The bludgeon of governance
Politics, it’s everywhere but we never see it, insidious bastard that it is.
Is it another word for relationship? Are there things/objects involved? Manufacturing processes and plants, tanks and planes, roads and bridges, dollars and bonds. Is the art of politics about dominion over people or things? Is it the art of facilitating the relationships between people and people and things?
I’m sure it’s all these things and I’m sure there is a political economic theory to explain each and every single one. People talk politics as much as people practice it.
It’s the way people talk about politics that interests me. Very similar to the way people discuss economics. Very bizarre.
Follow the White Rabbit.
Take the pill.
Alice?
Neo?
Anyone?
Politics, like economics, is spoken of in whispers or in screams, conspiratorially or democratically, in ways and using a terminology that makes it seem occultish, almost ethereal, almost not ours.
I’m coming to the conclusion that it is not ours. Not in our control. Beyond the borders of human comprehension or apprehension. We still argue about the definitions, like it’s definitions that matter. We still try to figure out what side we’re on when there is no apparent reason for war. We discuss whether things are a matter of opinion or of law when all is opinion and which of us is good enough to carry the title of judge?
I am coming to the conclusion that it is not the objects or situations that are manipulated by politics that are the problem. I am coming to the conclusion that the only problem we have is politics itself.
Anarchism ruined the question of governance by turning the question into a political stance. Hume and Locke, Rawl and Marx, Hegel and Hobbes. All have tried to answer the question of governance and why we need it. Whether it is the contract theory of Rousseau or the Historical materialism of Marx and its precursor in Hegelian dialectics, nothing has given a clear answer, or a clear way forward. Each had started its own wars and each possesses the tragedy of guilt, folly and downfall.
Like empires, political systems rise and fall, proving their own fallibility along with their imperial progeny. From the simple tribalism of Australia and the Pacific, to the mystical and communal North American “savage nations”, to the Mesoamerican blood and sun empires, to the Republic of Greece and Rome, with their prototypal democracy for the few, to the present day where we aspire to democracy for all - all have fallen or are falling. Each down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, into books of history, arm chair reading and university lecture theatres.
What has always survived is the war of meaning. What is politics and what should it be? Who is to be governed and how? Why? Because someone always wants to govern and others (the vast majority) want to be governed. It is a matter of yearning, not logic. Destiny is too big a word for the individual, for all but the strongest of individuals. History is never a personal thing; it is the record of concession, of yielding.
More importantly this war of meaning is the means of governance, the only concrete in politics, the only thing free of abstraction. While we discuss the law we are subject to it and while we discuss democracy we are excluded.
Politics is never ours. It is always for the other. For our discussion, never for our practice. An art for the illuminate, not a craft for the masses. We bicker about the finer distinctions while “they” govern.
I can imagine them now, sitting in stately rooms.
“Let them have their cake but we shall eat it.”