In the latter stages of updating (pacman -Syu) I noticed a warning of incorrect permissions under the /usr/lib/polkit-1 heirarchy.
Related: pamac update --aur also failed to initialise.
On the chance that this wasn’t a local issue, assigning the correct permissions to directories/files should fix the issue:
The correct permissions should be:
drwxr-xr-x (755) - root:root- Directory-rwxr-xr-x (755) - root:root- Executables-rw-r--r-- (644) - root:root- Rules files
Fix polkit-1 directory and file permissions:
sudo chown -R root:root /usr/lib/polkit-1/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/polkit-1/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkitd /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1
sudo chmod 644 /usr/lib/polkit-1/rules.d/*
We now return you to your usual programming.