Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…What is a new equilibrium for these existing institutions, whether it’s the civil service or the media? Suppose you successfully reverse a lot of these trends and there’s a bunch of successes that ramp up. Do they keep opposing you or do they support the new regime? What is the new equilibrium for the blob? Well, by definition, I think all bureaucracies end up operating for themselves. So you should assume that if you do a kind of like a standard approach to this, and you say — We don’t like the existing bureaucracies, we’re going to take over, we’re going to scrap them and replace them. Then obviously within not very long, those things are going to operate pretty similarly to what the old things did. The only way, I think, that there’s any chance of long term changes, you have to build into the system institutions and public acceptance and elite acceptance of a kind of constant reinvention and rejuvenation and closing and refounding of things. It’s the only conceivable way that over a time period like 100 years. If you go back to your Singapore example, so far it’s been successful in preserving that culture. It’s like: here’s what our real goals are and the different elements of the government system have to change to meet those goals. And they constantly are adapting and we try and face our failures honestly. Like their report on what they got wrong on COVID which is already published and actually accepting the errors and trying to fix them. Unlike Britain, where we’re just paying lawyers hundreds of millions of quid to spend years arguing about it. The only way that you could even imagine something happening long term is if you not just replace the existing elements with new ones, but you also create institutional mechanisms whereby the elites and the public accept these things need constant rejuvenation. And that’s a mix of basically sunsetting, closing and rebuilding. Let’s get more specific. Let’s talk about the Ministry of Defense. Would you just lay off a huge chunk of it? And there’s specific projects you’ve talked about that you’d sunset. But what would it look like to refound the Ministry of Defense, for example, or any specific department?…

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