Managed Populations: 1 The Lateral Elite

Democracy is often imagined as a vertical relationship: the people elect, the government governs, and accountability flows downward. But this verticality is increasingly illusory. In modern states, particularly those deeply enmeshed in global networks, political elites identify laterally, not vertically. Their sense of “us” is defined not by the electorate or the moral weight of public opinion, but by peer networks that stretch across ministries, allied governments, bureaucracies, think tanks, security agencies, and international institutions.

The people, in contrast, are transformed in the elite’s perspective into a managed population: a variable in risk models, a set of statistics to guide policy, an electoral constraint to be observed rather than a relational partner to be engaged. Moral outrage, ethical reasoning, and lived experience are filtered through abstraction. When citizens protest, they are evaluated as disruptions, not interlocutors. When they support or oppose policy, their voices are codified, quantified, and integrated into the lateral network’s assessment of feasibility and risk.

This is not necessarily the result of malice. It is a structural effect of scale and abstraction. Governments must process enormous flows of information, anticipate complex economic and geopolitical consequences, and act rapidly. In doing so, the vertical channels of encounter — direct experience with those affected by policy — thin to invisibility. Abstraction is necessary, but it produces moral distance. When decision-making becomes primarily a function of peer alignment and institutional continuity, the relational link between elected office and citizen dissolves.

Consider the policing of peaceful protests against government-aligned military actions abroad. Citizens march, holding placards denouncing actions widely recognised as unethical. Their protest is orderly. Yet they are arrested. Meanwhile, those displaying support for the very actions the public deems immoral often face no interference. Narrative framing by authorities misrepresents the protest, justifying coercion in service of risk management rather than moral reflection. The procedural theatre of democracy continues, but the relational field of vertical accountability has collapsed.

In this context, the lateral elite stabilises itself by insulating against perturbation from below. Legitimacy is maintained not by engagement, but by ritual: elections, party discipline, ceremonial acknowledgment of public sentiment. The system is coherent, continuous, and internally rational — but for the “managed population,” it is alienating and opaque.

The structural question is stark:

How can vertical identification survive in a polity whose scale and complexity naturally produce lateral alignment?

This is the paradox at the heart of “Managed Populations”: the very systems that claim to serve the people systematically treat them as variables. And until the architecture of governance confronts this lateralisation, accountability remains conditional, contingent, and fundamentally abstract.