26 February 2018 - political anti-logic

When the same topic comes up in political debate in a later decade, I’m always struck by the way that different aspects of the issue switch between realistic consideration and empty posturing. If every impulse were political nonsense, we would get a kind of Brownian motion in policy reactions, a random walk which guarantees that eventually every policy will be tried. It’s hard to change a policy which is seen as successful, so when we hit on a good one, it would stick. But in fact, every solution we try is a mix of logic and political anti-logic, so that not every policy can be tried and we may never find a good one. The world’s underlying governance problem: Not enough empty posturing.