Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief…
Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another.
One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t.
Why this matters, fundamentally. /1
People aren’t stupid, as a whole. Nor are they lazy. They just have their own lives to get on with.
Despite all our rhetoric about ‘the people’ running democracies, they just don’t. They were never meant to. /2
Representative democracies were invented explicitly to take that job away from ordinary people, and delegate it to others.
We waste so much time and energy reading the most extraordinary nonsense into the tea leaves of polling and elections. /3
For most people, if life is going OK, they’ll give the incumbent another go. If life isn’t going OK, they might vote for somebody else.
That is *literally* about as far as their attention to politics goes. And that’s entirely rational behaviour. /4
How much do any of us know about how most of the things we encounter in life are done? How food arrives in our supermarkets, how medicines are researched and made, how electricity arrives at our homes. So many etc’s.
Hardly at all. We delegate, to others. /5
That’s absolutely healthy. We’re not Robinson Crusoe, living in a DIY-everything society. That’s what progress is.
Why would politics be any different? If it’s not delivering for our lives, very few bother to figure out why it isn’t. /6
And nor should they. The mechanism is designed to give them the option to just try somebody else who might be able to. Simple, quick.
The reason our lives are spiralling into the toilet *is* the belief we all should be running societies. /7
Hugely encouraged by platforms like these. Where people spend all their days and nights feeling like mini-Presidents, striding the world stage sticking their noses into every issue.
Issues most of us know nothing about, really. /8
Epidemic busybodyness. That’s what social media is. Not a way to connect, it’s a way to stop anything meaningful happening by burying it all in a continuous barrage of ignorant vitriol and complaint.
If you work in government, you’ve seen it. /9
You can’t get a thing done now. Even the tiniest initiative is immediately swamped by tidal waves of complaint and violent anger, coming from an endlessly proliferating number of identity-forming teams. /10
If we stopped thinking the people run democracies, all of this would go away. Getting rid of social media would be the quickest way to achieve that.
It wouldn’t create utopian perfection. Nothing does. But it would let us all get back to our own lives again.
/end