Consciousness of Sheep
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Over the years I have collected countless official reports into the various crises that make up the bottleneck – aka the great filter – that we find ourselves stumbling through. Not just climate change, which at least draws some head nodding from officialdom, but resource depletion, energy shortages, agricultural run-off, ocean dead zones, microplastic pollution, water shortages, etc… man-made crises which, we are led to believe, governments might have some ability to reverse or mitigate.
This sets up what we might call Schoedinger’s government, which is both all-powerful and completely useless at the same time. Take, for example, the UK’s one-time minister, and walking disaster zone, Chris Grayling. As Secretary of State for Transport, he came to be known as “the fascist who couldn’t make the trains run.” As Justice Secretary he single-handedly wrecked the probation service, resulting in a big rise in reoffending. And, allegedly, on his first day as Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee he managed to lock himself in a broom cupboard. In his book How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn’t, Ian Dunt observes that:
“Grayling had a handicap. He suffered a particularly acute form of it, but it wasn’t unique. It’s a handicap faced by almost all ministers. The handicap was that he didn’t know what he was doing.”
The average time politicians spend at the head of a department is just two years. A few get promoted, some get shifted sideways, many are demoted to obscurity. So, unless a politician happens to bring knowledge from a previous career – extremely rare in an age of specialist (in getting elected) professional politicians – ministers have little opportunity to learn much about their brief.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the permanent civil servants advising the minister had a detailed grasp of the subject. But as Dunt explains, the promotion structure operates against it. The system rewards those who jump from department to department, never learning enough beyond the key skill of keeping the minister happy and the media on-side. Like the ministers they serve, few stay in post for more than two years.
Dunt describes the neoliberal process of creating power without responsibility… the deliberate dumbing down of government to the point, ironically, that the only people left in government with any technical expertise are the unelected crossbench (i.e., non-party) members of the House of Lords. Today, the largest group of MPs – from all parties – are people with PPE degrees who previously worked as special advisors to ministers or sitting MPs. Meanwhile, MPs who had previously run a business or worked on the factory floor are at an all-time low.
What Dunt misses is what Dan Davies refers to as the accountability sinks. The most obvious – and pernicious – of these is the pseudo-independence of the central bank. After all, once a government has ceded control over the value of its currency, what remains of its sovereignty? But the decision – in the hands of the cowardly Gordon Brown – was inevitable, since it removed the accountability from the Treasury and the Chancellor. Whenever anything goes wrong with the economy, the sitting Chancellor can just shrug his or her shoulders and point at the central bank or any of the other quangos established ostensibly to manage the economy.
It is the same across government and, indeed, across the western states. Every department has its arms-length quangos to provide the supposed expertise that members of government – elected and permanent – have voluntarily surrendered. And where there is no quango, there will be an army of consultants from organisations like Deloitte and McKinsey to provide the technical knowledge and to take the flak when things go wrong.
As we enter an age of algorithmic machine learning, the dumbing down of government is bound to accelerate as AI datacentres provide politicians with plausible but wrong policy statements to further infuriate a population whose prosperity is collapsing faster with every passing month. The corollary of this being that politics becomes ever more short-term as ministers reel from one crisis to the next.
For these reasons, the question “does the government know about…” is worthless, since there is no unified mind within government. The Prime Minister and the Secretaries of State are primarily concerned with hanging onto power and getting re-elected. Their various advisors are primarily concerned with “spinning” events in the best possible way to meet the aim of getting re-elected. The various consultants hired to advise and manage crises are primarily concerned with telling ministers what they want to hear in order to get further contracts – something that may often require the current party of government to remain in government. And, as it develops, the people who write government AI programs will no doubt also write programs which tell ministers what they want to hear.
When it comes to the bottleneck crises, there are of course, volumes of reports and crisis management assessments gathering dust on departmental bookshelves or taking up disk space on government computers. We might even like to pretend that in the event of any of these crises occurring, people within the organs of state might even know what to do. The corrective to this though, is that a pandemic was – and is – considered to be the biggest threat, but this didn’t prevent ministers and officials from making it up – and cocking it up – as they went along in the face of the relatively mild Covid-19 virus… indeed, the current economic downturn is largely due to the decision to force millions of people into house arrest and millions of businesses to close for the duration.
In the 1960s – possibly in response to the Profumo scandal – when asked what he feared most, then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan reportedly said “events dear boy, events.” It is far from clear that he ever said it. But anyone who has gone into government, from the lowliest parish councillor to the president or prime minister of a democratic state understands the sentiment. Whatever good they may have intended to do when they stood for election is rapidly swept aside by the many short-term – and trivial in the grand scheme of things – events that bring the media spotlight onto them… something even more difficult to avoid in the era of social media.
Overwhelmed by the series of short-term crises that have become commonplace since the 2008 crash, governments have no mental capacity for slow, long-term crises like peak oil, resource depletion or even climate change (which they mouth platitudes about but do nothing realistic to address). There will be relatively junior employees of the permanent state who understand one or another crisis. And there are NGOs which try to prompt the state to act. But little if any of this makes its way up to the apex of the state machine where ministers and permanent secretaries might take notice.
As with “we the people,” “the government” doesn’t really exist. Sure, there is an apparatus of state which can be highly coercive. And there is a financial arm which can bestow funds upon selected beneficiaries. There are departments which gather statistics… most of which go unread by anyone with the power of decision. And there are officials charged with handing instructions to private service providers which mostly ignore them. But there is no all-seeing controlling mind at the top. Indeed, rather like the human brain, which has evolved to filter out most incoming information save for that which is urgent, here and now, those sitting at the top table are unable to focus on anything beyond the immediate.
This is one of humanity’s greatest terrors… the realisation that nobody is in control. There is no plan of action or even an understanding of the problem. There is just an infantilised population lulled into unconsciousness by spun narratives that promise milk and honey in some far-off future even as the winds of crisis are blowing the house down.
As you made it to the end…
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