The Potemkin Syndrome
9th August 2010
A “Potemkin village” has come to mean “any deliberate construct which lacks actual substance, but is cynically designed to fool others into thinking it is real”. As the modern bureaucratic welfare state has metastasized into the gargantuan tumor that it is today, the incidence of Potemkin-like behaviors has increased exponentially. The more labyrinthine the bureaucracy, the more opportunities for its functionaries to set up false fronts to fool their superiors — or the public they ostensibly serve.