Trumping Truth by Salvador Jiménez Murguía

Author:Salvador Jiménez Murguía
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2019-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

What Is a Politician?

Christopher W. Thurley

What is a politician? The word “politics” comes from the Greek word “politika” meaning affairs of the state, which, over time, evolved into “polettiques” in Latin which, by definition, added the significance of governance into the practicing of these affairs. In the 21st century, what are the requirements of being a politician? To read laws, give opinions, collect signatures? Call constituents and ask for money? This all seems too simple when stripped down to the rudiments—these are tasks any competent college student could accomplish over a summer internship. So where is the learning, the growth? Where is the research, the struggle, the doubt, humiliation, and reflection, the criticism and constant self-evaluation that is demanded by a full, complete, and effective education? The embracing of different views is stressed in education where introspection is key to growth, but this may not be so in politics. Is a politician not just a representative edifice of a body of beliefs carried by their supporters? If so, then what a dangerous construction—a Frankenstein’s creature assembled by the fragmented and, likely, ignorant views represented in the vox populi—an assemblage created out of boredom, a bricolage of various beliefs sewn into the anatomical likeness of a human that revels in its newfound consciousness, its praise of being lifted from the table, but ultimately, not human, not even necessarily natural (although made of natural constituent elements). These anthropomorphs lack an essential individual conscious, because it has been outsourced, since they tend to exist as a creation for the purposes of a specific party which ascribes these individuals with a set or criteria including limitations of character and thought. It is because of this necessity to adhere to Party law that these anthropomorphs do not normally, although they should—and I speak of politicians here—take their role to be necessarily growth-oriented. Instead, those in these roles act as megaphones for those they wish to excite, incite, emotionalize, and mobilize because a democracy demands a majority, so the goal must always be more. The goal is never truth, knowledge, or instruction, and if it is, politicians that use these tactics will likely not be politicians for very long. With party politics truth often becomes relative, or, to put it another way, it becomes lies, and the keen observer “knows that such lies rarely spring from genuine cynicism or contempt of the mob [because] a politician is wholly devoted to his party, and he has to find ways of making the worse cause seem the better. He does not want to lie, but he has to. He can evade bare-faced falsehood by gobbledygook or euphemism, by ambiguity or redefinition.”1 This is how the word democracy, as George Orwell noticed, becomes used admiringly and without hesitation for any side of a political debate, but, more accurately, should instead be understood in conjunction with acts of demagoguery since “the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

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