Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either.…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests. Elections. It’s insane. 1/2 https://t.co/nrBfDhie1J

I don’t think we see just how deeply infected we are by populism. It’s the culture of schools, which we never give up, even as adults. We LOVE the cut and thrust of shifts in popularity and status. This platform is full of it. Social media is an economy of likes. /2

It’s the infrastructure of popularity culture, used to now dominate the world. We already had a Twitter president. Popularity solves NOT ONE PROBLEM. If a building collapses, there’s zero connection between the people with expertise to diagnose and fix it, and popularity. /3

The two have absolutely no link at all. But we refuse to see it, for our biggest problems of all, the ones governments manage every day. We let governments be run on one metric only. Popularity, who can win elections. These days that’s who’s best with social media. /4

There’s no job interview, no assessment of expertise, experience or aptitude. And yes, nobody could possibly *have* the expertise to solve the thousands of activities governments manage. That’s the point. Thousands of government officials have that expertise. /5

But our popularity gods sack them, bypass them, call them ‘unelected’ and basically run a daily fantasy that they, the elected, are ’running the country’. Some of them were furniture salesmen or suburban accountants before being elected. /6

And now they’re supposedly running things like delicate geopolitical negotiations on conflict, climate change, trade etc. People believe this! There’s a wonderful scene in Yes Prime Minister where the PM jokes that he and the US President kept falling asleep in a meeting. /7

And he says to Sir Humphrey, his lead official, that it’s a bit of a worry, that they were both too tired to do anything. Humphrey smiles and says not at all, the officials had already done all of the work before the meeting even started. /8

That *is* how representative democracy was designed to work. The Chinese invented what we call the public or civil service. The Brits copied them when faced with social problems that were well beyond the in-bred toffs self-elected to parliament to solve. /9

Australia and other modern democracies adopted the same system, for the same reason. It’s unimaginably stupid to think elected politicians run anything at all. This isn’t to suggest we should just have a government of ‘technocrats’ either, a common counter. /10

It means government should be ruthlessly re-focused back on *solving practical problems*. Elected pollies’ actual role is to be a liaison point with the community, not to run anything. To ‘bring the community along’ with necessary changes. /11

Instead they’ve hijacked the whole ship (of State). Populism has allowed them to assume an authority the system was never designed for them to have. They re-route massive infrastructure projects (as just one example) to get more votes in marginal areas. /12

The whole practical work of running societies has been re-purposed to the continuous popularity and status games of the elected. We get more and more elections, early elections, and more and more leaders, like revolving doors. This is why, populism has won. /13

It has people seriously believing the elected run countries (or States, or towns). They never have, and never should. It’s like thinking school captains run schools. Or even worse, that the most popular jocks in the playground run them. /14

Many teachers might agree that is in fact what has happened, in schools. Whole societies threw their entire social development into reverse gear and have been driving at maximum speed, in reverse, back to a perpetual adolescence. Nothing but popularity status games. /15

Scroll through your Twitter feed and look at how deeply people love it. Not really interested in the practical details of the problems of the world, but utterly, obsessively fascinated with arguing about the people jostling for status around those problems. Who cares? /16

Who cares if ‘the Left’ or ‘the Right’ or ‘independents’ or the ‘neoliberals’ are in the ascendancy? None of them have a clue how anything actually, materially, works in the societies they live in. Let’s get rid of all popularity politics, and just list our practical…/17

…material problems. And find the people with the expertise to solve them. And then fix the problems. The popularity/status crowd can then stay on social media arguing all day to their heart’s content, with their ridiculous and irrelevant ideologies. /18

As Bruno Latour once called it, drawing on coding language, an ‘object-oriented democracy’. Or in other words, a democracy focused on fixing material problems. Fixing roads, rivers, energy systems, schools, hospitals, aged care etc. /19

When you have a leak, you want a good plumber. Not the most *popular* plumber, who could be hopeless. Just a good plumber. (And remember politicians don’t even know anything about plumbing.) Drop this ridiculous fantasy that daily arguing over which elected windbag to choose…/20

…is ‘democracy’ in action. It isn’t, it’s a total perversion of democracy. High school life dominating adult life. The endless jostling for an empty, useless status that doesn’t fix a single problem. Fixing and building things will bring us together as a society. /21

Not arguing over who’s the most popular person to fix and build things, a person who won’t have a clue how to anyway. Like the Romans, they survived so long, because they built things. That should be us again. /end