Why I'm apolitical
How a mandatory part of my job as a civil servant became a personal philosophy
In the civil service we are asked to be apolitical. That means it is our job to support the government of the day, by providing impartial advice and - once decisions are taken - to implement them in the best ways we know how. It is not our job to take positions on political issues, nor to argue with decision-makers on value judgments. After all, politicians are elected by the public to represent the people, not us.
Many new civil servants struggle with being apolitical. That makes sense. These are same people who spent many years in policy school debating the pros and cons of past decisions, and asked about how they would do things differently. What they often do not realize is that there are no good or bad decisions, only tradeoffs. The most important job of the civil servant is to listen, so that we best represent various interests and accurately discuss tradeoffs when offering policy recommendations.
The problem with being political is that it stops us from seeing those tradeoffs. Whenever I have failed as a policymaker, it is always because I was too wedded to an idea of how the world should be, I failed to see how the world really is. Over the years, I have learned to listen to all perspectives with an open mind. While the policy solution is not always clear, being apolitical helps us understand the needs of various communities and to be clear about what we are trading away.
Before becoming a civil servant, I had many years of training as a professional philosopher. Part of the reason I left philosophy is that I do not believe humans and societies can be reduced to ideology. Life is always more complicated than what can be explained in words. Concepts are there to help make sense of the world, not to box us into ways of thinking. I felt philosophy as a discipline was more wedded to ways of thinking, than it was to the real world and the real humans who live within it.
Politics is the same. Too often, political ideology that was originally designed to help us better understand society have been co-opted to control how we should behave in society. You should preserve marriage as an institution between men and women, says the right. You should respect transgender rights and use their pronouns, says the left. Why can’t both exist in this beautiful and complicated world of ours? Are we even talking about real married couples and real transgendered people anymore?
In marketing there is a phrase called “segment of one”. In the days of mass TV advertising, everyone who watched cable news was shown the same ad. Later in direct mailing, companies could segment their customers - sending toy flyers to only those households with children. Then, with the advent of internet cookies, companies began to track the preferences of customers and show them individualized ads.
What segment of one marketing allows us to do is recognize that fundamentally people are not the same. Each person has a unique set of wants and needs and, by taking the time to understand them, can we truly see human beings for who they are and the world for what it really is. This brand of humanism is what enabled me to become a good civil servant. This is how I will continue to approach everyone in my personal life - inclusively and in full recognition of individual differences. Ultimately, I believe this is how we ourselves can truly be seen.