Tend the Soil, Don’t Just Curse the Weeds

Last week, someone I respect — someone smart, informed, engaged — called politicians “elected oligarchs.” The crowd chuckled. A few people nodded. It got the easy laugh these lines always get.

I am tired of it.

My colleagues and I hear some version of this every week. In workshops with civil society and business executives. In calls with funders. In green rooms before panels. At dinners with caring, thoughtful people who would never be this fatalistic about any other field that so fundamentally shapes human life.

“You can’t train politicians.”

“The people who want power only want it for ego.”

“They’re all elected oligarchs. Always have been.”

We’ve heard it so many times we’ve started cataloging the variations. The resigned shrug. The knowing laugh. The person who delivers it like a difficult truth no one else is brave enough to say. Sometimes the cynicism arrives dressed as sophistication, as innovation. Sometimes, as dark humor. Sometimes, it’s something closer to grief.

And I want to say something direct: it’s a cheap line. It gets a nod, but it lacks precision and curiosity. From people as smart as the ones saying it, I expect better.

Because “elected oligarchs” — really? All of them?

• Václav Havel, who went from prison to the presidency and dismantled a totalitarian state without a shot being fired — an oligarch?

• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who inherited a country shattered by civil war and rebuilt Liberia’s institutions while fighting Ebola —in it for herself?

• John Lewis, who was beaten nearly to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spent sixty years in public service — just ego?

• Barack Obama, who was raised by a single mother, became the first Black president in American history, and spent eight years governing under a level of obstruction and racial hostility that would have broken most people — just chasing status?

• Helen Clark, who served nine years as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, then led the United Nations Development Program for eight more, dedicating three decades to public service when she could have walked away at any point — in it for the money?

• Angela Merkel, a doctor in quantum chemistry from East Germany who led Europe’s largest democracy for sixteen years, navigated the eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, and a pandemic, and left office voluntarily with her integrity intact — addicted to power?

• Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison, walked out without bitterness, negotiated the end of apartheid, served one term as president, and stepped down when he could have ruled for life — another strongman?

(And these are just the names you know. In every country, there are mayors, city council members, and local representatives whose constituents could tell you exactly the same kind of story. You’ve just never heard of them.)

You don’t have to agree with every decision these people made. I don’t.

But if you cannot distinguish between these leaders and the ones who disgust you, your analysis is not sharp. It’s lazy. And lazy analysis of politics is something we can no longer afford.

My colleagues and I work with political leaders across the globe — training them, studying them, sitting with them through crises and failures and moments of extraordinary courage. Some are deeply flawed. Some are remarkable. Most are mixtures. That is what humans are.

But the story that everyone in politics is irredeemable? That story is wrong. And it is doing catastrophic damage.

A 2025 Pew Research Center study across 25 countries found that majorities in 20 countries believe their political systems need major reform or complete change. In seven nations — including the United States, Greece, and France — roughly half or more wanted reform and didn’t believe it could happen. Across all 25 countries, a median of nearly half of adults said few or none of their elected officials are honest.

And nowhere is this belief system more entrenched than in Pakistan — the country where the experiment I’m about to describe took place. A 2023 Gallup survey found that 88% of Pakistanis believe corruption is widespread in their government, and 70% lack confidence in the honesty of their elections. If cynicism about politics can be shifted there, it can be shifted anywhere.

This isn’t just frustration. This is a belief system. And I’m going to show you, with one study, exactly how much that belief system costs us.

Imagine two gardens. The first has healthy soil, clean water, sunlight, and care. A wide range of plants can grow there. The second is toxic — depleted soil, contaminated water, hostile weather, and broken fencing. Over time, only the hardiest, most aggressive weeds survive.

Now imagine standing in front of that second garden and concluding: See? The problem is the plants.

That is how we talk about politics. We blame the people. We almost never examine the soil.

But there are two things the cynics never reckon with — and both are backed by hard science.

The first: your brain rewards helping other people. This is not a metaphor. The same reward circuits that fire when you receive food or money also activate when you cooperate, give, or help — brain imaging studies have shown this consistently across charitable donation, cooperation, and costly helping tasks. The idea that humans are fundamentally and only selfish is not just cynical. It is actually biologically wrong.

The second: environments shape which impulses win. Decades of behavioral research show that people adapt to whatever system they’re inside — its incentives, its norms, what it rewards, what it punishes, what it destroys. Put the same person in a system that rewards performance and punishes vulnerability, and you get one kind of behavior. Put them in a system that rewards contribution and protects integrity, and you get another. Both of those impulses — self-interest and service — live in all of us. The soil determines which one grows.

So what happens when you actually change the soil?

If you take one thing from this piece, take this.

In the lead-up to Pakistan’s 2015 local government elections, researchers Saad Gulzar and Muhammad Yasir Khan ran a randomized controlled trial across 192 villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, working with 9,310 ordinary citizens, none of whom were political party workers or had planned to run for office. Trained canvassers visited each citizen at home and encouraged them to consider standing for their village council. The question the researchers wanted to answer was simple: Does the way we talk about politics change who enters politics?

In one set of villages, canvassers framed political office the way most people already see it — around personal returns: the status, respect, and influence that come with holding a seat. In another set, they framed it around prosocial motives: the chance to serve the community, to improve public services, and to deliver for people who needed it. The researchers varied how the message was delivered: in some villages, canvassers spoke to citizens privately; in others, they spoke to them publicly, in front of neighbors.

Then they waited to see who actually ran, who won, and — a year later — how those who took office actually governed.

Three things happened when politics was framed as service.

1. Different people ran. Candidacy went up by 1.8 percentage points—an 86% increase over the baseline rate in personal-framing villages.⁷ Small in absolute terms, enormous in relative terms: nearly twice as many people stepped forward to run. And the people stepping forward were specifically more prosocial than candidates who would have been recruited under the status quo. Not just more candidates. Different candidates.

2. Those people won. The probability of being elected rose by 1.2 percentage points—a 120% increase against the personal-framing baseline.⁸ Voters chose them.

3. Those leaders actually governed differently. This is the part that stops me every time. A year later, the researchers measured the gap between what citizens said they wanted their council to spend money on and what councils actually spent money on. In villages where politics had been framed around service, that gap closed by roughly 15%. Not because citizens’ preferences shifted: citizen preferences in social-framing villages were nearly identical to those in personal-framing villages. The politicians changed. Better people entered, and they made better decisions.

And here’s the finding that has the deepest implications: none of this worked when the framing happened only in private. It worked when it happened publicly — when canvassers made that same case in front of the person’s neighbors, so the community’s shared narrative about what politics is for changed. When everyone in the village heard the same reframing, the entire selection dynamic shifted. Communities coordinated around candidates committed to the public good. Social expectations changed. And the people who stepped forward were people who, under the old narrative, would have stayed home.

Let me say that plainly. A single shift in how a community talked about politics — from “it’s about status” to “it’s about service” — changed who ran, who won, and how they governed. In a rigorous, peer-reviewed, randomized experiment.

Change the story, and you change who shows up.

Keep telling the old story, and you keep getting the old result.

This is what the cynics miss. Or refuse to see.

Every time someone says, “all politicians are corrupt,” it gets slightly more likely that the person in their life who could be extraordinary in office decides not to try. Every time we treat political ambition as inherently suspect, we reinforce the filter that screens out the people we say we want.

My colleagues and I see this constantly. We meet people who would be remarkable leaders — principled, skilled, motivated by service — and they tell us they won’t enter politics because of how it’s perceived. Not the work. The story.

Cynicism doesn’t describe reality. It produces it.

And it doesn’t just keep good people out. It drives people toward autocrats. When citizens stop believing democratic politics can deliver — when they decide every politician is a fraud and every institution is captured — the strongman who says “I alone can fix it” starts to sound less like a warning and more like a relief. The road from “they’re all corrupt” to “at least this one is honest about power” is shorter than any of us wants to admit.

You don’t just repeat the cynicism. You become the toxic soil. And then you point at the weeds and say I told you so.

Politics will never be clean. People are contradictory, tribal, short-sighted, stubborn, and occasionally magnificent. Any system built by humans carries those qualities. The question was never, can we make politics perfect? Can we make the soil good enough that more of what we need has a chance to grow?

One promising answer: blending elected politics with citizens’ assemblies. In Ireland, 99 randomly selected citizens deliberated on abortion, one of the most divisive issues in Irish life, and their recommendation led to the 2018 referendum that legalized it. An earlier assembly, the Constitutional Convention, helped pave the way for marriage equality in 2015. Given structure, good information, and real responsibility, ordinary people will take on what professional politicians fear to touch.

But assemblies aren’t magic. France’s Climate Convention produced 149 proposals; only about a fifth were adopted in full. The hard parts are real: securing commitment to act, and building legitimacy with the wider public. The answer isn’t one or the other. It’s both. Better politicians and more citizen voice. Better soil and more diverse seeds.

One line. Clear enough for a t-shirt:

Tend the soil. Don’t just curse the weeds.

Five things you can do:

1. Change the story. Next time you catch yourself saying, “all politicians are corrupt,” stop. Ask instead: What kind of political environment are we creating, and who does it let grow? The Pakistan experiment proved that single reframe changes who runs.

2. Recruit someone. You know a person — a teacher, an organizer, a public health worker — who’d be extraordinary in office. Tell them. The experiment showed that public encouragement is one of the most powerful drivers of political candidacy.

3. Protect the ones who enter. When someone you respect enters public service, don’t abandon them to a system built to grind people down. Show up. Defend them when the outrage machine hits. Staying good inside a brutal system takes support, not just character.

4. Fund the soil. We spend roughly $60 billion a year globally on executive training and based on our estimates, approximately $15 million on political leadership development. That ratio is the problem. Invest in organizations doing the unglamorous work of recruiting, training, and supporting political leaders. Reach out about our Better Politics Fund for a vetted pipeline of non-partisan innovations from around the world.

5. Send this to the cynic in your life. The one who shrugs at politics. The friend who’d be a great leader but talked themselves out of it. The narrative changes one conversation at a time.

Tend the soil. Don’t just curse the weeds.

Warmly,

Lisa