The system has reached the limits of its adaptability. Everything else is entertainment.
A great many people have immense faith in political solutions to looming crises: if only we elect new leaders, if only we replace current policies with new policies, everything would be fixed and the crises will all dissipate.
There are powerful reasons for this faith and equally powerful reasons why political solutions fail in crisis. Our faith in politics is nurtured by recency bias in eras of relatively low-level volatility: when the system is humming along, decade after decade, the incremental adaptations of politics are enough to resolve whatever spots of bother arise.
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There are three key points here. One is that politics is by its nature incremental, and there are profound reasons for this aversion to radical reforms. All organisms are well-served by the innate conservatism of natural selection: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. If the current set of instructions–genetic, epigenetic, social, cultural, economic, political–is working, then it makes sense to conserve what works and be cautious about adapting new instructions.
Natural selection tinkers with experiments when selective pressure is applied to a species, and this is an incremental process: if random mutations in an individual offer some meaningful advantage in changing conditions, over time that improvement spreads through the species.
Experiments that fail to offer advantages are eliminated by, well, death. Not exactly warm and fuzzy, but when push comes to shove, Nature doesn’t fool around.
This is why humans experience financial losses so sharply and forget the euphoria of winning. In the big picture, gains are nice and we enjoy the dopamine hit, but losses can be catastrophic, and so we’re wired to be risk averse as a key survival trait.
In the political realm, this plays out as favoring incremental policy adjustments over radical–and therefore difficult to risk-assess–course changes. Enthusiasm to really tackle the crisis head-on is tempered by fears that some unforeseen consequence could emerge from the untested policy that triggers losses or instability that cannot be reversed.
The second key point is everyone in a position of power or influence is committed to preserving the status quo that has rewarded them so well. Outsiders with no power or influence may be chomping at the bit to overthrow the stale, sclerotic, do-nothing status quo, but insiders are self-selected defenders of the status quo, as it has served their interests so well: they rose to wealth and power within this system, and no matter how great the crisis, all their energies are devoted to preserving the system that has served them so splendidly.
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Self-service is neatly cloaked by a belief that since the system has served me so well, it serves everyone equally well, and so defenders of modest, incremental adjustments in policy naturally believe the system is the best possible and worthy of protecting, despite its flaws.
A third source of incrementalism is the lack of consensus and the self-serving divisions in the Power Elite. There are ideological differences which lead to disagreements over policy–welfare queens in Cadillacs, etc.–and there is the auction of favors where to get the vote / approval of a powerful politician, some utterly nonsensical, needlessly costly bauble must be tossed to them–for example, an outdated rocket engine must be manufactured in their district even though the cost is higher and the harm to the project is irreversible.
This is the infamous “making sausage” of political wheeling and dealing. Incremental change is all that’s possible when few of the participants are feeling any real pain that demands radical adaptations and the majority aren’t feeling they’re getting anything for supporting radical change. Rather, they’re risking their career on a longshot which might end up harming their constituency and position in the party / power structure.
