Column | Governing from a burnout
Last week my team and I missed an early train transfer to Brussels because my connection from The Hague arrived three minutes later. “If only you had taken a train”, a disappointed and clear team member wrote. He had to travel much longer than I did to catch the train to Brussels at Rotterdam Central. Still to arrive well over half an hour earlier. I couldn’t help but feel ashamed because we missed our first meeting at a think tank in Brussels. Our visit to the European Parliament and a Flemish journalistic platform also went differently than planned. The price for receiving from chaos is that you are in control, at the mercy of circumstances.
Some friends and Presence these days are sometimes hesitant to call me for fear that they might “harass” me. Then I run from one meeting to another, from deadline to deadline. Those in a permanent state of crisis traffic have little room to go through life uninhibitedly, and to slow down. That is only the case on a personal level, not for society as a whole.
In the years that I consciously consider Dutch society, I find that there are initial similarities between a personal state of chaos and the permanent state of crisis in which the Dutch government finds itself. Two of those crises were national news this week: the reception of asylum seekers and the nitrogen issue. Where I missed my transfer because I had not anticipated a delay of my train, because of the Dutch government much too late on both the reception and the issue due to lack of focus. Where I run from deadline to deadline, the Dutch government bumps from crisis to crisis. Where my friends and future are afraid to treat me the Dutch government treats its citizens as last.
To understand why my life is in chaos, you have to take me to a certain permanent one. There you will meet someone who keeps several balls in the air as a survival strategy, so that he does not have to confront his own fear. To understand why the Dutch government is in crisis, you need to delve into history. There are political and policy makers created by the daily influential lobbying of influential companies making choices of long-term stability.
The cliché is that without darkness the light cannot know itself; duality is an inherent part of life. There are plenty of situations that can be based on chaos, as resistance to the over-organized society. As sharply described by Henry Adams, chaos was the law of nature, order was a dream of mankind. Out of chaos, friction allows us to question existing situations and present alternative solutions. Not only on a personal level, but also on a collective level. Just look at the Second World War, the financial crisis, the corona crisis, and now the Russian war in Ukraine. These are chaotic events that have enabled Europe, despite the cultural and economic differences, to be a community of values too small.
But it becomes risky if we start to see crises as the status quo. Because where we as personal can become overwrought as a result of permanent incentives and expressed from a crisis situation, a government can also lose its clout, have consequences, they react out of power to complex problems, instead of acting as a ruler.
Let’s reflect on this summer recess to prevent our government from ending up in a burnout. In any case, I am absent from this place.
Kiza Magendane is a political scientist and writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also in the newspaper of June 24, 2022