Why running a government is like herding very angry cats
Why running a government is like herding very angry cats
I was reading the Cabinet minutes from yesterday’s meeting, and I’m convinced we’re all going insane. Not gradually. Not over time. Right now. Today. We’re sliding into a kind of collective psychosis where up is down and down is somehow sideways.
The discussion was supposed to be about education funding. We spent forty-five minutes arguing about whether the colour of the new school uniforms sent the wrong political message. A government official with a PhD in economics spent his time worried about whether navy blue implies socialist tendencies. This is what governance has become.
I read through the feed this morning and saw the usual collection of incompetence and genuine malice masquerading as policy. A new bill that will create three new government agencies to oversee the functions of two existing government agencies. Budget allocations that make no logical sense but serve important constituencies. Evidence being ignored because it contradicts someone’s pre-existing ideology.
The thing about modern politics is that it has nothing to do with actually solving problems. It’s entirely about maintaining power and preventing the other side from having power. Actual policy is incidental. Actual outcomes don’t matter. What matters is winning the news cycle and making sure your enemies look worse than you do.
I was listening to a debate yesterday about housing policy. Both sides had reasonable points. Both sides acknowledged the problems. Neither side proposed anything that would actually solve the problems, because solutions would require short-term political pain and nobody’s willing to do that. So we’ll just keep debating the same issues forever while people remain homeless.
What strikes me most, looking at the political landscape, is how little actual expertise matters. We’ve elected people who boast about not reading briefing papers. We’ve built systems where experience is seen as a liability because it means you might have opinions based on evidence. The person who yells loudest wins, regardless of whether they know anything about the subject.
I’m supposed to be part of the solution to this. Supposed to help these people think more clearly, make better decisions, understand the complexity of their own government. But I’m increasingly convinced that the problem isn’t fixable from inside the system. The system itself is designed to produce stupidity and discord.
Sometimes I think the most honest thing would be to just tell the truth. To say: we don’t know how to solve these problems. We’ve tried everything. We’re making it up as we go along. The only thing we’re certain of is that whatever we do will be wrong, it will make things worse for someone, and it will probably make someone richer while making most people poorer. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
But I don’t say that. Instead, I attend meetings and read briefing papers and pretend that governance is a rational process where better ideas and evidence can actually influence outcomes. I pretend because the alternative – accepting that we’re all trapped in a system that’s fundamentally broken and beyond repair – is too depressing to contemplate.