Tell a Lie Often Enough

Tell something often enough, and it’s easy to convince people of its self-evident truth. That is especially so if that lie is repeated over decades or centuries. The phenomenon is not new. It’s not something that arose with Donald Trump Cult Enterprises Inc who cartwheeled falsehoods into the core of American politics. It’s not contemporaneous country-level deceit.

Take the concept of democracy, something so dear that it is fused to the identity of the West, let alone its political systems. The spirit and etymology of democracy have this rather fortuitous trait – they’re the same: people power. There is no cleaner way of capturing the word. A political system in which the power to govern belongs to the people – that is ‘demo’ ‘cracy’. It doesn’t get less ambiguous.

Now within that, you may notice that there is no reference to sofas. There’s no mention of the Chicago Bulls. And there’s no mention of electing representatives every 4 or 5 years. In other words, you can have none, all or some of these and still have democracy. Power to the people is not tied to sofas, the Bulls or electing representatives every so often.

The dishonesty that we’ve been fed for quite a while is that voting for representatives equals democracy. The two, so we have been fed, are the same.

But, I ask, is it possible to have a political system in which we vote in MPs, Senators and the rest of the apparatchik, yet offer no power to the people? Can we elect representatives yet deny to people the power to declare war, raise or spend taxes, and determine policy priorities? Can we vote every four years yet deny citizens the right to choose their national CEO? 

That is exactly what we have.

Our politicians, and the massive political machinery which they live in, have long played us by portraying the political system as ‘democratic’. The political hacks know full well that the ordinary citizen has no meaningful role in the most important decisions that a political system can make - a democracy neither in essence nor mechanics.

What then do we have? An elected oligarchy co-existing with a hidden, massive civil service – both of which are fundamentally unaccountable and unrepresentative. Doesn’t have the marketing spin of ‘democracy’, that’s for sure. But let’s not kid our own selves at least.