Fragmentary Politics

Fragmentary politics is the largely unwitting doctrine of manufacturing and sustaining endless political and sociopsychological friction in order to self-validate. It generates adversarialism and conflict, then feeds on the consequences, mistaking turbulence for relevance and agitation for purpose. This is not strategy. It is structural incompetence: the conversion of social damage into political leverage, and of human suffering into narrative fuel. Constitutively unsustainable, it depends on permanent distraction, perpetual grievance, and the continuous erosion of trust to justify its own existence and the narrow self-interest of those who benefit from it.

This form of governance is inseparable from mismanagement. It aligns naturally with corruption, short-term extraction, and the hollowing-out of institutional capacity. A frantic pursuit of wealth and power consumes the very generative conditions that make either possible. Civilisations do not collapse from weakness alone, but from addiction to conflict, dissonance, and performative division. When someone insists that such movements are not stupid but shrewd, they are mistaking cunning for intelligence. The worldview is small, repetitive, and derivative, endlessly replicating the same patterns that produced systemic decay, while celebrating that decay as success.