Evolution is all about "what works" in the largest sense and politics is all about what minimally "doesn't work", i.e., it’s about minimizing failure. Obama may be the absolute bottom of the barrel, but the tragedy is that there's a world of slime festering under the barrel.

In fact, Obama "is" the barrel since there's nothing above him in the world of politics.

If evolution worked (or didn't work) like this, the Earth probably wouldn't have mammals, much less primates, or hominids, or human beings, because natural selection would have nothing to select.

It's hard to make a model of this, but everything would be "default" (like American politics). The "fittest", again by definition, would be in a "negative sense" selected out, and only the "lesser" would survive.

Perhaps most planets’ end up with "lesser of the evils" evolution, and slob around in a default world where the "path chosen" is always the lesser of the evils.

On our planet, at least, what makes this so terrible is that we think this is "progress". We think, for example, that electing Obama would be a kind of triumph, when the reality is that he's simply the one least like a human cockroach.

A lesser of the evils dynamic simply "leaves out" the fittest, so a lesser of the evils country would be strangely motivated. Why would people flood to the voting booths when "the fittest" is never a candidate?

Indeed, what is the payoff of lesser of the evils politics? Perhaps it is a compromise with a total dictatorship. After all, people do feel they have SOME input into their country, even though it's only the candidate who seems (only seems!) to be the least dishonest and repulsive.

Perhaps we could call this a lesser of the evils "Democracy". In other words a bare, bare minimum democracy.

Fortunately, nature transcends all this flummery and sets its sights unimaginably higher that the mere lesser of the evils.

It's a challenge to construct a model to capture all this. What would happen, for example, in a lesser of the evils war? The success options are simply deleted and what's left would be a list of "failure options" from which you must pick the least destructive choice to your side.

Of course, the other side is doing the same, so "failure minimization" is what rules this conflict.

So who wins and why? Not the side that succeeds the most, but the side that fails the least.

Of course, the REAL story here is that this idiot political game/war is all win/win for the 0.5% vampire elites. They get to keep living like Greek Gods, while the human race keeps wasting its substance in a brain dead democracy.

"Failing the least" is not the wise and sane civilization our Constitutional forefathers bequeathed to us.

And speaking of being selected out . . .

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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

<http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>