The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.
populism down under
The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.
A society overwhelmed by complexity eventually stops seeking explanations and starts seeking certainty; that is when political movements such as One Nation cease to be anomalies and become warnings.
The future will not be defined by any single party or leader. It will be defined by the widening gap between the complexity of the systems governing society and the increasingly simplified narratives through which society attempts to understand them
Power does not erase wisdom’s serial warnings about the corruption and cruelty that often accompanies extreme wealth; it orchestrates and sustains an institutional matrix to demonstrate why the warning applies to someone else.
Technologically mediated democracies are invoking remedial, simplified political coherence faster than they are generating the intelligence and/or aptitude required to govern the accelerating complexity of contemporary socioeconomic experience.
Barnaby Joyce’s sprint into One Nation marks a shift from policy argument to performance theatre. It is not a conversion so much as a wager: that in a crowded media field the shortest message wins. One Nation’s platform thrives on what could be called ideological constipation — gripping a few ideas so tightly they can […]
The role of language in cultural and political systems of belief is such that geographic tropes are anchors that provide internal narrative self-validation to such systems and their inhabitants. It doesn’t mean their assertions of territorial impropriety are valid, merely that such adversarial gambits are the perennially ascendant low-hanging fruit of belligerent nationalist pathologies everywhere […]
I’m going for yet another deep (if relatively brief) dive on the question of suffering. The natural orientation of the Universe towards dissolution and decay or disorder is precisely the reason why we have life, sentience, experience and intelligence – the entropy of material dissolution is a precondition for the structural aggregation and compression of […]
Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?