Praying For The Death of Politics

There’s something comforting about the political spectacle. Keeping up with the soap opera drama of it all seems to provide one with an ontological high ground. You spend your days looking for opportunities to correct the malinformed, as though the real world has ever cared or needed the “objective truth.” You sling off a snappy and meticulously reasoned facebook reply to your #tcot uncle, laboring under the illusion that you are correcting the record and not simply trying to contain an ego that is vibrating with the Brownian motion of too many hot takes. It does feel good; trolling for truth. There is certainly somewhere in the brain some strange ganglion that whistles every time a logical fallacy is smashed or a particularly odious hypocrisy is brought to light. So it marches on, your righteousness compounds on itself and you slide further into your ideological niche. The truth is, optimistically, at least of a little comfort.

Then one day, over lunch, or on the internet or at work, your ego shimmers out of existence for a moment and you hear yourself say “Well, actually…” You watch the expression of the person you were talking to melt into uncaring tolerance. Empathy breaks through and you realize that no one wants a lecture. You feel sorry and as your ego comes angrily screaming back form the void you have a microsecond to ponder the nature of truth. It doesn’t help.

While I doubt that the nature of truth has ever changed, it is certainly the case that the ubiquity of technology has had an unquantifiable impact on human interaction. Where once shame was reserved for the relatively intimate realm of face-to-face contact, now we can all create a virtual strawman, shame it relentlessly, and maybe get a few likes in the process. Where once Kennedy had to send a letter off to Khrushchev to avert nuclear war, now I can tell the President to eat shit directly, and even cross my fingers that it might actually be read. These are unequivocally good things, if for no other reason than they are cheap and easy forms of catharsis and expression. The power to build sandcastles out of posts only to see them taken by the sea is probably better than nothing.

Here’s an unpopular opinion; no one really gives a shit about the Truth. Even science, the most objective of disciplines, burdens itself under the weight of group think and unquestioned materialism. Functionally, what matters is whether or not a process works, and how it works is tertiary to that. I’d say less than 1 in 5 people could give you a sufficient explanation of how their laptop works. Much like existence preceding essence, your computer might as well be run by an elaborate syndicate of leprechauns as long as it works. Process precedes procedure.

If there is one thing all of us in the underclass can agree on it is that politics no longer works. I’d argue that it never did, but it should suffice to say that we find ourselves in a time where the ideological tug-of-war that we call politics has ceased to be responsive to our needs as humans. Peace, land, and bread is a timeless distillation of our common humanity that has no quarter in modern political theatre. Instead, countless hours are billed examining whether or not the poor could stand to be a little poorer or exactly how many percentage points can be shaved or added to an metric ostensibly representing people’s material conditions. Imagine the irony of an unpaid intern at Kinko’s printing off giant cardboard mockups of a pie chart that shows, “well, actually, you’ve got it pretty good all things considered.” A game that has always been the domain of the powerful has now been extended into the cultural realm to allow the rest of us to play at the kid’s table. Political policy caters to the needs of those who can afford it and the rest of us are given the home version; the black box of the ballot. Noble sounding platitudes are supposed to be rallying cries; “Make your voice heard!”,”Trust the Process!”, “Civic Engagement!” and yet the only thing politicians can muster for us to coalesce around is a hill to die on. Better to keep the body politic constantly on the defensive, lest we find the time to catch our breath and realize that there are other possible worlds out there. The political process, and it’s attendant entertainment complex, is tailor made to stage manage our expectations downwards such that we actually think our power lies in bloodless bureaucracies and the endless reaffirmation of a morality that should be common sense. We expect nothing and are given exactly that, and sometimes less.

Natural rights theory was one of the biggest ideological victories in history for the ruling class. What better way to force people on the defensive than to convince them that deep inside lay an inalienable right which is constantly under siege? The alternative is that we have no intrinsic rights and that whatever rights we want must be constantly brought into existence through our collective actions. If we want freedom, we have to ensure that our actions create and maintain that freedom. We must do something and not simply sit back and enjoy our rights in that mythical natural state. Activity versus passivity. If you were trying to enshrine an immortal power structure to last through the ages, which philosophy would you favor?

So we find ourselves in a moment where an amorphous protest movement is building, based around the #resistance. NO! to the things we don’t like. YES! to the things we do. The strength of liberal protest is also the strength of conservative protest. They represent two poles of a binary that stands for nothing, that always deals in negation because it has nothing to affirm. Voicing your opinion on the ticker tape crawl of politics is like wading in the ocean, not certain enough of your convictions to swim. Some of us would advocate abolition; of police, of prisons, of borders, of the state. Abolition is not simply a petulant negation, it is a negation that implies evolution. We can do away with police and prisons because there is a better way. Protecting the rights and dignities of those who would cross borders is a short term goal, but what passion is there in it if not extended to its logical conclusion? The state is corrupt not because it is administered incorrectly, but because rot is its essence. Modern politics is a social construct made to obfuscate human potential.

I’m tired of the everyday business of politics. Why should I have to call a person I didn’t vote for and will never talk to just to explain why they shouldn’t vote to install the head of a vast petrochemical mercenary group as secretary of state? Is it possible that my time might be better spent feeding the homeless than writing letters to functionaries who apparently have no sufficient moral compass of their own? Are my political heroes coming to save me, or is it more productive to assume the opposite? Can we build, or only kick the can down the road of destruction?

Italian anarchist Alfredo Bonanno once wrote a book called “Armed Joy” for which he spent 18 months in prison. He said of the revolution :

It’s easy. You can do it by yourself, or with a bunch of trusted comrades. You don’t need to have great means or technical competence. The capital is vulnerable, if you are determined to act.

In order to make a better world we need to be able to find joy in imagining it. Politics is the balanced equation that always solves for the null set of our lives. It’s purpose is to constrain, to offer a reason to argue over today instead of dreaming of tomorrow. Revolutionaries deal in the possible, not the plausible. Let’s walk side by side down the road, instead of falling in line.