Wikigovernment 0002

Dunning-Kruger meet Impostor Syndrome meet Self-Regard Tendency meet Confirmation Bias

What the hell do I know about politics, about economics, about running a country? I can barely run a bath.

Although the word ‘economics’ comes from the Greek οἰκονομία, for household management, running a country is not the same as running a house, and yet…

And yet there are similarities:

• Front-door = customs and entry points
• Windows = view of the outside world
• Curtains = let’s keep some things secret
• Kitchen = cultural production
• Garage = transport
• Garden = domestic produce
• Au pair = cheap foreign labor
• Wages in & shopping out = balance of trade
• And although there are elements of governance that are intellectually understandable by pretty much everybody (cost of highway maintenance, fuel prices, education…), they are always far more complicated than we think. And at the same time, they’re not.

Linnaeus has already shown us how: take life and break it down into component parts, from the incomprehensible jumble of global biomass, through lions and tigers to tardigrades, bacteria and viruses, down to amino acids, molecules and the humorously-named bits and pieces of atomic chemistry that keep things going.

Government is a name, a word, a multi-faceted and multi-misleading description. Like ‘life’.

‘Life’ doesn’t exist, it’s parts do.

When we vote, it’s for a party, left, center or right. But I suspect we’ve all, at one time or another, felt attracted to one of the other party’s particular policies, and can’t vote for it. Hence the crux of the matter: we vote in bulk, but issues are individual. We cannot vote every day on every issue, so we accept the shortcomings of the current system.

There must be a better way?