The day I became monarchic
(orignally published on 06/14/2016 on the verge of the events bound to the Brexit vote)
UK voted Brexit. British Parliament has still to really finalize the decisions on the future of UK in the EU, but the people have spoken.
The people have spoken
May I say I don’t give one single microscopic fuck about what the people say on remaining or leaving EU, because staying is the only thing that makes sense, even more so if we start looking at political fusion? Does this draw me as an anti-democratic prick? I don’t think so, but let me explain this the long way. I don’t think that every decision needs to be “referended” on. People don’t need to express their opinion in every single decision a “management elite” makes, be it a government, be it a discographic label, be it a publishing company. The bottom-up need to do that comes from a terrible lack of faith and consideration the voters have about their voted representatives, the decision makers. But that brings up a new question: If we don’t think our representatives are good enough, why do we vote for them? If we think they are good enough, why do we require them to need direct opinions through referenda?
I think the reason we have to answer these questions is a deep and complex one. The problem stems from 3 factors:
- the timelyness of “voting sessions” and terms
- the concept of what a job is;
- our view of the world.
Let us start from the second factor. If you are a teacher, your work is to get your students to learn your topic. If you are a lawyer your job is to win your cases. But what is your job if you are a politician? Your job shoud be to represent “the people” while choices have to be made, being aware that every complex choice in the complex world we live in has a series of side effects. This sentence brings up two aspects that are incrediby complex. On one hand, “the people” is a vague concept, so let us rephrase this in “his voters”, yet again, it remains too vague, so let us pause on this aspect and we will be back soon enough. On the other hand, there is the aspect of knowing the complex side-effects. A recent study shows that most adults are unable to define a problem by more than one cause. If you add to this that most political parties nowadays do not require their high level executives to have either a political preparation or a technical knowledge to rely on, the average political weight of most politicians is exactly like the average political weight of the people that vote.
Every election is for a given term, a timespan that is around 5 years depending on the country we are talking about. So, every 5 years a politician has to be confirmed in his job being elected by his voters. And that means that given a vote every 5 years, the voted has to get confirmation in his representativeness by his electoral base. Getting voted is difficult and it costs a lot to be deciding as well as being on the territory to talk to people. For this reason it is usual that the easy physical representations of political power are consumed in the months before the election while complex issues are usually aggressed at the start of the term. That leaves usually around 4 years of activity to work on. Yet, if you leave an area for 4 years it’s complicated to get the voters to remember your face. So comes the beautiful idea of a continuous electoral campaign. Every year an election of any kind from local to national, so an unstoppable excuse to talk to voters brings everyone into the territories consuming resources and burning words in the eternal flame of rethoric.
And so comes the third factor. The world perception we have is of around 2km radius around our person. That is usually the vision radius a normal person of around 1.75m height has and that view of the world can be extended through travel, study and interactions with other people. Considering the percentage of studying people and travelling people in our communities, this means that, getting back to our friend “the politician”, he has to “choose” his voters amongst these people. And considering an even slightly extended view radius, it is quite obvious why “nationalistic” views are so easy to tell and to share. But these views are a representation of the “guts talking”, not of a conscious perception of the world.
And this brings us back to the election. A politician needs to be re-elected, has to optimize the investment in time spent on the territories as well as in his parliament, so the same politician needs to go the “easy road” to get to the result. And so, here are our friends Farage, Salvini, LePen, Trump. People who choose not to higher the bar of society and evolve mankind, but consciously choose to lower the bar and to harmfully ignore (at least in the rethoric) the complex side-effects the over-simplification of our modern complex world brings.
So back to the title. Why do I suddenly believe that monarchy is not a bad option? The monarch has a very important characteristic. He has no term, his term has no end and the monarch himself, at least in theory, should have access to resources that should make him almost uncorruptible. I know I am comparing a real life experience of democracy with a vague and theoretic concept of monarchy, and our Italian monarchy has been everything but “illuminated dictatorship”, yet those monarchies are the ones that started the italian industries and the first long distance rail on the continent (Napoli-Portici). But not having the continuous massacre of elections would be the first element to stabilize and give finally a vision to a country and to the world.
