Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to…

Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They have no idea how to do that. It’s much too complex. Their promises therefore always fall short. /1

You see it most clearly in difficult ‘economic’ times, when the flow of cheap debt dries up and suddenly the whole con is exposed. They don’t know how to fix a single thing. ‘Great economic managers’ just preside over tsunamis of cheap debt, attributing the fake prosperity…/2

…people feel to their great leadership. They’re doing nothing at all. It’s all slogans and spin, a tiny veneer over the actual material reality of the societies we live in. Like a commentary on actual reality. I actually feel sorry for the better politicians, who come…/3

…to power with the noblest of aims, and within a week are so totally overwhelmed by the complexity they get briefed about by their officials, that they quickly retreat to the same slogans and spin as the bad politicians. I’ve lived this directly, on the inside. /4

Anybody who works in government, at any level knows the elected are figureheads who know almost nothing about how anything works when they arrive, and little more when they leave. They’re not dumb, it’s just that societies are way too complex for any small group of people…/5

…to ‘run’, even if they had terms that lasted decades. Thousands and thousands of people do that ‘running’. People whose entire careers revolve around mastering all of the complexities of what needs doing. The Chinese invented that model, the Brits adopted it, and we…/6

…inherited it from them. It’s the only way a complex society can ever work, with a vast collection of highly skilled civil servants to coordinate what needs doing. Decades of that same mechanism being weaponised as ‘bureaucracy’ has maybe fatally damaged the whole system. /7

Leaving us with what we see now. Elected people who seriously believe they run countries, coming to power and driving nations off a cliff, to satisfy the ideology of their particular team. We don’t need ideologies. We need engineering. To build and maintain things. /end