If you have a public permanently divided against one another because of the existence of 2 (or more) gigantic propaganda-spewing entities called "political parties" whose very reason for being is to perpetuate division and conflict and to compete against one another....then you can never have a positive, effective government...you can never have a truly united public (except in the case of a temporary dire outside threat such as is posed in a war or a great natural disaster)....and you can never have a sane, rational and responsible form of government.

Political parties are instruments of division, hatred, selfishness, and chaos. They do NOT secure democracy, liberty or freedom, they compromise it and threaten it in every way.

Have you ever seen a film about a Native culture, such as any of the North American Indian cultures....or the fictional culture presented in the film "Avatar"? Do you notice that these natural cultures which are the basic form of natural human development always function around a united council of citizens that represents the collective views of the whole community, with experienced elders usually having the most influence? Naturally, there are always differences of opinion in a community, and in a council, and those differences WILL be debated vigorously every time a matter comes up before council. But they will be debated by many free individuals whose loyalty is not to a political party or to some formalized hierarchical coalition...but to their own intelligence and conscience. Those individuals will not be artificially divided against one another on a permanent basis by party label or political affiliation. Therefore they will be free to think independently on every issue. Their professional future will not be imperilled by "breaking party ranks", no matter how they decide to vote on an issue. Their campaign funds will not come from a "party war chest".

Campaign funds should, in fact, come from a public purse....should be EQUAL for every candidate, and should be quite modest. All candidates should receive EXACTLY the same amount of air time and public exposure during an election, so no one has monetary advantages (which are just a way of rigging the election). A candidate's ideas and character and experience alone should be the only significant factors in getting him or her elected.

What has made everything I'm suggesting impossible in our society is the utterly corrupt and insane tradition that has grown up in relatively recent historical times of dividing a nation's politics up into competing party blocs and setting them AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC against one another in a battle royal where some bloc wins and another bloc loses.

That's stupid. It's destructive. It's entirely unnecessary. It's EXPENSIVE. It has destroyed the legitimacy of our governments and the trust of the public in government. It has destroyed public unity and fractured the public into separate groups who detest one another along party lines.

But you all take it for granted, because you grew up with that ludicrious system already in place around you and you thought "this is democracy".

Well, it isn't. It's insanity.

Now just let me roll it back to that Native tribe with their council. Just suppose that we "modern" idiots managed to convince a Native race like that to take their council system and arbitrarily divide it up into 2 or 3 competing political parties. Every council member would then be expected to work for his party from then on, ensure that his party won the next election, and if he didn't by God work for his party then he'd soon be kicked out of it and lose the professional friends he had there...and either have to join one of the other damned parties or quit politics altogether.

And what would you have happening in that Native tribe in just a few years that had never happened before? Hatred. Permanent division of the community into irreconcilable competitive blocs who couldn't stand each other and who worked from then on to attack each other, discredit each other, and cut each other down. You'd have political warfare such as had never been seen in that tribe before, and it would be enshrined and perpetuated by the party system. In a generation or two they would have forgotten that things had ever been any other way...and they'd be trapped in it.

As we are. We are trapped. We are living in a broken system that cannot function as a government ought to, because it is founded upon the very principle of division, and that leads directly to dishonesty, compulsion, influence-peddling, and graft.

I look at the society I'm living in and I know with no doubt in my mind that it's being run in an insane manner by millions of people who are lost in a dream of their own making. It makes me sick. I feel like an alien being who has woken up on a crazy planet filled with deluded people who have no idea what the hell they are even doing. I despair of it. There's nothing I can do except try not to let it get me down too much, and just attempt to make something of my own private life as best I can in a lunatic society. What else can you do when you're living in the village of the mad?