The Committee of Public Safety

Politiking

Politics is the second highest layer of functionality in the CPSOT stack:

1. Culture: divides priority between desires.
2. Politics: divides power between desires.
3. Strategy: reconciles power and desire.
4. Operations: arranges power and desire in time and space.
5. Tactics: directs the interaction of power and desire with external forces.

Like culture, politics is an OODA loop, a learning machine designed to survive and prosper amidst the rigorous testing of external forces. Survival and prosperity are the products of successful adaptation. Successful political adaption comes through a division of power between cultural desires that meets the demands of external forces. Divisions that fit the changing environment receive more power. Divisions that come up short receive less power.

A new division is proposed as a hypothesis. It passes through action and gathers feedback. Results are observed, the observation leads to reorientation of the division, the division is either acted upon or held up for decision, and the process repeats. Soak, wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.

Politics’ place in the CPSOT stack is clear: it’s stuck between culture and strategy. Politics serves culture by dividing power between its priorities. Strategy serves politics by taking its divisions of power and the desires of culture and reconciling them into an integrated whole. For example, economics is a type of politics, dividing power based on the priorities of culture. The type of economy used to do this division is a strategy. Free market economies or command economies are strategies used by politics to divide power between desires. The effectiveness of a strategy is gauged by the division of power it produces. He that gets more power is happy. He that gets less power is less happy. Such is the way of the world.

Politics is subject to the pull of culture but it has its own beat and its own rhythm. Politics can turn the tables and shape culture but the effort is power intensive. Since it’s uphill battle, culture usually has the upper hand.

As culture evolves, it moves through twisted and tortured forms. It is usually irrational and there usually isn’t a huge demand that it should be rational. Politics is different. It harbors aspirations towards rationality and others harbor expectations that it will be rational. Politics is only partially rational. It’s pulled between three poles of attraction (in a variation on the Clausewitzian trinity):

1. primordial [instinct], which is to be regarded as a blind natural force;
2. the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and
3. its element of subordination, as an instrument of [culture], which makes it subject to pure reason.

Rationality is only one pole: instinct and chance also exercise pull. While chance and instinct have more sway over culture, politics leans towards rationality. Indeed, politics’s irrational side can largely be seen as an overflow from culture. Culture’s desires are powerful, passionate, broad, and sweeping. Politics’ divisions are nitty-gritty details, haggled over by unattractive power brokers in the proverbial backroom. Politics focuses on the tangible. It must be practical. Culture focuses on the intangible. It has the luxury of impracticality if it so chooses.

Politics is strangely idealized and yet it is damned as sordid and dirty. The later is more true than the former but the perception that politics is virtuous is useful. Hypocrisy, the veneer of the higher virtues of culture, is the lubricant of politics. Politics without hypocrisy is naked. Politics without culture is meaningless. Great politicians are therefore great cultural actors, putting on a grand show. Too much honesty and any sufficiently complex political system will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Openness rubs off mythos, leaving only grubby reality. People need the Big Lie so they can power government with their faith. A man with no faith will not voluntarily part with his taxes. Political leaders also benefit: the illusion of virtue: it helps them face themselves in the morning.

The most insightful insight ever offered on politics came from George Marshall on FDR’s insistence on invading North Africa before launching a cross-Channel landing in Europe during World War II:

The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. (This may seem like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.) The people demanded action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready. Churchill was always getting into sideshows and if we had gone as far as he did we would have never gotten out. But I could see that the president had to have something.