All our breezy prescriptions for a World Government will fail miserably if they don’t address the same problem that the Governments of the Nations are grappling with. And one of the biggest is the widening gap between People and Rulers. Almost within days of arriving in office, the government of our poor namesake Sir Keir Starmer found itself plagued by a deep and inveterate hostility from the voters.
Those same voters demand endlessly lower taxes, then complain bitterly about potholes, weak defence and the lack of capacity in the prison system. They demand an end to red tape and regulation while simultaneously clamouring for restrictions on immigration, the sale of certain drugs, and the use of the internet by minors. Where has such demanding — and self‑contradictory — behaviour come from?
One possible source, we wondered (and at first this was mere speculation), is consumer society. For decades people have been born and raised in a milieu that specialises in gratifying their capricious wants: for sweet foods, for psychologically active substances, and for ever faster ways of travelling towards the next traffic jam. We do not blame companies like Amazon, Netflix or Deliveroo; they have simply perfected trends in a culture a century in the making.
So we asked: do people now demand the same instantly gratifying solutions from politicians that they expect from fast‑food companies?
Readers will be glad to know that help arrived from a much deeper thinker. We came across the work of a remarkable philosopher, Luke Yates, whose book was published in that far‑off year of 2022. Modern society, Luke argues, is based on consumption practices: convenience, speed and instant gratification. If this is how people come to perceive politics, then our outlook is dire indeed.
For, as those of us in the — er — more reflective- elements of the population have known for centuries, politics isn’t like that at all. Its word‑cloud comprises such elements as slow, procedural, available resources, nuance, evidence and above all: choose options. To expect any politician, world emperor or local councillor to wave a magic wand and solve all is to chase mare’s nests and even, dare we say it, bark at the Moon.
Which leads us to a third, depressing metaphor: dead ducks. For if Luke’s thesis is even halfway reasonable, our plan for a World Government will solve absolutely nothing at all.
Oh well. We tried.
Luke Yates (2022), How everyday life matters: everyday politics, everyday consumption and social change, Consumption and Society, 1(1): 144–169.
#world government #luke yates #consumer society #politics#economics #culture
Learning, Science and Society 
To address the fundamental weakness in Yates’s approach, one must confront the inherent contradiction of attempting to reform a broken system while preserving the structural mechanics that caused its breakdown in the first place. Yates represents a classic vanilla reformist tendency: he diagnoses real societal symptoms, yet recoils from the radical measures necessary to cure them. By insisting on solutions that fit neatly within existing institutional boundaries, his proposal becomes an exercise in palliative care rather than actual transformation.
Systems are designed to reproduce their own outcomes. When a framework consistently yields instability, inequality, or institutional failure, those results are not accidental defects—they are the predictable outputs of its underlying design. To advocate for meaningful change while leaving those foundational structures intact is to rely on the very mechanism that generated the crisis to resolve it. True resolution requires a willingness to dismantle and replace the core architecture, rather than merely redecorating its exterior.
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rafael thank you so much for reading my blog and for the fullness of your thoughtful reply
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