The Tyranny of Governments. How Politicians are NOT US.

Britain’s MPs have apparently lost the trust of the people. One of the charges leveled against MPs, indeed in any country, is that they are out of touch with society and don’t understand the plight of the people. This is patently false. They understand the people alright; they just don’t want to be the people.

Life is tough for the people. Being an MP has privileges. This is why politicians have lost the trust and admiration of the people. Politicians do not represent the people, they represent themselves. This is of course not just true of politicians, this is true of everyone. Thus it is important to either vote for those most like ourselves in circumstances, and not only that, but ensure that high office means servitude and not dominion. MPs should live our lives, they should be required to take public transport, to live in council housing, to not be exempt from any of the trials and tribulations of the people, they have to get in the queue like everybody else and they have to be paid the median wage. The office of government is sacrifice and service, charity and empathy, selflessness; an honour crowned with thorns.

Yet government has evolved from rule, and not service. This evolution from king to parliament is yet incomplete. And the human species such as it is is unlikely to have the enlightenment or strength of spirit to evolve to a new and selfless ideology. Democracy was an effort to overthrow absolute rule because it was the only way, not because it was a better way. It was more marketable to the people who were necessary for that revolution. That was all. It was more marketable and people bought the idea, full stop. Democracy is a good idea but too easy to mis-sell and the first politicians were quick to see that and capitalize on it. The myth of the properly aligned representative was necessary to mobilize the masses, a bigger force than any army.

In many places this understanding had always been and incumbents have therefore erected insurmountable barriers to entry. Behind every suited, smiling game show host like politician is a little bit of Robert Mugabe, sometimes a big bit.

The British people should see how politician in other countries live and stop complaining.

But change is likely to come as the world becomes more impoverished. You wouldn’t think it from where stock markets were heading. Yet unemployment is high in many parts of the world, wage growth is slow, and food prices are rising, thanks in part to over population and on a shorter term basis to the efforts of central bankers to debase currency. As we find it harder and harder to find more and more work to earn less and less to buy food that costs more and more, apart from a reexamination of our economic systems may come a reexamination of our political systems and the men and women who have come to infest them.