Part 20: Governance People Actually Trust
A bold experiment where decisions are explained like normal human sentences
Welcome to part 20 of 31 in the series...
Society, But Make It Make Sense
This series asks a simple question: if we redesigned society today, would it look like this?
Each post explores the strange rules behind modern life and what might work better.
Governments make a lot of decisions.
Budgets.
Policies.
Plans.
Strategies.
Frameworks for implementing the strategy that supports the plan.
Occasionally a working group about the framework for the strategy on the policy change.
From the inside, all of this feels perfectly logical.
From the outside, it can look slightly mysterious.
A decision appears.
A document appears.
Then someone on the news says something like: “We followed the appropriate consultation process.” Which technically answers the question while also raising seventeen new ones.
Most people don’t actually expect governments to be perfect.
Running an entire country is a fairly complicated group project.
But people do expect two fairly simple things:
explain what you’re doing.
be clear about who is responsible.
These two ideas sound basic, but they are surprisingly powerful.
When decisions are transparent, people can understand the reasoning.
They may still disagree. But at least they know how the decision happened.
And when accountability is clear, everyone knows who is responsible for outcomes.
Success has a name.
So does failure.
Without these two things, governance starts to feel mysterious and untrustworthy.
Decisions appear to come from somewhere. Responsibility appears to belong to everyone and no one at the same time. Which is how you end up with press conferences where someone says:
“We acknowledge the challenges and will continue working collaboratively across agencies.”
A sentence that contains many words and almost no nouns.
Trust grows differently.
Trust grows when people can see the system working.
A clear explanation.
A clear decision.
A clear line of responsibility.
It turns out people are much more comfortable with complex decisions when the process is understandable.
Because when governance is transparent, it stops feeling like something happening behind a curtain.
It starts feeling like something the public can actually see.
Which, when you think about it, is the whole point.
Harry Truman might not have been the best President, but he certainly let everyone know that he was responsible for dropping the atomic bombs and firing Douglas MacArthur. Our current President blames everyone but himself for everything and anything.
This definitely feels utopian, even though it shouldn't. I did a Google search for "are there any countries whose governments are considered legitimately transparent," and the results directed me to this article: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/institutional-effectiveness. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. was not on the list. Given that we are sliding ever closer to authoritarianism, and there seems to be zero accountability for the crimes and corruption emanating from the current administration, it could be years before we ever regain anything approaching transparency. Also unsurprisingly, the Nordics top the USA Today list, and three of them still have constitutional monarchies. There is hope out there, somewhere.