I had some thoughts on the US election as I woke up this morning. From the conversation I had with some coworkers and what the people on Live streams are saying, I think that people in the US believe in the system of the US government enough, that despite the fact they don’t like the president as a person, they still think the policies will be carried out according to their plan.

After many years of living in the US, I think people believe strongly in the system rather than the person who is making the decisions. Because the system is putting up enough barriers to direct whoever is in charge to make the correct decisions, the personality of the person in charge does not matter.

This is a strong contrast to the Chinese government for example, in which people believe that a good leader can direct the country to a much better place. And there are many old stories and historical comments that show strong favor of a leader that is compassionate and listen to the people.

But my question is that do we want to leave up to chance that we have a good person in the leading position. Would it better to have a system that makes sure the leader does not waver from the people’s interests, no matter how deranged they might be?

Being trained from a scientific background, I believe in the system of discovery. That we should experiment using systematic approaches, rather than design experiments depending on how we feel it should be. And we should collectively build a system that essentially guarantees things do not fail. And we should consider the said system to be our grand achievement for the government and society, not celebrating the individual who makes great decisions for us.

As I can think of it, nobody is perfect. And we certainly should not rely on the hope that any leader will be perfect.