Big basins of bollocks

There has
always been red tape in Government.  Now
there are fantasies of duct tape.  According
to a report,
US border patrol officials have been emailed and asked by the Customs
and Border Protection Commissioner to urgently respond with any information
about women being gagged with tape and driven across the US/Mexico border.  This came after the US President, who kept
repeating the claim, had been challenged to provide evidence, any evidence at
all.  Nada.  Zip.

Ben Ramalingam wrote a great book called “Aid on the
Edge of Chaos” in which he said that in the aid and development field
“there is far more policy-based evidence than there is evidence-based
policy.”  I have always loved this
distinction as it chimes with my experience as a public service leader and the
ways policies are constructed.  Trump, of
course, is re-writing the code.  He does
not bother with the fig leaf of cherrypicking policy-based evidence.  He just lies repeatedly and then, it turns
out that when these lies are challenged, public monies are spent sending
officials to rake up some substantiating evidence, or anything at all that
might add some fibre to the fabrication. 
The count
of the President’s false and misleading claims has been running at more than
16.5 a day in his second year in office.

All this got me thinking about complexity concept of basins
of attraction and the ways big lies become big basins of attraction.

The basin of attraction is a metaphor for the ways systems
self-organise themselves.  A complex
adaptive system is not predictable. 
There are too many interacting variables to predict how the system will
be disposed at any one point but there are clear patterns to how the system
behaves.

Big lies are one way a pattern is formed and then maintained
in a system.

It is a nonsense of the President’s construction that a wall
is an essential component of effective border security.  Reports
say The Wall was a memory aide for the new presidential candidate to make sure
he remembered to talk about the hot button issue of immigration. 

Build the Wall worked so well as a slogan it became policy
and then an unbreakable commitment to the base and now the base of a whole
presidency.  The big lie that The Wall=Effective
Border Security has now been adopted
by the Republican Party.  When that
happens in politics, when a party puts its weight behind something, then all
efforts go toward sustaining this “truth.”  The big lie becomes the pattern for a
self-organising basin of attraction.

On the other side of the Atlantic the British PM is shuttling back to Brussels with another mission based on another big lie: that Britain can exit from the European Community without significant consequences and that this also can be done without a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland or across the Irish Sea.  Years of effort have gone into sustaining this conceit and most of the British system seems to now being self-organizing around trying to make this true.

The political process is built on examples such as these.  For example, there is a whole history of the value of state investment in building the largest of capital works.  James Scott’s book “Seeing Like a State” provides a trove of examples.  There are times when state investment is the only way to get important work done effectively, and there are often times when it can be a monument to many other follies, egotistical leaders, favours for particular communities, and support for special interest groups.  Not far from where I write this there are new Roads of National Significance where the cost-benefit estimates were marginal at best but the whole system developed a commitment to sustain the case.

Big lies create basins of attractions – a dense web of hopes
and fears, follies, convenient facts, fabrications, and fervid flights of
fancy.  When we get into big holes we
often keep digging.  As we look at the
systems around us in organisations or our communities, a useful way to reveal
how it might be organizing itself is to look for the big lies and myths that are
supporting momentum or enabling the system to stay the same.