Change: The intellectual disconnect

The above is a recent Harris poll, part of which details Industry Reputation Ratings.  The government fare only slightly better than tobacco companies.  Yet, incumbents will capture over 90% of their offices.  The disconnect is that while people recognize that government is bad, they are unable to make the correlation between bad government and the fact that the voters hired the bad government and despite the government continuing to perform badly, the voters keep hiring them.  It does not cognitively register in the voters mind that in order to change government they have to change the people who are running government.  We have all kinds of these disconnects:  We are overweight and continue to eat poorly, we believe in god without any evidence of a god, we gamble with a very low probability of any return, we yearn to right the wrongs of society and do nothing to affect change.   Without the substantial physical pain of imminent negative reinforcement, we trudge along with the status quo  and pretend that change will occur via the ether.