Managed Populations: 2 Abstraction, Detachment, and Responsibility

Once vertical accountability thins, governance increasingly operates in abstraction. Policies are modelled, risk is quantified, and populations are reduced to variables in spreadsheets, predictive algorithms, and strategic frameworks. Decisions are justified in terms of efficiency, stability, or geopolitical alignment — not in relation to the lived experiences of those affected.

This is not mere bureaucratic laziness. It is the inevitable consequence of scale and complexity. No cabinet, ministry, or civil service can track the full consequences of every policy in real time. Economic forecasts, intelligence briefings, and risk matrices become the language of governance. But the very tools designed to manage complexity also detach decision-makers from moral perception. The farther the abstraction from lived consequence, the more the citizenry becomes an object of calculation rather than a relational partner.

The detachment has moral consequences. When the public witnesses policies that cause profound harm — forced displacement, systemic inequities, the orchestration of violence abroad — their outrage is met not with engagement, but with procedural insulation. Administrative explanations, security rationales, and media framing transform ethical dilemmas into technical problems. Those who protest are treated as threats to systemic stability, not as participants in co-creating the consequences of action.

Consider the policing of peaceful protests in Australia and Britain against actions widely recognised as morally indefensible. The protests are orderly. Participants pose no physical threat. Yet they are arrested, sometimes beaten, and routinely misrepresented in official narratives. Meanwhile, individuals expressing the exact opposite sentiment — supporting the contested actions — are largely ignored. The state does not respond to moral content; it responds to alignment with lateralised structures of authority. Ethical evaluation is displaced by systemic coherence.

Responsibility is abstracted alongside the population. When a minister approves a policy that results in civilian suffering abroad, the moral weight of the act is diffused across the network: advisory boards, bureaucratic hierarchies, allied governments, economic constraints, and strategic imperatives. No single actor bears the full relational burden. Detachment becomes survival.

The central tension is this:

• Vertical identification fosters moral responsibility but slows decision-making.

• Lateral identification fosters coherence and continuity but erodes relational accountability.

Abstraction does not make actors evil. It makes ethical perception structurally difficult. And for the managed population, the result is stark: the system functions as designed, yet it operates above, behind, and around their moral intuition.

The structural question emerges:

Can responsibility survive in a system that necessarily abstracts and detaches decision-makers from lived consequence?

This movement sets the stage for the next: how democracy, as ritual, legitimises this abstraction without confronting it, and how the managed population experiences continuity without control.