Let’s assume they are all driven purely by the desire to help the country.
Let’s not assume that, it seems to be incredibly false, and borderline incoherent. They are all driven by different private and public beliefs about which subsets of “the country” are more important than the others. Literally zero “leaders” live anywhere near the median of their populace in terms of wealth or luxury.
There are some legitimate differences in beliefs of policy-contingent measurable outcomes. But most of the power struggle is about power itself, and about how to help the favored/pivotal supporters in order to gain/keep power.
The situation in the real world isn’t as neat as in my thought experiment, but we still see the same dynamic, where people with the same goals end up fighting each other. It’s a hyperbolized example meant to highlight that particular dynamic as clearly as possible, but I don’t claim it’s the only one.
people with the same goals end up fighting each other
From this I think the far more correct conclusion is that their goals are not the same, but only superficially appear the same. While their real goals, in a more Hansonian sense, deal far more with increasing personal status and the like (instead of whatever lofty policy ambitions they advocate in public).
When writing the article, I assumed that politicians’ altruism reflects the distribution of altruism among the general population, but then I remembered that practically every dictator is concerned only with plundering their country.
Still, a lot of goals are shared by all voters, yet some support one set of politicians while others back their opponents. I acknowledge that there is a genuine value difference between the right and the left—nationalism versus internationalism, in the sense of how much importance is placed on the lives and happiness of foreigners. But there is also a clash over economic issues, and everyone would be better off if both the left and the right understood the point of my article and became less certain in their economic ideas.
Let’s not assume that, it seems to be incredibly false, and borderline incoherent. They are all driven by different private and public beliefs about which subsets of “the country” are more important than the others. Literally zero “leaders” live anywhere near the median of their populace in terms of wealth or luxury.
There are some legitimate differences in beliefs of policy-contingent measurable outcomes. But most of the power struggle is about power itself, and about how to help the favored/pivotal supporters in order to gain/keep power.
The situation in the real world isn’t as neat as in my thought experiment, but we still see the same dynamic, where people with the same goals end up fighting each other. It’s a hyperbolized example meant to highlight that particular dynamic as clearly as possible, but I don’t claim it’s the only one.
From this I think the far more correct conclusion is that their goals are not the same, but only superficially appear the same. While their real goals, in a more Hansonian sense, deal far more with increasing personal status and the like (instead of whatever lofty policy ambitions they advocate in public).
When writing the article, I assumed that politicians’ altruism reflects the distribution of altruism among the general population, but then I remembered that practically every dictator is concerned only with plundering their country.
Still, a lot of goals are shared by all voters, yet some support one set of politicians while others back their opponents. I acknowledge that there is a genuine value difference between the right and the left—nationalism versus internationalism, in the sense of how much importance is placed on the lives and happiness of foreigners. But there is also a clash over economic issues, and everyone would be better off if both the left and the right understood the point of my article and became less certain in their economic ideas.