharine Hepburn's character says in the film The African Queen: "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above."
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When they were setting up democracy in Ameica they had to anticipate aspects of "human nature" (selfishness, potential power-grabs) and deal with them preemptively, as they rolled out the bold, audacious New Idea. We can observe Alexander Hamilton doing this in the following -- the first two paragraphs of the first letter in The Federalist Papers:

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After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.
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!! Gotta watch out for those -- views, passions, and prejudices which are "little favorable to the discovery of truth."

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