Human societies are governed by complex rules that we call our socioeconomic system. The political and economic aspects, democracy and capitalism in the Free World, are its two fundamental pillars.
We tend to focus on individuals, but we need to focus more on the system. It is not as natural, as our brain is wired to react to other humans, but it is crucial. The general consensus is that politicians of all sides are incompetent and corrupt. Are all humans like that? No. So clearly, we have a system that selects for this type of person, and we need to change that.
But this negative selection bias might also conceal a tendency to oversimplify problems others must solve. The idea that people in charge are malicious and stupid is easy to hold, until we are responsible for a large project. Then it suddenly becomes clear how challenging it is to manage all stakeholders, and how we are cornered into making suboptimal decisions. The real world is just hard and messy.
While systems were initially built to fit around one individual (typically a king or emperor), it got out of hand, and the situation has reversed: people in power now fit into the system. Conspiracy theories often assign blame to individual people because that makes so much more sense to our primal brain, but that is simply not true. Everyone, even Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, is a little lost in our world, and none of us fully understands it. It is similar to the way we all rely on computers everyday, even though no single individual can fully grasp all of their components. We build and build on top of each other’s work until we do not understand anything anymore.
If you want to live in a world with a better system, join the evolution.