20 August 2026 · method
Synthesis of a Working Session
From a high-rise photograph to a methodical framework for the exhausted state
What follows is a structured synthesis of an extended working session in which a diagnosis of contemporary Dutch government was built up step by step — from a concrete observation about a high-rise tower to a methodical framework for diagnosing and intervening in what, in the final part of the conversation, came to be called the exhausted state. The line moves from the architectural scale of daily life, via the absence of a sociological diagnostic register in Dutch public debate, past the classic questions of class formation and movement failure, to a three-part extension of Hanlon’s razor, and finally to an instrument of four triangles combining Moore’s Strategic Triangle with Ofman’s core quadrant. The synthesis closes with the application to the Dutch trajectory from 1945 to the present and with two concrete cases illustrating the mechanism: asylum policy advice at the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND), and a municipal youth care cascade from the spring of 2025.
The document is not a summary in the chronological sense; it is a thematic reconstruction that makes visible the coherence between the twelve subjects discussed. It is written as working material that can be integrated into future Statecraft publications and as a reference for the formulations developed in the session.
I. The occasion: a tower and a question
The conversation began with a photograph of a high-rise tower in a Dutch city. Twenty-five storeys, brick-clad, with small balconies and a relationship to the ground that ended four metres above the street. The question the photograph raised was deceptively simple: have we ever really thought about what a good life looks like if you live in such a building?
The honest answer is no. The Dutch housing programme is framed in units, not in lives. Nine hundred thousand dwellings by 2030 is an output target; what becomes possible inside those dwellings is not an indicator. The cabinet measures what it can count.
The typology of such towers betrays the design problem. They are built predominantly for one- and two-person households, with small balconies instead of usable outdoor space, little storage, and a spatial logic that effectively rules out family formation. A family with two children does not form there without three ingredients: an affordable larger dwelling, a school within walking distance, a playground that works. In a large part of the high-urban supply, at least one of the three is missing.
Beneath this design problem lies a deeper structural pattern. It is what has elsewhere in the Statecraft corpus been named the congealed outcome as the new given: earlier policy choices (land prices, fiscal incentives for investors, depreciation periods, urban densification ambitions) are treated as exogenous facts in the next policy round, and the question of what a good life is, is then answered within that given. The political incentive is clear: whoever measures in numbers scores in numbers; whoever measures in liveability scores nothing, because liveability only shows in twenty years, and by then another alderman is in office.
II. Pattern language: architectural counterweight
Immediately after the opening question, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977) was brought in as an analytical register that the Dutch policy debate in fact lacks. Alexander offers 253 named, transferable, combinable interventions for the built environment, each with an explicit value position.
Pattern 21, Four-Storey Limit, states on the basis of empirical work from the seventies that everything above four storeys damages human functioning. Alexander wrote it deliberately polemically; it is rarely cited in the Netherlands, because it directly undercuts the housing agenda. Whoever holds the catalogue against Dutch high-rise practice finds pattern after pattern violated. Pattern 14 (Identifiable Neighborhood), 37 (House Cluster), 67 (Common Land), 73 (Adventure Playground) stand in direct tension with what is delivered on most recent housing sites.
For Statecraft, pattern language is interesting not only for its architectural content but for its methodical move. A pattern is, in a sense, a form of anchoring: what remains standing when the architect, the alderman and the project bureau have gone. The parallel with the structure of Moore’s Strategic Triangle or De Caluwé’s colours of change is structural: a pattern language supplies named, transferable interventions with explicit value positions. Alexander’s additional insight, elaborated in The Timeless Way of Building, is that patterns only work when they are handled by people who know the system from use. That is precisely the opposite of Dutch urban development practice, which works from programme, not from use. The municipality writes a programme of requirements, the developer delivers units, and the question of what it actually does to the lives that will take place there is never operationally asked.
III. The missing register: dissociation in the Netherlands
The next question was why the melancholy sociological side of dissociation has so little life in Dutch intellectual and public debate, compared with Flanders, for instance, where Dirk De Wachter’s Borderline Times found a large readership. Five connected mechanisms were worked out, all institutional and all Dutch.
First, the polder as ontological obligation — the polder model being the Dutch practice of consensus decision-making in which every problem is expected to be negotiable at a table. The Dutch self-image rests on negotiability. A sociological diagnosis of dissociation establishes something that is not negotiable. The system has no register for that. What cannot be made discussable at a consultation table is reformulated into something that can be, and thereby disappears from view.
Second mechanism: depillarisation cleared away the carriers of cultural critique. Before 1965 the Netherlands was organised in “pillars” — confessional, socialist and liberal communities, each with its own schools, media, unions and intellectuals speaking from an explicit value position. After depillarisation came the technocratic-managerial centre, in which cultural critique was replaced by policy advice. A tragic register does not fit there, because the tragic cannot be translated into an action perspective and thereby becomes administratively worthless.
Third mechanism: the clinical-philosophical bridge is missing. De Wachter works because in Belgium and France the phenomenological-Lacanian tradition still holds active chairs from which clinicians speak to society. In the Netherlands, academic psychology is predominantly American-empirical. There is no chair from which a Dutch De Wachter could speak. The Trimbos Institute, the national mental health research institute, does epidemiology, not diagnostics of the age.
Fourth mechanism: the DSM-isation of suffering does the rest. What in a sociological reading would be systemic is routinely reduced to individual psychopathology. Not because clinicians want it, but because the funding system requires it. A complaint without a diagnostic code is not reimbursed, and what receives no reimbursement does not become public reality.
Fifth mechanism: the Calvinist substrate. Suffering that does not translate into productive action counts culturally as self-indulgence. The melancholic register requires permission to dwell on something without wanting to solve it. That permission is rarely granted in the Netherlands.
The result is a diagnostic vacuum. The phenomena are there. The language game is missing. Hence a Dutch Borderline Times cannot organise itself in the same wave as in Flanders. Not because the book cannot be written, but because the condition of reception does not exist.
IV. Classes that do not see themselves
The conversation shifted to a sharper line: people do not unite along axes they themselves do not see. The precariat, non-homeowners and other structural groups remain politically non-existent — not for lack of numbers, but for lack of symbolic articulation of their shared position. Marx called this the transition from a class an sich to a class für sich. Bourdieu called it méconnaissance: the structure of domination works deepest when it makes itself invisible.
In the Netherlands, five mechanisms keep that invisibility in place.
The aspirational identity. The non-owner defines herself as a future owner, not as a structural outsider. You do not organise against privileges you expect to acquire yourself. The same plays out in the precariat via the flex worker who understands himself as a future self-employed professional or permanent employee. The provisionality of the identity blocks its formation.
Depoliticisation through abstraction. What is a political structure presents itself as “the market”. Rents rise through scarcity, house prices through interest rates, waiting times through population growth. None of those formulations names who made the rules of the game. The mortgage interest deduction, the property transfer tax, the imputed rent charge on owner-occupied homes, the social housing quota: political instruments with large distributive effects, not discussed as causes of the position non-owners find themselves in. The instrument disappears into the outcome, and the outcome becomes reality.
Statistical invisibility. Statistics Netherlands reports at household level, not on the wealth position of the individual. The twenty-five-year-old living in an owned house is statistically a member of an owner household, even though she herself will never be able to buy. Wealth inequality is measured annually but rarely made into a frame.
The diploma democracy. Bovens and Wille have shown that Dutch politics is structurally populated by the highly educated. The highly educated are disproportionately owners. Articulating the non-owner interest therefore requires the articulators to speak about a position that is not their own.
The network composition. Politicians, journalists, senior civil servants, bankers, notaries, estate agents, policy advisers: almost all owners. Not out of bad faith, but out of cumulative incentive. It is precisely the configuration Slingerland calls network corruption: legally correct actions by interest-aligned actors which, in aggregate, destroy a public interest without any single transaction being identifiable.
The deeper layer beneath these five mechanisms is that visibility alone does not suffice. Even if the precariat saw itself, it would not simply organise. Trade unions arose from shared factory floors, not from shared statistics. The material infrastructure for class formation (a fixed workplace, a stable neighbourhood, its own press, its own associational life) is largely gone. Seeing is a condition, not a cause.
V. Movements that do not endure
The pattern that visibility does not suffice was illustrated by the Lekki Toll Gate protests (#EndSARS in Nigeria, October 2020) and by Occupy Wall Street (2011). Both achieved within weeks a degree of visibility that classic movements worked years for. Both evaporated within months — not for lack of participants but for lack of a form that could hold participants.
Zeynep Tufekci has worked out the mechanism in Twitter and Tear Gas (2017). Digitally coordinated movements trade organisational costs for mobilisation speed. That looks like a gain, until the moment comes when a negotiating position must be taken. Then it turns out that speed is no substitute for structure. There is no membership list, no treasury, no spokesperson with a mandate, no decision-making body that can bind a counterparty. An opponent that is an organisation does not need to win. It only needs to wait.
Beneath that mechanical explanation lies an ideological one. Both Occupy and #EndSARS held horizontality as a positive principle, not as tactical necessity. The form that made them safe (no leaders to decapitate, no purchase for repression) made them at the same time perishable.
A third layer is the absence of a theory of takeover. The labour movement had one, in two variants: revolutionary via the party, reformist via the union and social democracy. The horizontalist movement has no comparable arsenal. Visibility produces a shift in discourse, and there it stops. SARS was formally disbanded and returned under another acronym. The “1%” frame did not touch the American wealth distribution; it has only widened since 2011.
What would a comparable non-owner coalition in the Netherlands have to do differently? Not horizontal and not short-lived. It would require an infrastructure that has in fact been dismantled: a political party organising explicitly along the wealth axis, its own press, its own knowledge production, its own training apparatus, its own continuity across generations. The labour movement did all of this between 1880 and 1920. It is not technically impossible; it is institutionally unknown in this age. What is missing is not the position and not the pain, but the capacity to build something that must stand for ten years before it yields anything.
VI. The right-left asymmetry
To the question of why the right does organisationally better than the left in this configuration, a number of additional mechanisms were discussed. The organisational lead of the right is no accident. In the United States it goes back to the Powell memorandum of 1971, after which conservative donors invested for forty years in counter-institutions: the Federalist Society as a legal pipeline, the Heritage Foundation as a policy apparatus, evangelical churches as organisational infrastructure, Fox and the talk radio circuit as a communication layer, AEI and Hoover as academic shelter. The left did not make that investment. The left moved into the universities and the NGO sector, and built status there, not power.
Over this lies the Piketty inversion. What is called “progressive” and “conservative” no longer carries the same class content as in 1960. The contemporary progressive coalition is predominantly highly educated and urban-professional; the contemporary coalition of the right contains a growing share of workers. The worker who organised against capital now organises through parties the old left dismisses as right-wing. The label no longer follows the substance.
In the course of the conversation, the symmetry between left and right in their internal dialectics was demarcated more sharply: the right has been able to attach its internal dialectic (such as the Trump loyalty test) to a working electoral coalition. The left no longer has one, or only in fringe form. The empirical confirmation stands in the European figures: the SPD halves within one generation, the Dutch Labour Party disappears into a merger, the French PS reduces to a few per cent, the Italian PD oscillates, Corbyn’s Labour is worked out of the party from within.
What that implies for a possible non-owner coalition, or any class an sich whatsoever: the existing progressive infrastructure is not a vehicle. Not out of bad faith, but because its internal logic produces fragmentation, not consolidation. Whoever tries to recalibrate it is repairing something that by its design cannot drive. The question is not how the existing progressive apparatus is restored, but what a new vehicle would have to be.
VII. WEF criticism and network corruption
The criticism of the World Economic Forum circulating in parts of the Dutch population touches, empirically, a real pattern — and, analytically, too crude a reading. The empirical part: Dutch policy decision-making increasingly functions as the transmission of internationally circulating templates with thin domestic anchoring. The reading the WEF criticism supplies (Klaus Schwab as coordinator, Davos as headquarters, a deliberately acting cartel) is diagnostically wrong, and thereby loses the battle for analytical credibility in the centre.
The structural problem is more precise and more uncomfortable. It is what Slingerland has described in her work on network corruption: legally correct actions by interest-aligned actors in a dense network which, in aggregate, undermine the public interest without any single transaction being identifiable. Each individual participant (a municipal chief executive taking part in a World Bank urban development programme, a director-general for housing travelling to a Cities Summit, a senior official in an OECD working group, a public administration scholar invited to Davos, a centrist politician in Bilderberg circles) does nothing illegal and possibly means nothing wrong. The net outcome is a converged policy repertoire that domestically hardly comes about democratically any more.
The populist reproach thereby has, empirically, a point — and, analytically, a hole. The point is that the decision-making capacity of national democracy has indeed been systemically hollowed out by transnational network coordination. The hole is that the problem is not solved by replacing the current elite with another elite. Whoever the new elite is, it ends up in the same networks and fetches the same templates, because the structural gravity of international convergence is stronger than the individual integrity of the minister.
What the WEF criticism usually does not see is that elite replacement must become a different mechanism, not a different face. A referendum system as Switzerland has, a pillarised counter-power as the Netherlands had, a planning discipline as Singapore has, a public housing structure as Vienna has, or cooperative sector ownership as Italy still has: those are the institutional brakes that can actually withstand the convergence pressure.
VIII. From Hanlon to compartmentalisation
Hanlon’s razor (“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) was identified in the conversation as the right analytical move at the individual level. The uncomfortable part is that the razor works flawlessly for one minister and largely stops working at the systemic level. When twenty-five successive ministers take the same unwise decision in the same direction under different cabinets, stupid is no longer a sufficient explanation.
Hanlon’s razor therefore requires a third category besides malice and stupidity. The conversation searched through a series of formulations to name this third category without repeating the errors of the previous ones.
Design (the first attempt) proved insufficient: it implies a designer and thereby reintroduces the architect the whole move was trying to eliminate. Gravity (the second attempt) proved insufficient: it implies natural law and thereby unchangeability, falling back into the same depoliticising abstraction as “it is the market” already criticised elsewhere in the corpus. Bedding, drift and pattern (alternatives) were imagery for the general mechanism without naming the specific mechanics.
The landing came in the recognition that the mechanism requires not one concept but three concurrent conditions: compartmentalisation (specialisation at a scale that gives every vertical its own vocabulary — the Dutch term is verkokering, literally “ducting”), groupthink (the social dynamic within each duct that congeals the worldview), and absent feedback (informational closure between duct and reality). These three are each other’s necessary conditions and together sufficient for dissociation.
The Statecraft Razor thereby becomes: never attribute to malice what is explained by stupidity, and never to stupidity what is explained by compartmentalisation. In three words: not intent, not incompetence, but compartmentalisation.
IX. The four triangles of Moore
From the combination of Moore’s Strategic Triangle and Ofman’s core quadrant arose the central methodical instrument of the session. Each of Moore’s core qualities (public value, operational capacity, political legitimacy) has a pitfall, a challenge and an allergy. That yields twelve positions, which order themselves into four triangles.
Triangle I, ideal-Moore: public value, operational capacity, political legitimacy in pure form. Unstable in practice.
Triangle II, the overshooting state: moralism, technocracy, populism. Hypergovernment through overcommitment.
Triangle III, the prudent state: pragmatism, reflection, steadfastness. A dynamic balance between core and challenge.
Triangle IV, the exhausted state: opportunism, indecision, authoritarianism. The challenge has overshot; the core is lost.
The four triangles order themselves into a Shell scenario architecture with two axes: keeping measure versus overshooting, and core-quality-led versus challenge-led. States slide between the scenarios along predictable trajectories. From ideal-Moore to prudence (when the challenge pole is activated) or to hypergovernment (when the brakes are missing). From prudence to exhausted (when overcompensation pushes out the core). From hypergovernment to exhausted (the collapse route). From exhausted back to prudence as the hardest route, comparable to the Polish cycle of 1976-1989.
The value triangle (Moore plus Ofman) receives its organisational counterpart in the dissociation triangle (compartmentalisation plus groupthink plus absent feedback). The first describes the experienced result in the language of values; the second describes the production mechanism in the language of organisation.1
X. The Dutch trajectory, 1945 to the present
Applied to Dutch public administration, the instrument yields a readable trajectory. Until around 1980 the Netherlands was in the prudent configuration. The pillarised counter-power structure offered three independent institutional carriers (confessional, socialist, liberal) with their own value frameworks within a shared procedural frame. The result was considered effectiveness with high anchoring.
The breaking point is 1980. The Christian Democratic CDA is formed out of three confessional parties (KVP, ARP, CHU); the three confessional pillars disappear as independent institutional carriers. The Labour Party breaks with its confessional-progressive coalition. The Wagner Commission publishes Een nieuw industrieel élan (A New Industrial Élan) in 1981. The Wassenaar Accord of 1982 — the celebrated wage-restraint pact between unions and employers — is concluded in a register that is formally polder but substantively doctrinaire neoliberal. The first Lubbers cabinet takes office with the no-nonsense formula “it is no longer possible”. The institutional brake of pillarised counter-power has been dismantled, and with that the overshooting phase begins.
The phase 1980-2003 is hypergovernment in the language of values: doctrinaire certainty about modernisation, technocratic self-assurance in New Public Management, populist mandate via the “purple” consensus of the liberal-labour coalitions. All three Moore corners deployed hard within one doctrine, without a challenge brake.
The second breaking point is 2003. The assassination of Pim Fortuyn on 6 May 2002 is the exogenous shock that collapses the purple consensus. The first Balkenende cabinet falls within months. Doctrinaire certainty loses its legitimacy without a successor doctrine being available. From 2003 the oscillation between opposite poles begins within every domain. It is in this phase that Prime Minister Rutte’s ophthalmologist doctrine (“anyone troubled by vision should see an eye doctor”, 2013) evacuates Moore’s value vertex as a legitimate category of administrative thinking.
COVID is the third breaking point, into exhaustion. The state compels the population’s behaviour across all three Moore corners at once: moralism, technocracy, populism-cum-authoritarianism. The open combination dismantles every pretence of prudence. What comes after (the asylum crisis, the benefits affair aftermath, nitrogen, the housing shortage) meets a citizen who no longer believes the appearance. Since COVID, the Netherlands has been increasingly exhausted.
XI. The leverage question in the exhausted state
When culture and administrative culture are seen as a web that can be pulled on, the question arises which corner of the Moore triangle offers the highest leverage for moving out of the exhausted configuration towards prudence.
The theoretical answer is that public value is the most upstream position. Whoever knows what government is for can direct capacity at it and gather legitimacy for it.
The practical answer is that operational capacity is the usable lever. It is the corner where concrete intervention is possible without an ideological consensus having to be formulated first. It produces visible results, and visible results generate the feedback that is missing. A functioning execution articulates in its own operation what public value actually is, better than any policy vision.
The other two in the wrong order yield well-known failure routes. Pulling on political legitimacy first (referendums, electoral reform, citizens’ assemblies) without capacity and values being prepared produces populist shocks without translation. Pulling on public value first without operational carriers produces manifestos without effect.
The democratic-legitimacy objection to operational reconstruction (“nobody elected them”) is real. The Statecraft position on it is that operational reconstruction works within existing democratic mandates, not beside them, and that its legitimacy ultimately derives from its result, not from its mandate. Buurtzorg — the Dutch self-managing neighbourhood nursing organisation — was elected by nobody, but cares for hundreds of thousands without complaint.
XII. Civil service ethics, the IND and a municipal cascade
Two concrete cases were worked out in the conversation as illustrations of the mechanism.
The first was asylum policy advice at the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND). The legal instruments for strict application (the safe-country criterion, the Dublin Regulation, tu quoque as a political position when reciprocity ends) were available. The analytical diagnosis was available: that the Dublin fiction is now carried by the Netherlands alone. What was missing was the civil service advisory function that would bring the two together. Not because the adviser did not know, but because he refused to know. The fiction of neutrality is the working ideology here. In the espoused theory this is civil service ethics. In the theory-in-use it is structural assent to the status quo. Tjeenk Willink — the elder statesman of Dutch constitutional practice — has maintained for thirty years that the civil service function includes the duty to tell politics what is unwelcome when the facts demand it. Weber drew the same distinction between Gesinnungsethik (the purity of one’s own position) and Verantwortungsethik (the duty to take the consequences into account).
The second case was a youth care cascade in a mid-sized municipality, February-April 2025. In three months the municipality loses six successive layers around the social domain and youth care file. Three external advisers voluntarily hand back their assignments. Two mandated senior officials are dismissed. One alderman resigns. The case illustrates in concentrated form the mechanisms theoretically demarcated in the conversation: the external-adviser layer as a pressure valve for substantive advice the system itself cannot carry; the administrator’s self-image that does not break even at the moment of self-departure; the defensive recoding of substantive signal into personal information. The cascade is being worked out in a separate field note, Anatomy of a Cascade, in preparation.
XIII. What this yields for the corpus
The session produced a number of working products that can be integrated into the Statecraft corpus.
The Statecraft Razor as a compact diagnostic instrument in three alternative formulations: the three-layer Hanlon extension for papers, the three-word formula (“not intent, not incompetence, but compartmentalisation”) for retelling, and “not a cartel, a configuration” for the populist register.
The four triangles of Moore as a methodical instrument, worked out in a separate method note, coupled to the Shell scenario architecture and to the dissociation triangle as its organisational counterpart.1
The periodisation of Dutch public administration in four phases (prudent until 1980, overshooting 1980-2003, transition 2003-2020, exhausted 2020 to the present) with inflection points that are historically markable.
The leverage analysis identifying operational capacity as the practically workable entry into the exhausted configuration, with explicit recognition of the democratic-legitimacy objection and two tactical answers to it.
The municipal cascade as a concrete case paper, in anonymised form, aimed at the mechanics of substantive advice in dissociated organisations.
What the instrument offers is a readable diagnostic framework that attributes Dutch exhaustion not to party-political colour but to the cumulative detachment from the institutional braking architecture that carried post-war prudence. The way back does not run via a return to pillarisation, but via the reconstruction of braking architecture in new form. The institutional task is unprecedented in its scope and is at this moment not being seriously taken up by any party or movement. Statecraft positions itself on that absence.
Colophon
Statecraft · Working note Synthesis of a Working Session House of Viridian OÜ — Tallinn · Lisbon v1.0 · August 2026
This working note is a structured synthesis of an extended working session and serves as a reference document for the formulations developed in the session and as working material for future Statecraft publications.
Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.
Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.