I’m interested in this debate only because it’s a window into minimisation, the rage of the age. The claim…

I’m interested in this debate only because it’s a window into minimisation, the rage of the age. The claim that the ‘vast majority’ don’t commit fraud or waste is true for all jobs. The vast majority also drive safely, and don’t die of Covid. /1 https://t.co/EVagWe82Bg

It’s not relevant. A society becomes civilised when it organises itself around the bad things, not the good things. The things there will never be ‘popular support’ for, that don’t ‘have the numbers’. Populism ignores of all these bad things in favour of majority rules. /2

It also then suppresses minorities, because they upset the status quo. That was why democracy was invented, to act against majority rules, by inventing the ‘public’. The public isn’t a count of hands, it’s the interplay of people of all kinds. Why elections destroy it. /3

Going back to public administration, that’s why whistleblowers are protected, they’re the minority who call out the fraud. Everything in democracy goes (or should) against the tendency to lapse into majority rules. Because the majority is already fine. /end