Political Robots

The Three Laws of Political Parties

Decades ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created his famous “Three Laws of Robotics” that he believed should govern the behavior of robots in their interaction with humanity. Those laws were:

One: A robot must never cause a human harm, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

Two: A robot must obey all orders given it, except where to do so would violate the first law.

Three: A robot must protect itself, except where to do so would violate the first or second law.

In Asimov’s fictional universe, these laws were universal and were hardwired into every robot by the people who designed and built them, acting under the constraints of the laws of their society, the regulations of their profession, and the accepted morality of that fictional society.

In the real world, the world you and I live in, it would be naive to expect anything, real or artificial, to obey such civilized restrictions on their behavior. 

Political parties, for example, They seem to obey something similar to Asimov’s three laws, but with reversed priorities. These “Three Laws of Political Parties” can, I believe, be stated thusly;

One: A political party will protect its own existence, and its hold on power, first and foremost.

Two: A political party will obey the will its membership, except when to do so would violate the first law.

Three: A political party must act for the general welfare, except where to do so would violate the first or second law.

Political parties, like Asimov’s robots, are artificial constructs intended to service us. But unlike them, political parties have no built-in morality, no pre-programed constraints on their behavior that forces them to behave at all times in our best interest rather than their own.

It is hard to deny the fact that the two dominant political parties in America, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, have taken on an existence beyond anything intended by their founders. They appear to be working toward the preservation of their own power, their own hold on the people, rather than working for the benefit of those people.

I think that that is the reason that this is such an interesting year, politically. There are candidates in both major parties who are running very much against the established political order in their respective parties, and one of them (Donald Trump) appears to have all but locked down his party’s nomination. On the other side, it’s a two-candidate race between outsider Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, with Clinton representing the established order in her party (and make no mistake...there is an “Establishment” in the Democratic Party, no matter what Hillary would have you believe).

There’s one more point I’d like to make about my hypothetical Three Laws of Political Parties...parties that follow such laws ultimately fail. A political party cannot exist without a loyal membership, and a party that places its own existence above the welfare of its membership will eventually lose that loyalty and ultimately its membership.

That’s what we’re seeing in this political year; the people are deserting the established order in both parties in favor of outsiders who challenge said order. The very rules by which parties have always operated have failed them in the face of candidates who simply will not play the game according to established, though largely unwritten, rules and codes of conduct.

It is perhaps naive of us to expect our political creations to be anything but a reflection of our own values; whatever else political parties may be they are creations of human frailty and cannot help but reflect that frailty back at us. If they are ultimately self-destructive, what then of us?

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.