The Inner Monologue

In an age when politics increasingly resembles performance art, one of the most effective—and destructive—strategies ever devised has reemerged with terrifying precision: create chaos, then blame your opposition for allowing you to do it.

It’s a strategy as old as demagoguery itself, refined for the attention economy. The formula is simple. First, sow disorder—manufacture crises, undermine institutions, paralyze governance. Second, adopt the posture of moral outrage, accusing your opponents of weakness, corruption, or complicity. Third, repeat the narrative until it calcifies into public perception. When the smoke clears, the arsonist stands triumphantly before the cameras, declaring themselves the only one strong enough to rebuild the house they set ablaze.

This is not mere hypocrisy—it is the deliberate inversion of accountability. In stable systems, chaos is failure. In this new political calculus, chaos is currency. It fuels outrage, which fuels attention, which fuels power. The more broken the system, the easier it is to convince people that only a “disruptor” can fix it. The same destruction that once disqualified leaders now defines them.

The Psychology of Manufactured Crisis

The success of this tactic rests on a basic truth about human cognition: emotion outruns logic. In moments of turmoil, we crave clarity, even if it’s false. Chaos disorients; outrage simplifies. The politician who can provoke outrage gains control over narrative space. Facts become secondary to feelings, and once that line is crossed, truth itself becomes negotiable.

When leaders engineer crises—be it a government shutdown, a debt ceiling standoff, or an immigration panic—they aren’t just sabotaging policy. They are conditioning the public to associate chaos with engagement. The media, hungry for spectacle, obliges. Each new manufactured emergency dominates headlines, drowning out quieter, steadier forms of governance. The opposition, meanwhile, is left to explain, to contextualize, to plead for reason—and in the modern attention market, reason never trends.

Chaos as a Branding Tool

At its core, this strategy is marketing. In an era where outrage is monetized, chaos becomes brand identity. “Look how the system fails you,” the provocateur proclaims, while quietly loosening the bolts that hold the system together. Every act of sabotage becomes evidence of corruption. Every scandal becomes proof of persecution. Every institutional guardrail—courts, journalists, scientists, bureaucrats—becomes a convenient villain in the populist morality play.

It’s a closed loop of destruction and self-justification. Break something, blame someone else for the breakage, and then present yourself as the only one bold enough to fix it—usually by breaking more.

The opposition’s natural instinct—to restore order—is politically disadvantageous. Order is invisible; chaos is cinematic. No one cheers for the bureaucrat who files the paperwork that keeps the bridge from collapsing. They cheer for the showman who stands atop the rubble declaring, “See? I told you it was falling apart.”

The Cost of the Spectacle

The tragedy of this strategy is not only what it destroys, but what it corrodes: trust. Once a society normalizes the idea that truth is partisan and chaos is inevitable, it enters a death spiral of cynicism. Every scandal is seen as spin, every accusation as projection. Even legitimate criticism loses traction because the audience has learned to assume that everyone is lying.

This is the ultimate goal of the arsonist politician—to make governance itself seem impossible. When democracy feels perpetually dysfunctional, authoritarianism begins to look like efficiency. The public, weary of outrage fatigue, starts to crave the illusion of order, even if it comes from those who created the disorder in the first place.

It’s a psychological sleight of hand: you create the fire, you scream about the flames, and when the exhausted crowd begs for quiet, you sell them matches labeled “solutions.”

Restoring Accountability in an Era Without Memory

Defeating this strategy requires something that modern politics has largely lost—memory. The electorate must reconnect cause and effect. We must learn to ask not only who is shouting the loudest now, but who lit the fuse that caused this explosion in the first place. Chaos cannot be defeated by better slogans or louder outrage; it must be defeated by attention span.

Journalism, too, must evolve. The daily cycle of scandal has become an accomplice to manipulation. Instead of reporting each new blaze as an isolated event, the press must show the pattern—the deliberate hand that keeps striking the match. Voters must be taught to recognize sabotage disguised as incompetence.

The health of democracy depends not on perfection but on accountability. When chaos becomes a campaign tactic, governance dies by a thousand distractions. Every institution undermined, every truth contested, every norm violated is not an isolated act—it is a coordinated strategy to convince people that the system itself is irredeemable.

The Final Act

The politics of arson only ends one of two ways. Either the public learns to recognize the smell of smoke before the fire starts—or we let the whole house burn, comforting ourselves with the thought that at least we knew who to blame.

The question facing modern democracies is not whether chaos will come. It already has. The question is whether we will remember who keeps lighting the match.