Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own.…

Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own. The International Space Station (ISS) is an example I think of how politics, and our lack of understanding of it, hides realities. A thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/kzDGYGY9ce

Building the ISS took 3 million people-years, or 26 billion work hours. For comparison, it took 400,000 people-years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza. We’re cooperating in ways and at a scale that is unparalleled in human history. /2

But at the same time, what we call our politics gives the appearance of total dysfunction. Widespread conflict and disagreement. It seems anyway. But I suspect we’re looking at it in the wrong way. For starters, we live in privileged societies. We…/3

…have all lived lives largely free of major conflict of any sort. No existential crises, no struggle for food or health care, no major wars. Our baseline is peace and prosperity, lifestyle-lives organised around having a mostly good time. Argument and disagreement can be…/4

…dismissed as unnecessary, some sort of character flaw in those who pursue it. At the same time our representative political systems further encourage this perception, as by definition we delegate most of our complex problems to our representatives to deal with for us. /5

Everyday life in a privileged nation is therefore supposed to be mostly free of conflict. Sport for ordinary folk becomes dismissive contempt for their representatives, as they fight and argue over all the difficult problems we ordinary folk flick-pass to them to deal with. /6

If it was just a sport of mocking representative politicians, it would do little harm. But it gets a lot more dangerous. In our total absence of education in civics, we come to think our representatives actually run things. Let’s go back to the ISS. Does anybody seriously…/7

…think that the politicians in multiple countries who approved the construction of the ISS know a single thing about how it was built, or how it’s maintained in orbit? Of course not, it’s not their job. But nor is running a country, a town etc. Most of us have watched…/8

…Yes Minister, which showed so well how the officials surrounding the Minister actually run the country. They have the expertise, accumulated over many generations, to do it. They remain at the wheel of State through multiple governments of elected representatives. They’re…/9

…the long-term that is what keeps society running. We elect our representatives to be in the room when that running happens, to refract decisions in certain ways according to current popular beliefs and feelings. Democracy is 99% officials, 1% pompous elected windbags. /10

If you’ve worked closely with politicians at any level, you’ll know this to be true, and the honest politicians will admit it. They know almost nothing about most of the decisions they make every day, they need long briefings and simplifications, and complexity winnowed…/11

…to 2 or 3 simple options, to function. Not because they’re stupid, but because the complexity of modern societies needs thousands of expert officials to keep them running. Things functioned OK, because politicians enjoyed the limelight and a perception they were in charge,…/12

…while officials continued to run the show, managing complexity. What’s changed now though is that these same politicians, and the public who vote for them, have begun to believe the mythology. This is populism. Populist politicians and those who vote for them genuinely…/13

…believe politicians run countries, or towns, or States. They bypass the officials - expertise - almost entirely. Many decades of targeting this expertise as ‘bureaucracy’ softened societies up for this shift. We’re seeing some of the endgame of this, in the ignoring…/14

…of expertise in major crises such as climate change and the pandemic. But the shift has been underway for years, manifested in practices such as outsourcing ‘advice’ to biddable private consultancies, rather than public officials. It’s our own simplistic ideas about…/15

…democracy that are corroding it from within. Look at Covid, how most of the pandemic has been a tug-of-war between expert public health teams, and populist politicians pretending to run the pandemic response. (Really just getting in the way, mostly deliberately.) /16

Our upcoming election is empirical proof of who runs the place. In ‘caretaker mode’ the officials get to run the country with minimal interference from politicians. Nobody notices, because they run the country outside caretaker mode as well. Next time political argument…/17

…is getting to you, remember the ISS. It’s a microcosm of our entire society. Most of the work of the world happens outside the debating chamber of the politics we see. And it should. /end