Blog #100--Needed: Trustworthy Third Party Arbiters

Most of us understand how difficult it can be to get people on opposite sides of any issue to find and accept compromise solutions to problems. Neither side wishes to lose, so they both argue their personal views vociferously, whether they are accurate or not. Biases can distort our perceptions of reality to favor our personal views, to the point where truths become lies. To counter our weaknesses, we have created referees, umpires, vote counters, judges, impartial negotiators and the like to arbitrate conflicts in a way that will permit the most accurate conclusions to emerge.

This use of third parties to help settle disputes has been a great help to the human race over the centuries, but it is far from a perfect system. The reason for this is simple: even the arbiters are human beings capable of distortions and bias. There is no one alive on Earth who is completely impartial and has perfect perception at all times.

Those who choose the middle ground for their professions come close to perfection part of the time, and in some cases most of the time. This has been demonstrated well in professional sports, where the use of video replays can be used to discover what really happened in the blink of an eye on the playing field. Baseball is an excellent example since there are now frequent interruptions of play to insure accurate calls. Despite our eyes seeing only blips of information and not a continuous movie of events, professional umpires have been proven accurate most of the time.

However, sometimes their calls are overturned, preventing a number of on-field brawls from erupting as used to be common. Not all calls are reviewable, so some mistakes remain unresolved. This includes ball and strike calls, which can vary from one umpire to another. Video replay isn’t a perfect system, but it increases the likelihood of accuracy, practically eliminates the role of biases among umpiring crews and gives players and coaches greater respect for their arbiters.

On rare occasions (based on the infrequency of arrests) an umpire or referee in a sporting event is found guilty of helping one team win by a certain margin to cover large bets by their benefactors. It is increasingly difficult to disguise a hidden agenda, given how most games are now on television and analyzed repeatedly by those who report on them. But the human element must always be considered. If a referee or umpire has incurred a large indebtedness, has a bias toward or against a team or is promised a large financial bonus for helping one team over another, he or she is susceptible to the advances of gamblers. One can never rule out this possibility.

The same is true for the court system of all countries on Earth. There are always a few judges who have a preference for one political point of view or have biases against certain types of people. Over the years, plenty of judges have proven to be unethical if not illegal in their handling of certain cases.

This is a problem whether judges are voted to their positions based on their political party preferences or nominated by politicians from those parties. Some crime families actually push their offspring into becoming lawyers and later judges to fix the system to their benefit. While there are certainly judges who wish to be fair and impartial to everyone, they seem to be in the minority in many parts of the world.

Some lawyers search for judges who tend to rule the way they wish them to before bringing their cases before a court. A number of innocent people have gone to jail, and many guilty parties have been found innocent in this far-from-perfect system. Some judges are looking for extra payouts in exchange for their decision-making, while others are blackmailed into favoring guilty parties. And some simply use their powerful positions to advance political leanings that run counter to long-established laws.

Vote counting is another area where an attempt is made to find fair and impartial people to make sure the voting is done properly. In the United States, volunteers serve as election judges and promise to allow all registered voters a chance to vote, once each, regardless of their political preferences. While there have been times when judges in some local elections have destroyed or changed ballots illegally, and sometimes hundreds or even thousands of voters have been prevented from voting, for the most part the volunteers have done their jobs properly.

Unfortunately, technological advancements have made the system less accurate over time. Electronic voting machines may make life easier for vote counters, but it has been shown repeatedly that these machines can have back doors where an election judge or other official can arbitrarily change votes from one party to another. In these cases, people may think they voted for the politicians they prefer to run their governments, but their votes went to some other candidate.

And even if the votes are counted accurately in local areas, vote tabulations for national offices, in the United States at least, are then sent to a company that compiles them for the entire nation. If that company is owned by people with a political bias, subtle changes in vote totals can be made without anyone else knowing what has happened. Since they are concerned only with elections in tight races in selected areas, relatively minor changes in vote totals can reverse the results of an entire election without the general public sensing a problem.

Even those who have advanced college training as arbiters can have biases that influence how they lead opposing parties into a compromise agreement. Are they truly wishing both sides to feel like they got something to balance what they gave up to reach compromise, or do they make subtle attempts to skew the results toward one side over the other? They are not trained to prefer one group over another, but they are humans who are just as imperfect as the rest of us.

There is only one third party that is truthful and accurate at all times and has our own best interests at heart. That is our own higher selves, the synthesis between our two opposite halves. It is one with our creator and the entire universe. It will not always let us have our way since that is unfair to others when they have out-performed us. But it will tell us the truth. Sadly, it is often our last resort when confronted with problems in our lives. Even those hired to be arbiters are more likely to believe their egos than their higher selves.

Until we begin to discover the truth of ourselves and our world, we will continue to find arbiters playing an imperfect role for us. Most are doing the best they know how, but perfection is impossible with the human ego. Once we decide we want accuracy all the time and are willing to accept the consequences of our actions, we will allow our higher selves to do the arbitrating between our two opposite perspectives. That is when real progress can be made.

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