Victoria Nuland is an example. She worked for six presidents and ten secretaries of state over 30+ years, always promoting the same war agenda. She has worked in concert with her husband Robert Kagan, who has worked as an adviser to several governments and think tanks. These people and organisations are all part of the deep state, aka security state, aka military industrial complex, as forewarned by President Eisenhower on his departure from office.
so it's like lobbyists? or does rit have to be a specific industry
That’s the “unauthorized networks of power” which run independently of democratic control, eg by coordinating non-prosecution of crime despite citizen demands for more criminal prosecutions.
> A deep state is a type of government made up of […] unauthorized networks of power operating independently of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.
i've never had a say over my life let alone politics so it's a very foreign concept like having agency
The political leadership of the US is elected; by definition, any network of power which isn’t beholden to that is “deep state”.
but how can something be deep state if it has existed since the inception of the aforementioned state. rich people have run the world since humans came into existence
is it like a on paper not in reality thing?
Let's rename Deep State as "Under State" for the purposes of this conversation to make it easier to understand.
Whatever is the government (the "State", like in "Head of State") you can see is the "Above State". Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Governors, Legislatures, Courts, the government that supposedly runs the country, this is the Above State.
The Deep State, the Under State, operates under the Above State for their own goals and benefits accountable to noone, the only time they come up to the sunlight is to correct an Above State that dares to harm or defy the Under State. You can almost never see the Under State as a common citizen, but you can probably feel their influence if you pay attention.
"Deep" in Deep State hence refers to where they are figuratively located in a given country's political mechanism.
how can it be a separate thing if it has been a part of the state since its inception?
The Above State with its Presidents and Secretaries and Legislators are all replacable and expendable, they're just an abstraction and obfuscation layer for the Under State to put their desires into action.
Occasionally you might catch glimpses of them when they play their hand too strongly, like the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction(tm) narrative pushed by the Intelligence Community (the Under State) with State Secretary Colin Powell (the Above State) acting as their mouthpiece. On rare occasions a Deep State agent might turn coat and blow the secrets as was the case with Snowden.
i've been in a cult my entire life (to give you an idea i live in a house full of fanatics rn) so the thought of voting or having a say seem very alien to me
why do people care so much about that?
Because governments are usually accountable to someone or something.
For example, in most monarchies it's royal blood or even a god. In democracies like the US it's the voters.
Deep States are more powerful than governments (they are the power) and not accountable to anyone and arguably not even desired by the people governed, that is why people care.
They understand what the bureaucrats purported to do, but don’t believe that government bureaucrats can manage a complex system and that better outcomes are obtained by allowing individuals to optimize in a complex system than attempt to centrally manage complexity.
I’d go so far as to say you have it exactly backwards:
It’s people who advocate for government bureaucratic management that don’t respect complexity by hanging onto the belief a complex system (eg, an economy) can be managed by a handful of credentialed experts.
It doesn't seem extreme at all. If you've ever worked on a technical project and been given a deadline by someone not in the project who also isn't technical, you'll know the problem with central planning.
> The non-respecting of complexity is happening when one thinks that it is one or the other
This isn't to do with complexity, except that generally the government (or any centrally managed thing) is worse at managing complexity than the government. The government managing something isn't because it's too complex for the private sector. It's because the private sector would have adverse incentives with society-level bad outcomes if it attempted it. E.g. private prisons without sufficient enforced regulation.