Same Gravity

P0.6: Why saints hit the ground too

We’ve been told for decades that if we elect better people, government will work better.

That’s not true.

And it’s not failing because people are bad—it’s failing because of how it’s built.

I’ve been trying to explain this for months. Every time I try, it doesn’t land. People nod politely. Then they go back to arguing about which candidate would be better, or ranting about the villain du jour.

So let me try a different approach. I’m going to walk you through what I’m seeing, step by step. At the end, I want to know: can you see it too? And if not—what am I missing?

If you do see it, then we can start asking the real questions together.

Here’s the claim: The way government actually functions is closer to physics than philosophy.

In philosophy, there aren’t right or wrong answers. It’s perspectives and endless debate.

In physics, there ARE right or wrong answers. Systems have properties. Those properties produce predictable outcomes. You can study them. You can understand them. And—here’s the hope—you can change them.

Over the decades of watching government and politics, I have concluded that it is much closer to the second thing. Not the values part—what we SHOULD do. But the mechanics part—how decisions actually get made, how legislation actually gets produced. That’s not random. That’s not a philosophical conundrum. That’s a system with properties.

Let me show you what I mean.

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Two Systems That Make the Sausage

First, let’s agree on what I mean by “legislation.”

When I say legislation, I mean the rules that citizens and businesses must follow. If you don’t comply, you can be held accountable. Fines. Penalties. Consequences.

The Constitution said Congress would write these rules. That’s the original system.

But along the way, Executive Orders got introduced. The President issues an order. Government departments and agencies adopt that order as policy. Citizens and businesses comply—or face consequences.

In practice, Executive Orders often function like legislation—creating binding rules that citizens and businesses must follow. Whether Congress writes a bill or the President signs an Executive Order, the result is the same: rules you have to follow.

So we have two systems for making the sausage. Let’s look at how they actually work.

The President System: One Light Switch

Think of a light switch. Flip it one way, the light turns on. Flip it the other way, it turns off.

The President System works like that.

• The country elected Trump

• Trump issued tariff orders

• Departments and agencies collected the tariffs

• Citizens and businesses paid (or faced consequences)

• If we’d elected someone else, we almost certainly wouldn’t have tariffs

One input. One output. You can see the cause and effect.

This isn’t because the executive branch is better designed overall—it’s because the decision-making path is shorter and more visible. And that visibility is part of why authoritarianism has been gaining ground globally. It’s not just that strongmen are appealing. It’s that one-switch systems are transparent. You know where the rules came from. You can trace cause to effect. Your vote changed something you can point to.

The Congress System: 435 Switches with Hidden Wiring

Congress is completely different.

Imagine 435 light switches—one for each House member. But here’s the problem: there’s wiring behind the wall you can’t see.

You flip your switch. But you don’t know:

• Which combination of switches will actually turn on the light

• What the hidden wiring is doing to your signal

• Why flipping your switch doesn’t seem to change anything

This is why Congress has terrible approval ratings. People in each state flip their switches—they elect their representatives—but they can’t see what’s happening behind the wall. Flipping switches starts to feel random.

It’s not random. There’s a system back there. The wiring follows rules. But if you can’t see the wiring, you can’t understand why your switch doesn’t do what you expected.

Here’s what I see behind the wall: Rules, incentives, and pressures that shape what legislators do—regardless of who they are.

Let me show you what I mean.

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The Wiring Behind the Wall

Imagine your state elects a saint. Not a politician—someone with genuine integrity, the values you wish every representative had.

They arrive in Washington. They’re one of the 435 switches.

Here’s what they find behind the wall:

The Budget Process

The federal government doesn’t run on autopilot. If Congress doesn’t pass a budget by the deadline, operations stop. Shutdown.

Your saint didn’t design this. They can’t unilaterally change it. It’s part of the wiring.

When the deadline approaches and negotiations collapse, your saint can vote no on a bad deal. The shutdown happens anyway. The light turned on—partially because of how some of the other 434 switches were set, but largely because of how the wiring works.

Bundling

Your saint wants to vote yes on some things and no on others. Too bad.

Legislation comes bundled. Massive packages. Thousands of pages. The wiring only allows all-or-nothing.

Leadership uses this strategically. They bundle things so that any vote is painful. Your saint faces impossible choices—designed to be impossible.

Seniority and Party Pressure

Your saint discovers how power actually flows:

• Committee assignments come from party leadership

• Campaign resources flow through party channels

• The longer you serve, the more influence you accumulate

The wiring rewards loyalty and longevity. It punishes defiance.

Here’s what this means for YOU as a voter: The system makes it rational to re-elect the same people over and over. A 20-year incumbent has more power than a freshman. Replace them, your district loses influence.

The pressures shape not just how legislators behave—but how it’s rational for voters to behave.

Transparency (That Backfires)

Every vote is recorded. Sounds good, right? Accountability.

But every vote also becomes attack ad material.

If your saint represents a purple district, they face impossible math: vote against their constituents or against their party. If your saint represents a safe district, the math is easier but no less perverse: vote with the party even against their constituents’ interests, or face primary threats from the flank.

We see this constantly. Consider Senator Mike Lee of Utah. Utah—a red state—has been hailed for its mail-in voting system, leading the nation as an example of how to do elections well. And now Senator Lee is pushing legislation that would cripple that very system. He chose to align with the President and party leadership to actively harm something his own state built and his own constituents rely on.

Whether you agree with the policy or not, what matters here is the pattern: that’s not a character flaw. That’s the wiring working exactly as designed. The pressure to align with party leadership overwhelmed representation of state interests.

The Result

There are many other pressures and incentives legislators face, including, but not limited to:

• Fundraising demands (30+ hours per week dialing for dollars)

• Lobbyist access and revolving door incentives

• Media dynamics that reward conflict over compromise

• Primary election timing and mechanics

• Committee jurisdictions that fragment coherent policy

• The filibuster and other procedural chokepoints

Each of these is something your saint can’t individually change, but each shapes their behavior.

Notice what all of these have in common:

• None are controlled by the individual legislator

• All create predictable behavioral pressure

• All persist regardless of who is elected

Your saint is one switch among 435. The wiring behind the wall determines which combinations produce which outcomes.

Within months, your saint is behaving like everyone else. Not because they sold out. Because the wiring shapes the behavior.

You can swap out all 435 switches. If the wiring stays the same, the outcomes stay the same.

This is what I mean when I say “it’s not a personnel problem, it’s a system problem.” Not vague frustration. Specific wiring. Specific pressures. Specific outcomes.

What “Structure” Means

All of this—every pressure, every rule, every incentive—combines into something we rarely name: structure.

The combination of these rules, procedures, pressures, and incentives is what I mean when I say “the structure” of something. When I say something structural is failing, I’m saying the current combination isn’t producing the intended result. And when structure fails, outcomes fail—no matter who’s in the system.

Here’s an example: The Constitution created checks and balances between the branches. It was predicated on the idea that members of Congress would act to check the actions of the executive branch.

But now members of Congress are reluctant to check the executive branch when their team’s member is president. (Remember how committee assignments and campaign resources flow through party leadership?) The incentives in the wiring have overwhelmed the designed check.

This is a structural failure. The Congressional check on Executive power is functionally weakened—not because the people are bad, but because the wiring produces different behavior than the founders anticipated.

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You Can’t Out-Jump Gravity

Everyone keeps thinking: if we just find the right person—someone with real integrity, real courage—they’ll fix it.

This is like thinking: if we just find a better jumper, they won’t hit the ground.

But gravity doesn’t care how good your jumper is. Gravity pulls everyone down.

The wiring behind the wall works the same way. Budget deadlines. Bundling. Party control. Seniority incentives. Every legislator faces the same gravity. Every legislator hits the ground.

But Here’s the Difference

Gravity is a natural law. We can’t change it.

The wiring behind Congress? That was designed by people.

The budget process that allows shutdowns? Congress created it. Congress could change it.

The bundling that forces all-or-nothing votes? That’s a procedural choice.

The seniority system? The transparency rules? All designed. All changeable.

This Is What Bridges Do

A bridge is how you overcome gravity.

Think about it. A tractor-trailer drives over an overpass. Forty tons. Gravity wants to smack it to the ground. But the bridge handles it.

Gravity is still there. The bridge doesn’t eliminate gravity. It creates a structure that lets you stand under a forty-ton vehicle as it passes safely over your head.

The same way we can design and build beams and girders and supports—and combine them to build a bridge that handles known loads—we can design rules, policies, procedures, and incentives that produce better outcomes.

Just like we know a beam of given material, shape, and dimensions will support a given load, we know that certain transparency policies will put pressure on legislators to posture. We can predict it. We can measure it. And we can design around it.

This is engineering, not philosophy.

The Hole I’m Trying to Show You

Here’s the hole in American democracy that almost nobody sees:

Congress is dysfunctional to the point of paralysis. And the solution we’ve been told our whole lives—elect the right leaders—won’t work.

The hole is this: we’re trying to fix outcomes by changing people, when the system is what’s producing those outcomes.

The wiring determines the outcomes more than the people do. You can’t out-jump gravity.

If we want a system where voting for elected officials produces legislation that reflects the collective interests of the citizenry, we need different wiring.

The fundamental ideas the founders put in the Constitution are solid. But they were limited by what they could foresee. And the world has changed drastically.

As I wrote in “Wet Ashes”: the original system was designed for correction, not prevention. That made sense in the 18th century. But in the 21st century, billions of dollars in potentially unconstitutional tariffs can be collected before any correction happens—and even then, the correction is only partial. The money can’t be returned to the people who paid it. The pace of modern governance has outrun the pace of constitutional correction.

We need to update the system.

The bridge can be fixed. The wiring can be changed.

But first, we have to see that there’s a problem with the wiring—not just the switches.

About Those Midterms

Right now, many people are looking toward the 2026 midterms. They’re hoping that if we can just elect different people—people with integrity, people who will push back—we can start turning off the lights we don’t want and turning on the lights that got turned off.

I understand the hope. I share it.

But those new representatives are going to encounter the same wiring. The same budget process. The same bundling. The same party pressure. The same transparency traps.

Within months, they’ll be behaving like everyone else. Not because they sold out. Because the wiring shapes the behavior.

If we want different results, we need to change the wiring—not just the switches.

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Can You See It?

That’s what I’m seeing. Government isn’t a philosophical conundrum. It’s a system with wiring. The wiring produces predictable outcomes. Right now, the wiring is producing dysfunction—regardless of who we elect.

This is more like physics than philosophy. And that’s actually hopeful. Because systems can be understood. And systems can be redesigned.

We don’t need 100 million people to become structural engineers. We just need enough people to stop yelling at the jumper and start looking at the bridge.

Can you see the hole? Does this make sense? I’ve been trying to explain this for months. If something’s not clear—if there’s something I’m missing—tell me. Leave a comment. I want to understand where the gap is.

Because once you see it, the question changes—from “who should we elect?” to “how should this system be designed?” And once enough people say the system should change, we can start figuring out how to make it happen.