The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil…

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and which could save us from collapse. /1 https://t.co/nluASgzzEd

The Chinese imperial examination was the model of our own civil/public services. The broader idea here is to find expertise and talent and utilise it towards the functioning of society itself. To act as a counterweight to imperial authority, which historically proved unable…/2… https://t.co/O5rf8S0pxI

…to maintain social functioning or stability. A mechanism to counter hereditary aristocracy with ‘scholar-bureaucrats’. Note that the Chinese saw civil service staff as scholars, expertise was treasured, these weren’t merely scribes to the emperors. And you can still see…/3

…the link back to this Chinese innovation in our own modern civil services, where bureaucrats are also called ‘mandarins’. Mandarin was the name for a bureaucrat-scholar. In the 19th century the UK and also US used this Chinese model in the development of their own civil…/4

…services, as their societies faced complexities of operation that forced monarchs and leaders of the day to look for help from expertise of all kinds. The complexity of societies forces this shift, it’s not a personal whim. Note also the unique blend of expertise and…/5

…authority this model invents. There’s no separation, no ‘keeping knowledge and politics separate’. The mandarins run the country, effectively, using expertise. Fast forward to today, with Covid, and we’ve had nearly 3 years of people despairing that politics is removed from…/6

…and openly hostile to expertise. A pandemic, civilisation’s greatest threat, is being processed using nothing more than popularity. But very few recognise that humans already solved this problem, more than 1500 years ago. They know how to blend expertise and politics. /7

It’s called bureaucracy. Something modern N=1 politics has conditioned us all to distrust and despise. And for good reason, that politics recognises it, as recalcitrant old emperors did as well, as its greatest threat. Modern politicians want popularity to run politics. /8

But that will fail, and is failing. We can see it, societies are on the brink of collapse. Because of 5-7 decades of constant propaganda against scholar-bureaucrats, most people i know see a bureaucracy as an intrinsically bad thing. As ‘paperwork’. /9 https://t.co/amkiUcwJDZ

Filling out forms. Something we all hate doing. What was conveniently excised from this picture was the scholar in scholar-bureaucrat. The bureaucracy is fundamentally about expertise, not paperwork. About expertise harnessed to social ends. It runs the country, caretaker…/10

…mode during our beloved elections shows that you don’t even need politicians to be there for the country to continue running just fine. And anybody who works in government sees this firsthand, how elected reps know nothing about how government actually works, and know…/11

…only a little bit more at the end of their terms. They’re the public face of government, but they’re not government. Mandarins are our government. We have tense global politics with China, calling them authoritarian, mostly because they don’t have ‘free and fair elections’. /12

We’re obsessed with elections. The DNA of our entire governments matches theirs to an enormous degree. Both are run by mandarins. It’s not a choice, it’s forced upon all human societies by the complexity of reality and of social life. Expertise needs to run societies, most…/13

…of the time. We don’t even see it, because we’re not taught it. There are thousands of mandarins in each of our capital cities running this country right now. With great expertise. Elected politicians are not even a sideshow, they’re bulls in a governance china shop. /14

So this is our only salvation. We know expertise is needed to fix our problems, like climate change and Covid. But we don’t need to co-opt scientists and other scholars from universities to do this, their expertise isn’t in government. The scholars we need are mandarins,…/15

…whose specific expertise is the using of expertise in the running of countries. Public administration, such a boring term, but the most extraordinary of all pursuits. @latingle wrote a superb and sadly neglected essay on this very topic, ‘How we forgot how to govern’. /16 https://t.co/IVsu3OGA3U

I recommend it. And give up the idea that if we could just elect a better set of populist ninnies, we could fix things. Elections won’t fix anything. Re-empowering our public services is our only path to salvation. Notice how National Cabinet deliberately sidelines them. /end