Namely: The Ambidextrous Isis who should put the pieces together but prefers to create phantom traffic jams
“The highest degree of esoteric teachings is simple common sense.”
– A.R. Orage, On Love
“When you try to play one thing with your right hand and another with your left, you usually end up playing neither. Unless you are Keith Jarrett. But governments are not Keith Jarrett.”
– A digital junkie who has seen too many politicians attempt the impossible
Dedicated to all those who think that the solution to complexity is more complexity
The Myth They Didn’t Teach You (in Mythology Class)
There is this story they tell you at university, if you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to take a mythology course. The story of Isis and Osiris. They tell you: Osiris was the king, he was killed, his body cut into pieces – fourteen, to be precise. Isis, who was simultaneously his sister AND his wife (yes, Egyptian mythology had a complicated relationship with family ties), had to pick up all the pieces and put them back together.
End of story. Exam passed. Next myth.
But wait. Why in fourteen pieces? Why did they have to be put together? “It is simply their nature,” the professors reply with that academic confidence that masks ignorance.
Let us try the esoteric way, the one they don’t teach you because they don’t know it either: the body of Osiris is the desire to understand. And this desire was torn into many pieces and scattered to the wind.
One day you want to learn French. The next day you want to play the guitar. Then you want to be fit. Then you want to get married. Then for a while you wish to write the great novel. Your body – your desire to understand – is scattered in fourteen different directions.
Isis must pick up the pieces so that they can become one again: a single, tremendous desire to understand. Understand what? Yourself. Life. The meaning of things.
School, on the other hand, gives you a little bit of history, a little bit of literature, a little bit of sociology. And a little bit of mythology. Without telling you that the myth IS YOU.
Now keep this image in mind, because in a moment I will show you how modern governments have become so good at doing exactly the opposite: taking a whole body and tearing it apart. And then wonder why it doesn’t move.
Bureaucracy’s phantom traffic jam
In my last article I told you about the phantom traffic jam: the one you get on the motorway when one brakes, the one behind brakes harder, the one behind almost stops, and half an hour later you have a 10-kilometre queue. You get to the point of the hypothetical accident and there’s nothing there. Just air. A phantom traffic jam, generated by our collective inability to react to nothingness.
Bureaucracy works EXACTLY like this.
A department perceives a (often non-existent) problem. It reacts by creating a norm. Another department reacts to the norm by creating a control. A third department reacts to the control by creating a commission. And in the end you have a bureaucratic traffic jam of epic proportions where everyone slows down but no one knows why.
Case in point: Linda Gonzalez of the University of Miami suggests taxing consumption instead of income to ‘stabilise price levels’ in the age of AI. Translation: since AI is compressing prices down (plenty! Yay!), we create a tax that artificially brings them back up.
It’s like saying: “Since the Titanic is sinking, let’s increase the price of life jackets so people think twice before saving themselves.”
But wait, because the proposal envisages a ‘dynamic’ tax that adjusts in real time. If prices fall by 3%, VAT goes up by 2%. It’s the tax version of cruise control: keep your speed steady as you plummet into the ravine.
Nice move. It is the government that brakes where there is no accident, creating the accident.
The ambidextrous company (which the government would like to be but never will be)
In modern management there is this beautiful concept: the ambidextrous company. An organisation capable of doing two opposite things at the same time:
RIGHT HAND – Exploitation (Efficiency):
Optimising the current business. Performance, control, cost reduction, incremental improvement. That is what pays the wages today.
LEFT HAND – Exploration (Innovation):
Seek new markets, experiment with radical models, accept the risk of failure. This is what will ensure relevance in N years’ time.
The problem? These two souls require different ‘operating systems’:
– Exploitation needs hierarchy and certainty
– Exploration needs flexibility and autonomy
And guess what happens? Efficiency ends up eating away at innovation. Why? Because efficiency delivers today. Innovation maybe in 5 years. And politicians (when it goes well) think about 4-year cycles. When it goes wrong, they think about the next election in 6 months.
This is where many incumbent companies fail: they become great at doing something that the market no longer wants. Kodak was ambidextrous in analogue. Nokia in hardware. Blockbuster in physical rental.
All very good musicians. Too bad the audience wanted to hear another genre.
Isis ambidextrous: the government we want (but don’t have)
Now let’s put the pieces together (ah, the irony):
Modern government should be like Isis Ambidextrous:
RIGHT HAND:
Managing the present – functioning bureaucracy, fair taxes, efficient services, rule of law. The present body of Osiris.
LEFT HAND:
Preparing the future – AI governance, post-scarcity economy, new models of redistribution. The future pieces of Osiris.
The task: Bringing these pieces together into one coherent vision.
Reality: Isis has forgotten that she has to recompose the body. Instead, she continues to break it into smaller and smaller pieces.
Every new problem generates:
– A new department
– A new commission
– A new level of supervision
– A new real-time dashboard
– A new ‘participatory platform
Modern government is not ambidextrous. It is a bureaucratic centipede that uses 500 feet for the right hand and 500 for the left, and wonders why it cannot walk.
The articles I have read talk about ‘government as a platform, not a maze’. Beautiful. Poetic. Too bad that every attempt to create a platform generates three new labyrinths.
Do you know why? Because government, unlike companies, cannot fail and start again. There is no Chapter 11 democracy. So it accumulates. It stratifies. It mummifies.
Osiris remains dismembered. And Isis continues to search for the pieces in a desert she herself helped to create.
The Sufi paradox: returning to common sense
Here we are at the point where everything tips over. Remember the epigraph?
“The highest degree of esoteric teachings is simple common sense.”
Everything I have told you so far – Isis, Osiris, ambidextrous company, government as a platform – is beautifully complex. Fascinating. Intellectually stimulating.
And that is exactly the problem.
The Sufi tradition tells us one simple thing: after circling around all the mysteries of the universe, the deepest truth is … common sense. You don’t need esoteric complexity. One needs to see things as they are.
Applied to government in the age of AI:
GOOD SENSE #1:
If AI produces abundance, why do we still tax as if we were in scarcity?
GOOD SENSE #2:
If robots do the work, why do we base the tax system on labour income?
GOOD SENSE #3:
If productivity decouples from employment, why do we still measure economic success by GDP and unemployment?
GOOD SENSE #4:
If the problem is value compression (falling prices, falling wages), why would the solution be to artificially raise prices instead of rethinking how we distribute value?
The answers to these questions are obvious. So obvious that no one says them.
Instead we build:
– ‘Real-time dynamic taxation systems’
– “Participatory dashboards with algorithmic feedback loops”
– ‘Distributed governance platforms based on smart contracts’
It is the bureaucratic equivalent of using string theory to understand why you are cold. The answer is: close the window, genius.
But closing the window does not generate:
– Academic papers
– Millionaire consultancies
– TED Lectures
– New departments
So we continue to keep the window open and build more and more complex mathematical models of why we are cold.
The reorganisation window (or the last chance before game over)
Economists speak of a ‘reorganisation window’: reindustrialisation offers a brief respite. Investments in domestic production, infrastructure, green energy create demand for skilled labour. Engineers, electricians, project managers are again essential.
Beautiful. There is just one small detail: this window is temporary.
The same systems that are now being built in factories, power grids, ports will soon be run by machines. We are not creating permanent jobs. We are building the infrastructure that will make human labour in those areas permanently useless.
It is a bridge. But a bridge to where?
Option A: Let us use this time to really rethink how a post-scarcity economy works. How we distribute value when we no longer need to work to produce it. How we maintain social cohesion, meaning, identity.
Option B: We use this time to create 47 other commissions studying how to create participatory platforms for real-time dashboards that monitor the efficiency of other commissions.
Guess which option we are choosing?
Government as a platform is a nice idea. But the successful platforms (Amazon, Spotify, Uber) have one thing in common: they eliminate the layers in between. They directly connect producer and consumer, artist and listener, driver and passenger.
The government does the opposite: it adds levels. Because every level is a job. Every board is a career. Every dashboard is a budget.
Isis collecting the pieces of Osiris does not create 14 collection subcommittees. She collects them. Full stop.
Wait: the government IS NOT a business. I know that. I just said that. But then why do they keep selling us the ‘government as a platform’ model? Because it is a convenient lie. It sounds innovative. It attracts EU funds. It generates TED talks.
The truth? A government cannot remove levels like Amazon, because it governs rights, not products. Every level removed is one less guarantee. Every simplification is a potential abuse.
Platform government’ is not inefficiency that must be corrected. It is structural impossibility that must be admitted. But admitting it does not bring careers. So we continue to pretend.
The compression that no one wants to face
In the previous article I talked about the compression of value: AI produces more, prices fall, wages do too, and everyone applauds efficiency while they are applauding their own economic funeral.
But there is another compression that nobody talks about: the compression of decision-making time.
In 1800, a government could take 10 years to respond to an economic change. In 1900, maybe 5 years. In 2000, a few years. Today? AI changes the labour market in 6 months. And the government is still debating whether it needs a commission to study the problem. It is not a question of incompetence. It is a question of operational speed.
An ambidextrous company can pivot. An ambidextrous government … gets entangled in its own hands. Because corporations can:
– Dismissal
– Closing divisions
– Changing overnight strategy
– Failing and starting again
Governments cannot do any of this. They are immortal by design. And immortality brings rigidity. A dead and broken Osiris could be reassembled. But what do you do with an Osiris that cannot die but is still immobile? He is an institutional zombie.
The rock ending: the cadence of institutional deception
In music, the cadence of deception is when you seem to be moving towards resolution and instead… turn elsewhere. Modern government is a giant cadence of deception:
PROMISE: Efficiency + Innovation (ambidextrousness)
REALITY: Bureaucracy + Paralysis
PROMISE: Transparency and participation
REALITY: Dashboards that nobody looks at and platforms that nobody uses
PROMISE: Preparing for the post-scarcity future
REALITY: Taxing consumption to simulate scarcity
PROMISE: Government as an agile platform
REALITY: Another 140 pieces of Osiris scattered in the desert
The only really ambidextrous thing that works? The Beatles playing together. But they were four, not fourteen ministries. And when John played one thing with his right hand and another with his left, he did it on ONE platform. Not on 47 different platforms that didn’t communicate with each other.
Coda (what the Sufis would call ‘going back to the beginning’)
Isis reassembled Osiris into 14 pieces. It was hard work, but it made sense: reuniting what had been divided.
The modern government took those 14 pieces and multiplied them by 10. Then it created commissions to study how to put them back together. Then it created commissions to oversee the commissions. Then it created dashboards to monitor the commissions that oversee the commissions. And he wonders why the body doesn’t move.
The ultimate esoteric teaching is common sense. The ultimate governmental failure is to forget it while you build real-time participatory platforms to measure how efficient you are at not understanding anything.
Jerry Garcia was right: “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” But at least the Grateful Dead concerts were free.
The government makes you pay for your ticket, sells you merchandise, puts advertisements in your breaks, asks you to fill in a questionnaire about your experience… and then sounds off-key. With two hands. Simultaneously.
The only thing that sounds good is silence. What happens when you stop clapping and ask yourself: did we really think that adding complexity would solve complexity? Isis knew. You just had to pick up the pieces. Not create more of them.
But hey, at least now we have a dashboard that tells us how many songs we have created today. And that, my friends, is true modern ambidexterity: playing louder and louder with both hands as the song ends.
P.S. As I write this, somewhere an algorithm is calculating how long it took you to read each paragraph. But unlike AI, governments don’t learn from data. They repeat the same mistakes, only with more PowerPoint.
The real phantom traffic jam is not in the traffic. It is in the institutions that brake where there is no accident, accelerate where there is no road, and wonder why we never arrive at our destination.
Osiris is still there, dismembered. Isis has forgotten her way home. And we are stuck in the middle, applauding the performance.
P.P.S. The Tree of Life works with ten Sefirot plus one hidden so well that it is obvious to everyone. The modern government with a hundred and forty commissions all obvious that no one knows what they do, jobs covered in secrecy. The difference? The Tree bears fruit. Commissions produce minutes. Dismembered Osiris had more structural coherence than our governance. And he was literally dead.