Dominic Cummings is attempting to help people better understand the repeated failures of the governing elites, or at least, the elites that appears to be governing. He started this back in 2023.
One of the most fundamental things I’ve learned in 24 years involvement is that almost nobody has any interest in general principles underlying success and failure, nor interest in execution/management, and although political people read a lot of history books it’s hard to see any learning.
This is a core feature of why the world is as it is. It’s why I found a lot of interest in Silicon Valley about ‘why did Leave win the referendum’ and ‘how exactly does No10 and the deep state work’ but in London practically no interest beyond the surface phenomena. This is so extreme I’ve found more interest from people in San Francisco in ‘how exactly does X work’ than I have from the actual minister in London nominally ‘in charge’ of X.
So this is mainly for a) people outside politics interested in how it really works and b) people (almost all young) interested in the general problem of ‘the hard thing about doing really hard things’ (cf. Ben Horowitz’s excellent book on this in the entrepreneur context). I predict I will have ~100X more interest from entrepreneurs and researchers than from people ‘working in politics’. (And 1,000X more interest from some deep state officials than MPs who aren’t even interested in how the media really works even though they’re obsessed with the media.) But I also learned that odd people in politics are interested in these things and the <1% who are interested have an interesting knack of finding each other and working on things. These people are disproportionately young. (This is partly what happened in Vote Leave.)
If you disbelieve me, reflect on one simple fact that I’ve hammered repeatedly: the entire Westminster debate has, with the sort of ruthless focus it cannot muster to achieve anything positive, totally ignored the loathed, despised, lowest status issue in Westminster — how the government actually buys critical goods and services and the capacity of our industrial production. And it has maintained this ruthless focus through the worst pandemic in a century that left over a hundred thousand unnecessarily choking to death then through the biggest war in Europe since 1945. There has literally been more interest in Russel Brand among political-media-academia elites than this central aspect of how our state and society work and why we’re worse at it than we were in the pre-computer age.
We are living through exactly what we read about in periods like summer 1914 — a structural blindness of dominant political-media-academic elites about core features of the system they participate in all day. We read history books about summer 1914 and ask ‘how could the entire Cabinet week after week not probe exactly what our military commitments to Belgium were, what exactly the plans were, and expose that there was no actual plan or institution to cope with the crisis’. We’re in a worse situation than they were.
It’s a disaster and an opportunity. And studying this chronology can help you see how to create opportunities from disasters. In 2015 I thought the structure of the system was a disaster but the referendum was an opportunity and I tried to apply some of the things I’d learned. This proved unexpectedly successful. And, in keeping with the point above about people struggling to learn, the same happened in 2019 even though powerful forces really wanted it not to happen.
What’s needed is a shift in governing institutions roughly as profound as the shift from the ancien regime pre-1789 to what we think of as the modern western state — a shift in the types of people, their training, their tools, institutions, and the fundamental principles and incentives by which they operate. We are still governed by the Cabinet Room almost indistinguishable from what it looked like when it was overwhelmed in summer 1914: a dozen or so people with poor education and training on top of highly centralised dysfunctional institutions largely blind to the incredible system complexity yet responsible for crises that can affect billions.
His Bismarck project is a fascinating one. I’m giving some serious contemplation into engaging in it, assuming that he’s actually continued with it over the last two years, and it might make for an interesting collective effort in the old Voxiversity sense. Share your thoughts on this if it might be of any interest to you.