The task is not to create perfect agreement, but to maintain enough shared coherence that a society can continue solving problems without tearing itself apart.
better politics
The task is not to create perfect agreement, but to maintain enough shared coherence that a society can continue solving problems without tearing itself apart.
The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.
Populists tell you they’re going to smash the system for your benefit. Funny how it still always seems to end with the rich getting richer, the government getting worse, and everyone else paying for the repairs.
Australia’s political speed-dating with One Nation suggests that what has happened in the USA is not an exception, it is a franchised political method.
Xenophobia does not stop a changing world. It converts psychological vulnerability into political power.
Populism turns complex national problems into kindergarten theatre, then sells the applause as policy.
Power without responsibility is not merely a political failure. It is the central pathology of the attention economy: influence is purchased, outrage is amplified, incompetence is rewarded, and when the consequences arrive, everyone points at the voters as though the stage built itself.
Populism is not an opinion. It is a phase dynamic.
One Nation raised millions for political theatre while a Queensland hospice had to beg for palliative care funding. This is clearly ridiculous but is also hardly an isolated incident of misplaced priorities and dodgy reasoning in sociopolitical systems.
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
A system can become so effective at measuring, managing, and reproducing its own internal assumptions that it gradually loses the ability to perceive the external reality those assumptions were originally created to address.