Nicholas Gruen

Another great discussion with my friend Peyton Bowman. We began with a passage from William James on faith. Though the essay does discuss religious faith, it starts more mundanely, speaking of the way faith makes community life possible by knitting people together in bonds of mutual rights and obligations.  One implication is that social life is necessarily a network phenomenon. Further, even without this, it is 'kaleidic'. That is, an apparently small change can make all the difference between the way the whole scene looks — and can for instance throw the switch from pessimism to optimism. This kind of thing often happens in the economy. People's pessimism is mutually reinforcing and depresses the economy generally, until one day when things change and their optimism becomes reinforcing.  We then talk about the different metaphors for society and community. In ancient and early modern thinking, society is often conceived of as being like a human body with government being the brain. Peyton then discusses a speech by the Roman statesman Agrippa which references the stomach as the 'social body'. I think this switch helps us spot some of our modern hubris.  I argue that Zelenskyy is playing the role Winston Churchill played in 1940, but that in a world bathed in bullshit, Zelenskyy's physical courage makes a greater contribution today than it did in Churchill's time. It cuts through the bullshit, it demonstrates that he's not just another bullshit artist. He means what he says. And I cavil at the cliché that he's is 'inspirational'. He is, but the word is so bandied about that we're dead to it.  I focus on something closer to home, more humdrum and, because of it more profound. Zelenskyy's actions move us because he did his job, like the captain of a ship that has foundered committing themself to save all it or go down with the ship. And we're in a different world to that. Where politicians never say quite what they mean (why — because if they did we wouldn't vote for them!), and where our own job may not make that much sense, and whether it does or not everyone's keeping their eye on their next career move. In any event, the contrast Zelenskyy's actions made with all this were enough to set a cascade of effects going, as we have seen in the last week.  As much as we buy into the magnificence of these actions and the courage they showed, we end on the note of prudence. We are talking about heightened conflict between nations that can with the press of a button — including as a result of miscalculation, misunderstanding or more mundane cockup — annihilate all that we value. 

Joe Trippi was the campaign manager who first worked out how to use the internet in campaigning. I met him about a decade ago and was fascinated with his campaigning exploits — including taking Howard Dean from backmarker to presidential frontrunner in 2004. Many of the architects of the online campaigning that took Obama to the White House came from the Dean campaign that Joe engineered.   Anyway, in this podcast we talk a little about how even back then I had a more wary expectation of how things would turn out. See for instance this essay. And I was also thinking about the way citizens’ juries could detox our politics. Since Joe's trying to save democracy from further degeneration, we talked about what it could contribute in our current dire times. The interview was recorded before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

From 2GB's website: Luke Grant is joined by Dr Nicholas Gruen, Lateral Economics’ CEO & Index author and a thinker who doesn’t mind challenging the norms and we love that on this programme. Most people would say those who occupy seats in our various parliaments and councils are not always seen as being in touch with us ordinary folk or even worse, not always putting our best interests first in their deliberations. Today we should be seeking to balance representation by election with representation by sortation as occurs, in juries by random selection from the citizenry. I’ll elaborate more on this in a subsequent essay. Luke and Mr Gruen discuss doing politics better with an old idea that may just have found relevance today.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Peyton Bowman (https://www.protoclassic.com/paying-attention/). We were both quite taken with how much the simple story of Mal Meninga's famous 30-second political career had resonated with us and with our audience. It turned out that the story prompted quite a bit of further thought which was worth taking further. So we did.    Meninga's political career can be seen in its entirety on this video. The passage I read out on lying in organisations can be found here. And Act 1 of King Lear is here.

Tyson Yunkaporta was greatly taken with the story of Mal Meninga's thirty-second political career, ending when he realised he couldn't go through the falsity, bullshit and self-importance of campaigning. I mentioned this in my weekly newsletter when I was contacted by someone in Ohio who had a similar revulsion of political business-as-usual but who is hoping to parlay that into a campaign for a citizens' assembly in Ohio. That and much more in our long and winding conversation. 

Peyton and I start from the first heading of an article in which I first tried to summarise the attractions of random selection or 'sortition' as a means by which we might heal our beleaguered democracies. We go on to discuss an idea of mine which I've begun writing on which is this. The thing we're most proud of about democracy is its egalitarian nature. But a democracy will founder if those within it are not infused with a sense of their own duties to do the right thing. Yet in establishing democracy through elections the norms of democracy ultimately gravitate towards whatever is most effective at securing votes. This leads to a remarkable illustration of these principles on Sept 24 in 2001 when a former captain of the Australian Rugby League team gave his first political interview. As you'll see, he took his own sense of what he was and was not prepared to do into the interview. What happened next made him a minor legend of Australian politics. Right now in Ohio there's someone who feels just as he did, but it's led him to make some different choices.  

Working away on some explainer videos, we discuss the script for an explainer video which is currently called "Knowledge and its enemies" — currently because it's not yet been produced and we might change its name.  The script begins "Meet Socrates The Delphic Oracle proclaimed him Greece’s wisest man Incredulous, he searched high and low for someone wiser. Expert craftsmen had more technical skill, but that fed their vanity. So they pontificated on subjects they knew nothing about. At bottom, Socratic wisdom is an ethical idea — that vanity is the enemy of wisdom. If you’re wise, you’re radically humble — the more you learn, the more you realise how little you know. The cathedral of modern science was built on this idea. That, as much as it offends our vanity, true knowledge begins with scepticism about how much we really know. And whatever our reputation, the limits of our knowledge must be relentlessly tested against reality. But somehow we never got the memo. The enemies of truth-telling remain — deep in our psyche as virulent as ever. …"

As part of Crikey's Democracy Lost series, Crikey's political editor Bernard Keane conducted an extended discussion with Nicholas Gruen on Christmas Eve. Nicholas is one of Australia's finest public policy intellectuals and has written on an extraordinary array of issues while working as a ministerial adviser, Productivity Commissioner, academic and investor. He is also an advocate for citizens' assemblies, and argues that they offer a solution to some of the complex problems besetting our democracy, as well as overcoming the opposition of vested interests to much-needed reforms. He explains why in nearly an hour of free-wheeling discussion.

Another enjoyable discussion with P. Bowman in which we range over the pros and cons of the numerous terms that have come to prominence in our language over the last decade. Words like 'gaslighting' and 'microaggression'. What's distinctive about these terms is firstly their preparedness to break the 'forth wall' of a conversation. They allow one to address not just the words and arguments that others have used but also their intent or even their unintended effects. The result is the prospect of great addition to our language, but more often its weaponisation. 

In this chat we start from an essay of mine called 'needing the eggs'.* We talk about how so much of what matters takes place in all those ways in which what people say and what they do differ — in a thousand ways subtle and not so subtle. Towards the end of the discussion, we also talk about the prospect of a 'new professionalism' in preference to the managerialism of strategies and KPIs (which is always at risk of falling into roleplay) and also in preference to the 'old professionalism' which was replaced by managerialism. We'll explore an institutional framework which might enable us to develop that kind of professionalism in a future discussion.   *It's not been published but DM @ngruen1 at Twitter for access to it.