The primary occupation of the political class is just that -
political. They are concerned with the business of achieving and maintaining
their power, for politics is the art and science of power dynamics. This is
tacitly admitted by the political class, who often speak of communication to
their constituencies as their primary concern. That their constituents believe
they serve their best interests is of primary importance, whether this is true
is secondary or not important at all if the means of communication are
effective enough. That they must appeal to constituents - to the public - is
not at all a characteristic of democratic systems. It is inherent in all
political systems, for there is always power in numeracy. The degree to which
they must appeal however is regulated by the means of control they have at
their disposal and varies by the type of system.
Effective politicians are those who succeed in intensifying
and consolidating their power. They do this by perceiving the most advantageous
power bases with which to align themselves and so seizing the opportunity. In a
capitalist society with unchecked corporate growth, corporate interests will
grow to become a formidable power base. In such a system no politician can find
success without strategic alignment and balance between corporate and public
interests. Like seeks like, and so consolidated political power seeks out
institutions of consolidated power with which to forge alliances and determine
points of mutual interest. Large corporations, religions, and sprawling
organizations become natural allies to consolidated hierarchical political
power, which becomes increasingly incapable of interfacing with the individual.
In democracies, there is the idealized notion that
politicians serve the public. But in fact nothing could be further from the
reality. Politics is not, properly considered, a "service industry".
People who care about the well-being of others, who feel compelled to help, are
likely to find themselves in healthcare, but not so in politics. Where such
individuals do find themselves in the political arena, they will find that they
are frustratingly ineffective, and that the business of politics does not seem
at all aligned with bringing about the change they are desperate to see occur.
That is not to say that an effective politician cannot do
good. Rather doing good, and indeed doing evil, are side-effects spilling out
from the acquiring of more power.
For a democracy to function, each individual must represent
a fixed set amount of power. This is intended to be checked by ensuring that
each individual gets one and only one vote, regardless of his or her social
status or wealth. However, on its own such a system is incomplete and naïve.
For votes to count, voters must exercise their right to vote. Here the
political class may seize upon the more intelligent and less easily persuaded
voters by cultivating apathy in them. The voters most likely to unseat the
current political hierarchy must be made the most apathetic: this confers a
sort of immunity to the system. In order for votes to be of value, the voters
must be intelligent and informed. It is therefore in the interest of the
political class to sow disinformation and to undermine intelligence, so as to
render such votes as "noise". A single-vote system assumes that votes
cannot be bought, and that voters change their mind only through a process of
rational thinking applied to truthful information. Essentially the voters are
viewed as incorruptible. For the political class, the task then is in
corrupting the voters, bypassing their critical faculties with emotional
appeals, subliminal messaging, and the power of suggestion.
Those who wield power or would wield power understand human
nature, at least to the extent that such understanding enables them to
manipulate people and thereby acquire power. Any system that makes incorrect
assumptions about people is appealing to them, because they see at once how
they can exploit such a system, and so further entrench their own power.
Democracy posits an equality between citizens. Capitalism is
concerned with the acquisition of capital, the end results of which can always
only be more inequality. Unfettered capitalism will eventually come into
conflict with democracy, as it already has in the West, as the consolidators of
power seek to have their power expressed on institutional levels.
Only a certain type of person is ready for democracy, is
capable of all that democracy demands of him or her. Too many desire strongly
to rule, for them democracy will always be unacceptable unless it is perverted
to their purposes. Too many more desire to be ruled, they will always abdicate
their responsibility to those who would rule them for the most menial and
fleeting rewards. Whether the democratic type of person can be consistently
bred throughout a population seems a dubious prospect.
There may yet be hope. Humans may naturally be tyrants, but
there is nothing natural about tyranny on a large-scale. Large systems, of
whose populations we would now term societies, are too high in numeracy for
evolutionary history to offer much in the way of guidance. We have not evolved
to deal with such numbers. It may therefore be acceptable if hierarchy is
reduced to a certain scale, beyond which democracy may be expressed.
