driving a SUV alone in an urban environment is a wasteful and dangerous social marker, and we should find better displays of social worth.
the early greek democracies included a randomly-picked citizen in their decision making processes; such a citizen was called "the one chosen by the gods". the assumption here is that, while the information-gathering process still needs to be done by people trained to do so, the decision-making process can be done by people with basic intelligence—i.e. anyone.
it works for juries: we are very comfortable with the idea of trusting a possible life-changing punishment to a group of randomly-picked individuals. if anyone is deemed able to enact fair justice, why isn't that the case for the rest of our political bodies?
if we want a connected world, we need to connect all parts of it. it is expected that population flows would want to follow wealth flows. one of the main reasons why population flows (some call it immigration) might have negative impact on their host (host!) countries, is that they are still denied the possibility to access the wealth create; that is, the right to work (whether or not that work is done for money, or for happiness—see above).
and if that doesn't work, then we readjust, because systematic inconsistency is fertile ground for political violence, whether ground-up, or bottom-down.
there was a point in history during which white europeans believed black africans did not have souls. this seems absurd today. how absurd will it look in a couple of hundred years that we once thought non-human animals did not have souls either?
if you live somewhere, you probably know better than foreigners (governement officials) what is best for your neighborhood. while that knowledge might not be backed by numbers, it is backed by lived experience, itself a powerful means of understanding.
additionally, the residents of a country that came from somewhere else have forcibly uprooted themselves to get to where they are now, and that fact alone should be grounds to trust that they want to make the place where they live the best possible.
another problem that we are confronted with as societies is that everyone is the first human; that is, everyone has to learn everything that we as a group know, from the day they are born. everyone has to learn, experience, assess and re-assess values, morals and priorities.
while there is no radical solution to this problem, education can mitigate it by speeding up that process, and allowing future generations to stand on the shoulders of those that came before.
we spend most of our lives sleeping and working. while, as the great afro-american poet said, "sleep is the cousin of death", work is the majority of what we do on any given day. so perhaps we should start looking at the kind of work that is so unbearable that one is ready to give up absolutely any other possible lived experience to make it stop. and perhaps we'd look at those of us working as policeperson and farmers differently.
this means that we assume everyone is trying the best they can reasonably be asked to, and we do not expect less than that from anyone. perhaps this is also called "benefit of the doubt".