Politicians are either God or the Devil Himself, or, are they?

According to Aristotle, justice originated from the ideas that we created. When you say if

I would say that it is us, the public. It isn't an individual because that's not possible. However if everyone was to look out for eachother, then it might have been possible to have a just and and ompresent government. This way whatever the general public thought to be just would be considered just by the majority.

The idea behind this note is to think about creating incentives/institutions within the political structure rather than looking for someone. No single individual is capable of fixing a whole system, no matter how powerful or just he/she is.

Decentralized/Local Government is generally constituted with locals, that is, if you are a part of the local govt., your decision is going to affect you too. So, it's a better hypothesis that you will be more accountable than central govt.

Totally disagree! It's a favourite catchphrase of our politicians nowadays and perhaps for some of the elitist beneficiaries of the prevailing system too, but those jokers apart, this is a very erroneous view in my opinion, itself misguided. Criticism, judgements, moral judgements, whatever you call them - of politicians and leaders, is/are the most basic building block of a democracy, and a most desirable and commendable one in any '-cracy' whatsoever, in any situation whatsoever, in any country whatsoever, and irrespective of whether they bring any immediate or foreseeable positive results or NOT whatsoever! Without this practice of 'passing judgements' on politicians, political leaders, and on any public functionary - any system is bound to go to the drains. No high-flying (or whatever it is) solution will work then. It (not passing judgements) is THE most surefire way of sealing the fate of a country and a nation.

I disagree. Some people have more drive, more greed, more ambition for power and domination, etc than others. When two or more of these are combined with real power, the cocktail of those can and do make them a lot more or less human and good or bad than the rest. But this is not an inevitability.

I would contend you are partly right, but neither wholly nor necessarily. If the electorate don't have a better choice because of the manipulation of the electoral system or because of the overall prevailing system or political/economic environment which prevents the 'good' from entering into the foray, cripples him the moment he attempts to do any such thing, or strangles him into inconsequence even before he dreams of entering into the foray, then the electorate cannot be held fully responsible for the bad deeds of the politicians/leaders, neither can they be equated with them in a moral sense.

Politicians and leaders of a country have a lot more powerdrive and intelligence (at least in certain respects) than most. When this drive, intelligence (or cleverness if you prefer), opportunity and real power combine or coincide - they tend to create a monopoly of it for themselves and try their hardest to keep it to as smaller number of people as possible and prevent the rest from gaining it or entering into the club. Power has a certain dynamics of its own and is able to enforce and maintain a kind of exclusivity (hence the 'political/economic environment' I mentioned earlier), affording or enabling its holders or members to practice a lot of good or bad deeds without consequences effectively negative to themselves. But, this does not mean they "are only as good as the people who elect them", because as I have explained, with their monopoly or stranglehold over power they also can and do prevent, and create an overall/overarching environment that automatically prevents and filters out, 'good' or better alternatives or choices to themselves that the masses can have. This is surely a statement of weakness on the part of the electorate or common people, but 'weakness' does not equate to or can be compared to 'badness' (or 'goodness' for that matter). They are not the same thing.

I partially agree with you, we need self-correcting institutions. However, paying more to political post is something I completely disagree with. See, following your logic, you are assuming corruption in political post is a function of income only. Income, of course, an important variable but not the only one. Corruption is a multidimensional issue and the definition of honesty is very subjective. If there was an inverse relationship between income and corruption, you wouldn't hear about corporate corruption or wall-street scandals. So, I think, the focus should be more on creating incentives/institutions rather than simply focusing on income.

Thanks for reading and letting me know what you think.

"That's a mistaken assumption, I think."

I am just quoting you,

"They just hope against hope that, they would become a wee less dishonest and greedy and be a wee more humane in their virulently insatiable greediness, to allow the people a little more breathing space to survive a bit more tolerably. That's all!"

Now, the only difference I find between my assumption and your expectation is the degree of honesty, which again is very subjective and a topic of another debate.

"It could be true for teens and a minority of middle-class young adults, but I don't think the majority of adults harbour any such delusions or illusory expectation nowadays!"

Even if i agree with you, it's very important to understand what and how "teens" in our country (both rural and urban) think since they are the future representation and I also think that the proportion of middle class young adults to the population as a whole, who may think this way, is large.

Now, in this note, I am not trying to defend corrupt politician. I am just trying to say that expecting any kind of altruistic behavior from the politician should be non-subjective (from our part) and incentive driven (from their part), just like any other profession.