There’s a strange alchemy that happens when a government system or law’s been around long enough that its origins escape over the horizon of time: it stops being seen as an active choice and starts feeling more like a law of nature. Text etched into a golden tablet and handed down from on high, woven into the fabric of reality, eternal and unquestionable by mere mortals like us. But if you dare to look beyond the horizon into the shadows of history, you realize every single one of these policies was written by a group of ordinary, flawed, and often deeply self-interested people in a dusty old room somewhere.
These weren’t otherworldly gods. Nor were they all-knowing prophets. No, they were just a bunch of regular pipe-smoking, whiskey-drinking men with lofty ambitions and clear incentives (and bizarre sexual kinks just like the rest of us). These wealthy, white landowners were nonetheless trusted to write the rulebook for everybody, and many of those systems and policies still shape our lives decades and even centuries later.
We’ve been taught to believe there were key magical moments in history when powerful men were somehow freed of all bias and blessed with superhuman foresight. During these brief and mystical windows of time, these men were able to anticipate unprecedented technological innovation, social shifts, and moral evolution… all from beneath their lice-infested powdered wigs. Incredible.
It shouldn't be so quickly dismissed as radical, the premise that government systems and laws are just agreements we’ve made as a society. Nobody is suggesting to scrap the whole thing, but like any healthy and sustainable long-term relationship we might need a lil’ check-in to make sure we’re getting what we need out of the arrangement. Listen, nobody likes to hear “can we talk about us” when you're deep in your groove of profit-hoarding and quiet human suffering, but you can’t dodge the conversation forever.
Individually and collectively, we’ve grown. As individuals, we’ve become more aware of our needs and more confident in our own capabilities. The larger community has evolved in countless ways when we reflect on where we are vs where we started. (Certainly not all of them good, but this is to say we are not in the same place we were when many key societal agreements were first made.)
These legal and government systems were drawn up by wealthy and powerful capitalists to favor the priorities of whoever had the loudest voice and the deepest pockets at the time. Some of those agreements have aged quite well. Some of them... not so much.
Guess What Aged Like Milk?
Let’s take a few examples of popular government policies that when viewed in hindsight, don’t exactly hold up as the pure moral framework they were sold as.
1. Weaponizing Drugs (USA)
In the 1970s, the U.S. government launched the infamous War on Drugs, an initiative that escalated prison rates, devastated communities of color, and accomplished basically nothing in terms of reducing actual drug use. Today, lawmakers talk about it like it was a misguided but well-meaning attempt at public health. But when you go back to the actual moment of decision-making, it turns out that wasn’t the goal at all.
Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted as much in an interview:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. …By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
So this decades-long mass incarceration machine that still shapes modern policing in America wasn’t based on public health or safety at all. It was an explicitly racist and political strategy that worked so well that it became the default setting for half a century. Today, with states legalizing cannabis and the opioid crises being treated as a health emergency instead of a crime, it’s clear how malleable these "eternal truths" actually are.
2. The Sixties Scoop (Canada)
Oh, Canada you thought you weren’t getting called out? From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Canadian government proudly removed thousands of Indigenous children from their families against their will and placed them with white families in a practice known as the “Sixties Scoop.” These stolen children were usually rehomed far from their communities, their languages, and everything that rooted them to their culture. It was branded as an attempt to give the children a “better life;” but the goal of the program from the very beginning was the reprogramming of an entire generation into white Canadian culture.
The architects of this policy knew exactly what they were doing when they were doing it. Every child cries the same when taken from their parents, no matter the colour of their skin. The program was intentionally designed to sever Indigenous children from their cultural lineage. This is a strategy Canadian history knows all too well. (From the producers of ‘Residential Schools’ comes a traumatic new drama about a generation of children plucked from their communities and abandoned in suburban Canada.) And while the Ontario Superior Court finally acknowledged in 2017 that the government was liable for the harm caused, the damage was already done and it was generational.
This is what happens when government considers itself holy and policy is treated like gospel. For decades, this practice was defended as common sense. Only in hindsight do we see it for what it truly was: a calculated act of assimilation by abduction. And yet, for way too long the government and law stood by it. This is exactly the danger of assuming that just because something was written down, it must have been written right.
3. The Electoral College: Voting Like It’s 1787 (USA)
Ahh, The Electoral College. The beloved process that helps someone become president despite losing the popular vote, was never meant to be a functional safeguard of democracy. It was a compromise made in the 1787 Constitutional Convention to protect the influence of Southern slave states, which had fewer voters than the North. This process gave those states extra weight in presidential elections through the Three-Fifths Compromise (which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation but gave them no actual vote or rights).
Fast-forward to today, and that same device still distorts democracy, ensuring that a few swing states hold disproportionate power over the outcome of elections. It’s why candidates don’t bother campaigning in states that are safely red or blue, and why rural white voters are vastly overrepresented compared to urban, diverse populations. It’s nothing noble or fancy, it’s just a really old loophole that never got fixed.
That’s the whole point: policies like this aren’t inevitable and unquestionable truths. They were crafted by affluent men with clear political motives, rooted in the power structures of their time. And yet, because they’ve been around long enough, we treat them like sacred doctrine. The Electoral College isn’t a timeless principle of democracy. It’s an outdated workaround with racist origins that we’ve mistaken for wisdom simply because it hasn’t been torn down yet.
Duct Tape Democracy
What all three of these examples have in common is that they were tactical moves made by small groups of powerful men serving the interests of their moment. They weren’t born from timeless wisdom or moral clarity and they weren’t designed to stand forever.
They were built for the politics of their day: messy, biased, and deeply self-interested. Over time, repetition through generations has given them weight. At some point, people stopped asking where laws like these came from or why they were made. They drifted far enough over the historical horizon that we stopped seeing them as choices at all and they became part of the landscape of reality. As the years passed, policies stopped looking like political compromises and started feeling like commandments. Not because they were just, or wise (or even remotely true for that matter) but because they’d been repeated like ritual and recited like scripture.
But laws and systems are not sacred. They were made, and they can be unmade. The only thing keeping them in place is the collective illusion projected onto us that they’re bigger than we are. Power sustains itself across time by convincing people that the system isn’t just a series of choices made by a handful of old white men in dark rooms that reek of smoke, booze, and privilege. That these things must be the way they are. But legal and political history is made up of stinky old men in smokey old rooms making decisions that millions of people are forced to reckon with long after their political careers are over.
If you’ve not heard that perspective (or just haven’t heard it from someone that doesn’t have simultaneous perpetual bed-head and the dead eyes of someone that hasn’t slept in months,) this is because the political conversation is designed to keep us busy at the surface-level, arguing over superficial outcomes that have no real impact on the structure that’s built beneath or the possibility of changing things in a meaningful way.
We’re meant to stay where it’s safe, debating Right vs Left. Tax policy and immigration numbers. Should this meeting be public? Should that official apologize? It’s all just surface-level maintenance on a system that hasn’t been fundamentally recalibrated in ages. The real levers that shape wealth, power, and access are sitting one floor down, behind a cold, steel door labeled “Not For Debate.” We are not to go there, ever, under any circumstances, but I'm absolutely certain it stinks. I can smell it from here.
Once you start asking why the major political parties on both sides avoid the same easy fixes, you start to see the campaigns and debates as a loud and distracting show that was never meant to solve anything. I used to think that kind of statement was alarmist, but it’s clear now that the powerful aren’t confused or unaware. They know exactly what would help reconnect democracy to the will of the people. They’ve read the same studies, seen the same polls, heard the same (desperate, guttural screams of) demands from voters. They just know what happens if we all start looking under the hood together: the spell breaks. The policies we’ve treated like sacred scripture suddenly look a lot more like duct-taped deals. And the moment you stop treating those deals as divine, you realize they can be rewritten. In fact, they must be rewritten.
Governed by Ghosts
Not to get all self-promotional but this is exactly why I use the handle @governedbyghosts. Because so much of what shapes our daily lives is dictated by decisions made by long-dead men who could never have imagined the world we live in now. We’re still playing by their rules, still obeying their compromises, still carrying the weight of their prejudices and priorities.
Why is the world like this? Sorry, we’d ask the people who built it, but they’re worm-food now. And somehow, even from six feet under, they’ve managed to convince everyone that questioning their 200 year old decision is disrespectful.
Not everything needs to be torn up. But we should at least have the courage to ask: Is this rule still serving humanity? Or is it just serving the people who benefit from keeping things exactly as they are? Why is the future run by the past? And why do I hear more honest, imaginative ideas from a teenager on TikTok than from anyone with a press pass on CNN?
Because if the people in charge won’t fix what’s broken, the responsibility falls to us. (Sorry, I know you probably had big plans.) We need to challenge old habits we’ve mistaken for truths. And we must stop confusing age with authority, or tradition with relevance. If we want a future worth living in, we have to stop treating the past like scripture and start treating it like what it really was: a draft.
One that deserves a second draft.
One we are entirely within our rights to revise.
