The Imbecility Trap

We navigate through life by avoiding surprises and this simple observation offers us an interesting perspective into the link between governing elites and imbecile policies.

A surprise in this context is an anomaly If the governing classes were to discover that many of those they govern have a superior understanding of something politically important, that would count as an anomaly in the government façade – something to be avoided.

Yet it doesn’t become an anomaly until it is admitted. This is the almost universal government avoidance strategy – admit nothing. Traditionally this type of avoidance has been wrapped in thinly disguised supercilious snobbery, but the digital world is pervasive and for large numbers of people this type of evasion doesn’t work.

Intellectual snobbery masks a core weakness of government – senior officials must know more than those they govern. Otherwise ascendancy is breached and this is something to be avoided at any cost, where at any cost means what it implies – at any cost to voters.

Hence the gulf between political elites and voters in our age of information technology. Evasive people, fashionable discourse, weak sources of information, vacillation, too much reliance on inadequate experts and crude snobbery won’t do as a way to formulate government policies.

The result is weak policy-making which is periodically exposed when government is seen to have blundered again. Often a ludicrous blunder which governments try to evade rather than correct because that is what they do. It’s what they do because it’s what we do. It runs deep and is not a trivial matter however big the blunder may be.

It leaves an old and familiar gulf between government and the governed, but many voters do not seem to understand how deep this gulf is. The collapse of the Tory vote could be due to a number of factors, but one obvious factor may be that many Tory voters have seen the gulf while Labour voters have not. They seem unaware that they will be voting for the same gulf.

It seems strange in our information-rich age, but governing elites can still become trapped by imbecile policies. To describe our governing elites as imbeciles may seem unhelpfully dismissive, but it is not necessarily wrong.