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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1680801" data-attributes="member: 10201">I think you're putting the cart before the horse, or some such colloquiallism. That is, you don't need to play an RPG to get into someone else's head--and in token play, which is fairly common, you don't do so anyway. Rather, if you are good at getting into someone else's head, you'll probably enjoy RPGs. Not that RPGs can't be a tool for developing this, but i think you have to have the desire, if not the ability, first, and an RPG isn'tgoing to force you to develop the ability if you don't have the desire.And there're several things working against this. First, we have a winner-takes-all system at most levels of government, so there is no need to build consensus (as there often is in a proportional system)--you either have a majority, and can do what you want, or you don't and can't. Second, compromise is a dirty word in modern US culture--think of the colloquiallism "compromise means we both lose". Third, there's no such thing as becoming better-informed or more educated on a topic--once you have an opinion on a matter, it is virtuous to stick with it, and "flip-flopping" to change your opinion to accomodate new facts. Fourth, which ties in to the previous two, politicians get votes for sticking to their guns, regardless of validity of viewpoint, and lose votes for constantly evolving their stance in response to new information. And, fifth, seeing the other guy's POV is explicitly seen as being co-opted or betraying your constituency. We have an adversarial, rather than cooperative, style of gov't, where each representative is expected to fight for what is best for the specific people that voted for them, even if it's bad for all the rest of the people in the country. Thus the proliferation of porkbarrel, bizarre regional subsidies, and the like. If we did what was best for everybody, as a whole, we wouldn't simultaneously pay subsidies for rice fields in the South to be left fallow and for irrigation for rice fields in parts of CA that are technically desert (to borrow just one example). But we don't. We divide the whole contury up into little us-and-thems, and everybody fights.So, yes, i think that any sort of RPing, or even just empathy, would make a politician a better representative of the people. But, sadly, in the current system it'd probably make them a poorer politician. That is, they'd fall into the same sort of situation as Carter, where the ideals are so much at odds with the reality that the idealist actually does less good than the enlightened pragmatist.</blockquote>

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