Why Politicians Won't See Eye to Eye | Simon Sinek

Change starts at home.

Saying that the politicians have to change, everybody knows that, but they're not going to because they have become more finite minded, which is an election is a finite game. There's a beginner, there's a beginning, middle and end, and there's a winner and there's a loser. But the minute you win your election. Now, governance is an infinite game, but the problem is they don't make that conversion. And it used to be. It used to be. And I talked to some congressmen about this, some old timers, and they were explaining to me that back in the day, 80% of the negotiations would be done behind closed doors. And the last 20% was for the cameras. And now it's 100% for the cameras. And back in the day, the goal was that each party could go back to their constituents and say we won. And they could both go back and say we got what we wanted and appease their constituents. Now it's not enough to say we won. We also have to demonstrate that the other side lost, which is a finite mindset in an infinite game, which decreases trust, cooperation.

But if we want to go backwards and look to the root, I think that Contract for America back in the day.

One of the components of that, and this is not political, I don't care about the politics of it, but there was a component of it that said to congressmen, no longer don't move your family to Washington. When you get elected, stay home in your constituency. So now what happens is you have congressmen come to work for about three days in Washington, then fly home, and they're not meeting their constituents, they're fundraising for five days a week. Right. But the problem is, back in the day, they fought and they disagreed and they hated each other, but they sat in the bleachers together to watch their kids play baseball, and they went to the same PTA meetings and they were friends and they socialized. And it's really easy to compromise with a friend. And you could sit back and be like, I can't do that. You know, I can't do that. You know, but now there's no friendships. They don't know each other. They sleep on their couches at work, and they only know the people they hang out with, which is their own party. We don't want to go into gerrymandering as well. You know, we used to live in a world where, you know, we picked our electors, now our electors pick us. And so they don't work, they don't have blended districts anymore where they have to have a point of view that appeals to both sides. Both sides have gerrymandered the point. They only have to appeal to your own. So they've both gone more extremists. But to answer your question directly, without, you know, I'm sorry I had to go on the little diatribe, but the. To answer your question more directly, I think our politicians are a reflection of us. I think we get what we deserve. And this is. None of this is a surprise and none of this is an anomaly. It's all been a steady drum beat. If we just go back 40 years, you can see the steady drumbeat, Republican and Democrat, the steady drumbeat towards more and more finite. And it's just come to a head these days. It's been getting worse for decades, since basically the fall of the Berlin Wall. You can go back to about 1989.

Where it started, and we are the ones who are complaining. They need to compromise, they need to listen, they need to work across the aisle, they need to stop being less judgmental. Well, hello. We need to compromise, we need to listen, we need to work across the aisle, we need to be less judgmental. It's us. And I think change always starts at home.