When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means…
When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either politicians or the public. /1 https://t.co/fDMqVwtBJ3
It’s been public institutions, tasked with the job of managing things like this. Like the CSIRO, as just one example, this is an early photo of some of their staff at work. Governments set up institutions in response to desperate problems they don’t know how to fix. /2 https://t.co/ZpPz3QAOKV
In the case of the CSIRO, as just one example, by the turn of the 20th century, Australian agriculture, easily our dominant economic activity then, was being crippled by a whole range of problems like pests, diseases and drought, that it had no idea how to solve. /3
Prime Minister Billy Hughes pushed to establish what is now the CSIRO, saying: “Science can make rural industries commercially profitable, making the desert bloom like a rose; it can make rural life pleasant as well as profitable … /4 https://t.co/lABaTiOYEh
“Science will lead the manufacturer into green pastures by solving for him problems that seemed to him insoluble. It will open up a thousand new avenues for capital and labour.” Once these specialist institutions are set up, they manage these problems using expertise. /5 https://t.co/J5ZScikBuQ
What’s more important though is that this management is not only outside electoral cycles, it’s inter-generational. It continues over multiple lifetimes. It just happens, in the background, invisible to most people. Public health is exactly the same. /6
It’s been happening our whole lives. Most of the public doesn’t even know it exists, let alone having ever seen it at work, apart from the odd vaccination. The desperate pleas to take grown-up charge of our current problems are completely wasted on politicians. /7
Particularly on modern populist politicians. They love to suggest to people that they ‘run the country’. Politicians have never run countries, except symbolically. They just get in the way, it’s not their job. Billy Hughes had the humility to know this. /8
Our current politicians not only lack that humility, they’re aggressively the opposite. Decades of ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’ narratives have done their damage. You won’t find anything that ordinary people have more contempt for than their local council, for example. /9
Local government’s origins are actually heavily about epidemics and pandemics. Put there to control essential disease-control mechanisms like garbage removal, water supply and sewage. All because of past experience with infectious disease. /10
We can’t beat Covid or climate change by voting. It’s an illusion. And we can’t easily just put institutions back either. Which leaves very few options, except to use network politics to counter the network politics of the institution-smashers. /end