W18Reptilocracy 🦎🏛️ Insert Vote, Receive Same
Teaser
Slogans multiply while gatekeepers keep the decision range narrow. Recurring failure then looks like the public picked badly.
TLDR
We can choose which candidate disappoints us, but not whether the system will. The vote changes the label while the machine keeps dispensing the same menu.Context
This scene shows narrative control and restricted choice. A large system can present many candidates, slogans, and campaigns while keeping the real decision range narrow. Short-term incentives, donor or status pressures, internal gatekeepers, and fear of upsetting established interests shape what reaches the ballot.
The room then treats dissatisfaction as a consumer preference problem: choose a different box next time. That makes recurring failure feel like the public chose badly. It is evidence that the menu itself is constrained. “If every option disappoints, the problem may be the machine.” Without basic psychological fitness standards for honesty, accountability, courage, and reality-contact (applied transparently and under independent oversight), systems keep rewarding candidates who fit the machine better than they serve the public.
BUT WHY:
This is part of an experiment: we are keeping count of how many scenes it takes before we agree that leaders with real power should prove they are psychologically fit to hold it.
By turning our instincts and hive habits into animals, the project asks why we still let untested nervous systems run entire societies.
In a world where one unstable nervous system can scale to entire institutions, this project treats Reptilocracy as the cartoon diagnosis and points to one concrete step: the Change.org petition (Stronger Checks and Balances: Psychological Fitness for Australia’s Top Leaders).