OVER the last five years a universal disenchantment has grown toward what is usually, and erroneously, called ‘politics’.Bitter discontent is steadily intensifying.
A 2021 France24 report examined the Génération abstention phenomenon: ‘Between disappointment and rejection of the political world, millions of French people no longer want to vote, especially among young people. The parties are no longer able to generate interest while the traditional media are accused of participating in a failing democratic system. The yellow vests crisis has highlighted an unprecedented level of mistrust of institutions and policies, and the abstention rate seems to increase from election to election. Whether it is by settling in the countryside to live in community, or by using social networks to try to reinvent political action, they have chosen different paths to challenge the system. All, in any case, have decided to no longer exercise their right to vote.’Since then, abstention rates have increased sharply.
All across the Western world younger generations are turning their backs on public affairs with a sneer. Participation rates in elections continue to fall, suggesting not just indifference but a refusal to legitimise what are viewed as strongly biased performances. This growing detachment reflects a deep disillusionment with a complex machinery perceived as self-serving, opaque and unresponsive. For decades, arguably longer, politics has been shaped less by public service than by power preservation and favour trading. Extremely low participation figures are a sign of dissatisfaction with self-proclaimed rulers, abuse of power, corruption and an intricate net of sinecures entrenched in the maze of the state. Manoeuvring, vicious infighting, appalling partisanship, vindictive violence and brazen disregard for the rules, among other vices, are not politics but quite the opposite. History offers cautionary parallels. The Roman Empire was corroded from within by institutional rigidity, moral fatigue, a loss of civic purpose and frivolity. True politics should be a domain for honest individuals bound by modesty and strict term limits.
Decades of negligent behaviour have ended up with civil services turned into clubs of disconnected elites leading lavish lives and passively authorised by vast majorities more concerned with the functioning of their mobiles than with their time, property or money. Indolence, the mother of all vices, makes people believe that a public official, a complete stranger, will keep them away from all evils – the Stockholm Syndrome by other means. That Big Government is the solution to people’s problems is one of the most deeply embedded illusions and the conspiracy theory par excellence. While the industrial society produces crowds marching obediently in the assembly line, the digital industrial society breeds disabled individuals by dripping tons of inconsequential information. The end of the monopoly on information and education, shattered by the digital Big Bang, is a decisive event without which the progressive lack of engagement and concern cannot be understood.
From above, those who occupy places of privilege and those who aspire to occupy them are parts of the same staging, like actors reading lines from identical scripts. The pandemic, once more, proves Lord Acton’s maxim: ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. There is a natural tendency for power to grab more power. In the world of make-believe some pretend to rule, others pretend to oppose and both share the same passion: clinging to the levers of power. Those who have nothing to cling to need to believe in something or someone superior who can provide for them. The new faith is consummated within the confines of this top-down and bottom-up dynamics. Loyalty to the ruler replaces what was once faith in the supernatural. Though a prime minister is neither prince nor pope, large numbers of people feel quite the contrary. Nothing irritates a pragmatic person more than seeing crowds cheering approvingly while governments burn their money in the form of fireworks, the most conspicuous way of squandering public funds. ‘The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments’, declared Herbert Spencer.
‘The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line’,states Sir Isaac Newton in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Good old inertia is the guiding vector, the reactive force that controls and directs the world.
