Been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and I have Deep Thoughts inspired by the character of Vetinari, the Patriarch of Ankh-Morpork. Warning: minor spoilers ahead. Ankh-Morpork is pointedly a sort of in-absentia monarchy. It is structured as a monarchy but doesn’t have a king.
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Good corporate executives need to be both leaders and managers, but good politicians must *only* be good managers while *pretending* to be leaders at most. They must not actually lead or try to. At most “leadership” during a campaign phase, and only at a party level, is tolerable
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The ideal de jure leader is an empty throne. The ideal de facto ruler is someone who makes sure nobody ever tries to occupy it, while solving for normalcy one day at a time, without getting in the way of natural-rate progress or entrenching a status quo of cronyism.
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If you like James Scott’s anarchist model (the art of being ungoverned), Vetinari embodies the closest thing possible to practical ungovernance in a technologically complex society. The protector of the illegible against illegibility. Keeper of goose that lays golden eggs for all
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A pragmatist who resists both progressive and reactionary utopianism but not as a direct ideological adversary to utopian instincts. But by simply accepting the existence of utopians of all sorts and positioning oneself as a foil to all of them, arranging them in a balance.
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That’s how you solve for muddling through and slouching towards utopia in a complex world. That’s how you keep things boring and protect normalcy during the weirdest of weird times (which is all the time in Discworld).
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End of conversation
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