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MarkusRamikin comments on Have no heroes, and no villains - Less Wrong
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No-one is a villain in their own mind, of course.
I've spent several years deep in the bowels of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. (It's jolly good and I'm very proud to have had some small part in what we've achieved and continue to achieve.) Wikipedia has the rule "assume good faith", which is of course a restatement of Hanlon's razor, "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice." Wikimedia is 100% made of sincere people who really believe in what they're doing. Per Dumas' razor, "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, as rogues sometimes rest," this means that when one of these sincere, smart, dedicated people is doing something that's actually blitheringly stupid, it's ten times as hard to get across to them that they are in fact having a towering attack of dumbarse.
Every politician I've ever met has in fact been a completely sincere person who considers themselves to do what they do with the aim of good in the world. Even the ones that any outsider would say "haha, leave it out" to the notion. Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.
There are few, if any, villains. There are people being stupid and foolish. These are frequently us. LessWrong's catalogue of cognitive biases is to remind you that you, yes you, are in fact an idiot. As am I.
The hard part is to set the bozo bit on people in parts, rather than over the whole person. And allow for the notion of cluifiability.
This is patently, staggeringly false. Politics isn't Wikimedia. There are completely different motivations, rewards and therefore different people get into it. There is money, power, status involved and it's a competitive setting.
What do you think politicians think of themselves when they deceive, become corrupt, sacrifice the interest of the state for that of their own or their party, or go into the pocket of another nation/businessman/organised crime? Calling them "sincere" and acting for the good of the world sounds naive, like you don't believe in the existence of cynical people. As long as the interest of someone else than the voter is being served, and the voter is being deceived about that, that's not sincerity.
EDIT: the amount of upvotes the parent comment got is a bit scary. Either I'm missing something important, or there's a lot of very innocent readers around...