W19Reptilocracy 🦎🏛️ Public Money, Private Leverage
Teaser
A concentrated group tracks the rules and presses for the next exception. The cost is spread so thin that almost nobody follows every transfer.
TLDR
Tax money enters at one end and returns as lobbying power at the other. The public funds the loop, then faces the loop at the ballot box.Context
Incentives can build a closed loop between public funding, private advantage, and political influence. A concentrated group has time, expertise, and money to track rules, seek favorable treatment, and press for the next exception. The public cost spreads across many people, so each person has less reason and less capacity to follow every transfer.
Narrative control makes the loop sound technical: subsidy, partnership, competitiveness, reform. The result can look normal and professional even when public resources help finance the influence used to protect or expand private advantages. The smaller the group that gains, the louder it comes back to press again. Without transparent, independently overseen and auditable standards for honesty, accountability, and conflicts of interest, systems reward people who preserve the loop.
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).