By: B. Berkeliev
Why would anybody go into the military or become a politician if instead, they could build an orbital space station, a nuclear submarine, or a trendy app that instantly turns them rich and allow them to live in Silicon Valley, Palm Springs or Monaco, and drive a Porsche? All of humanity’s great technological creations were made by these cerebral individuals for whom it’s easier to count the stars of the universe or calculate the balance of load on the Golden Gate Bridge than it is for most people to combine fractions. The scientific advancements and inventions of intellectuals and scientists, privatized by politicians, on one hand, made people’s lives easier, and on the other, put their lives on the brink of apocalyptic catastrophe. Has it not come time for politics to attract more of these intellectuals who can “heal” the current disease of a situation where the accumulation of all crises is pushing the world to the brink with uncontrollable speed, threatening to bring irreversible consequences? Or perhaps it’s all in God’s hands?
When I say ‘bottle drive’, I’m understood by all former hockey players who, in their youth, travelled through the communities of their city and door-knocked each house, shared about their team and asked for their empty bottles, to then take them to the bottle depot and in exchange for money that would go toward the team. This is considered to be an absolutely normal traditional fundraising practice for sports teams, one in which there is no humiliation, but rather a pleasant acquaintance and useful sociability with one’s neighbourhood, during which, among other things, your communication and trading skills develop.
And now, a few years later, when you are still young and in the prime of your youth, the inexorable hurricane of fate throws you into a situation where you are once again knocking on doors or speaking in front of small gatherings, but this time, instead of bottles, you are asking the people to vote for a certain political party, all the while convincingly talking about its real deeds and firm promises to protect their interests and improve the lives of everyone.
And at one of these moments, an elderly man with a noble face, grey hair and a soft smile, says to you as politely as possible, “Son, I won’t be saying anything new when I tell you that politics is a dirty business and that all politicians are corrupt. Why would you get yourself involved in all this and ruin your life, like a fly looking for manure, while you can build yourself a life, like a bee collecting nectar?”
How could one forget the noble Socrates? The great sage, born a plebeian, who decided to participate in the political life of his native city of Athens, and adhere to his moral principles, recklessly voted against the interests of the ruling elite and paid for it with his life. However, his student Plato, who came from an influential aristocratic family and had every chance of achieving success in the political sphere, refrained from doing so, and lived a long and dignified life.
Any political system is supported by its dominant ideology, designed to justify and sanction the dominance of the interests of the ruling class. An attempt to change or revise this ideology is always met with a strong reaction. In fact, all of the notable pages of the history of human civilization primarily consist of these attempts and reactions, most of which concluded in blood-soaked wars.
Although Jesus Christ did not strive for material goods, and even less so for power, his revolutionary, for its time, teachings contradicted the existing ideologies of aristocracy and power, and this unwittingly turned him into a politician trying to completely reformat the existing principles of wealth distribution. Would the rich and the powerful agree, for example, that “if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matthew 5:40)? We all know what this led to.
New ideas always arose when an old ideology led society to a crisis and there was a need for a new ideological base for political activity. Each new ideological platform somehow made its way into the minds and hearts of the people, but violence was the most effective and efficient of all possible methods.
All emerging new ideologies, first of all, would seek to change economic principles and the distribution of wealth. These changes were made through the seizure, robbery and expropriation of property, or through the increase or reduction of tax pressure. But such a large change in the political and economic formation is preceded by the accumulation of crises in society which have reached their threshold, thus leading to an explosive peak of societal tension.
In such a situation, the trick of exchanging one ruling party for another does not lead to the resolution of the problems that caused the societal tension – unless that party has a decidedly new idea for restoring social justice. This problem can be solved only by the party that has a real plan for supporting a dignified way of living for all layers of society – by shifting the bulk of the profit to the real sectors of the economy, instead of the ones serving the oligarchs who hold exorbitant privilege in enlarging and monopolizing businesses.
But a logical question then arises: why can’t the party that’s in power for its second, or even the third term, solve the problems facing its society – but even exacerbates them? And why do we hope for a miracle, wherein the opposition that lost the previous elections comes into power – that this new ruling party will be able to solve, or at least begin to solve the problems that have been brewing like a disease for many years – despite the fact that their resource capabilities, the quality of their personnel, their dependence on sponsors and investors are all fundamentally no different than that of their rivals?
The breadth of party leaders’ possibilities is even more limited by the need to maintain a “clean” biography, to not make unnecessary moves (vs showing creative initiative), to not make mistakes, to not violate unwritten agreements with sponsors, and all the while to be afraid that some compromising evidence might be made public against them. And the politician, until he gets to the top (if he gets there at all), operates in such taming conditions for 20-30 years, acting as no more than a cog in the administrative system and protecting the interests of only those business groups that feed them and their party. The intellectual creativity and independence of such people are practically nonexistent. Do we seriously expect them to be able to solve the problems of inflation, low income and high taxes, homelessness and hunger, environmental problems and the quality of drinking water, food and air, with reforming of the healthcare system, with the spread of drugs and the fentanyl and opioid disasters, with the rise in crime, with the lack of purpose and meaning among the younger generation, permissiveness and the absence of God and limiters, as well as hypocrisy, primitivism and corruption in the government itself? And this is just the tip of the iceberg … On the international stage, will they be able to show reason and independence in order to refrain from participating in regional and local wars taking place tens of thousands of kilometres from their borders that have nothing to do with them, even if they promise big rewards and jobs for their military-industrial complex?
Now, you can call all these questions rhetorical and even funny. Can we blame the government for failing to keep its promises and solve the problems facing the country? Of course not. By the laws of democracy, we ourselves, millions of ordinary people are running our country, but since everyone has their own lives to live, we elect this group of people and authorize them to be our government. If something doesn’t work out, they can always say that the responsibility for the failure lies with us – the millions, because it was we who chose them. It shouldn’t be forgotten that politicians are the best acrobats of the word. Remember the story of Adam and Eve? When God discovered that Adam disobeyed his order not to eat the forbidden fruit and in rage demanded his explanation, Adam easily accused Him back, declaring that Eve gave him the apple, and giving him this woman was the choice and decision of God himself… So, all that the people can do is to expel the government that didn’t live up to its expectations from Eden, whoops, from the Office.
In times of deep crises or war and catastrophes, politicians with cognitive and willpower deficits deliberately do not seek power. Firstly (and obviously), they would be useless up there, and secondly, it would even be risky for their lives, which is not what they were striving for power for. For such dire straits situations, every great nation gives birth to a son or daughter who embodies, in addition to prime knowledge and will, the best qualities of their people and the ability and readiness to lead their nation out of crises. F. D. Roosevelt, W. Churchill, J. Stalin, Golda Meir, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew are some of the examples of such leadership.
But when a crisis is still remote, as history shows, anyone can be the head of government, and even better if they come from showbiz so that they can manipulate people’s feelings well, tell fairy tales beautifully and deceive convincingly. Today’s politicians and officials are the masters of feeding promises and avoiding responsibility. The billions of dollars of budget money flowing past them can cloud their minds and drag them away from reality so much that they try their hardest to privatize their seats in the government. They, like addicts to power, try to head the government and control the treasury forever. Money is power, power is money, and their god is the Golden Calf. The state, in this case, becomes a tool in the struggle of the elite. At the same time, the privilege of using this tool remains in the hands of the ruling portion of the elite. In a state like that, a simple and honest person has no chance of upholding their dignity, since such a person has zero value.
The current state of the world – on the verge of a third world war and a nuclear catastrophe, gripped by economic crises and mass depression, riven with greed and competition for resources, markets, and technologies, and dividing into new techno-economic blocks (such as AUKUS), with the abolition of the unipolar world through the creation of rival blocs (G7, BRICS), with the economy of the West collapsing due to trade wars and harsh sanctions – it is difficult to see it as the fruit of leaders who operate through reason. And all of this is happening alongside the depletion of the Earth’s resources, such as fertile arable land and unpolluted fresh water, ocean pollution and the spread of drought and climate change, the spread of diseases and harmful drugs, the shadow economy and crime. This is the result of the management of countries and international organizations in our globalized and interdependent world by mediocre and corrupt politicians whose cognitive deficit is compensated by their greed, vanity and arrogance.
Without a doubt, for all people and countries, planet Earth has become a single organism. Maybe the rich and successful have an illusion, inspired by Hollywood films, that corrupt and controlled politicians will create special conditions for them and they will be able to sit out in oases of well-being, surrounded by tall fences, a police cordon around them and Batman as their personal bodyguard. And the rest of the world is behind the fence in the ghetto, with its Jokers and dark forces.
The human society and the planet itself, as a single organism, are in need of attention before this organism becomes irreversibly ill. The old system of solving political issues, the essence of which was the conquest of markets through military force, is no longer medicine – it never was for the planet and it is no more for the people (a temporary pain-relief narcotic, maybe). Treating one organ, in this case, a country, at the expense of oppressing another is no longer a solution. An attempt to present coexistence as a race for survival, through the infringement of the interests of others, is losing its meaning. The murder of a million peaceful people on the other side of the planet may enrich certain individuals, but it does not solve the problems of the murdering nation, on the contrary, lays a curse on it.
If your weight, blood pressure and sugar levels start to rise, you would definitely consult a doctor. It would be too late to be buying a blood pressure monitor once you’ve already had a stroke. The time will come soon, if it hasn’t already, when each nation and all of humanity will be forced to think about how to stop picking showmen as their leaders and start electing sound professionals with good will, who will be able to pull humanity away from the abyss to which the current ringleaders are leading us at high speed.
Is society even capable of preparing people who in their role as leaders can solve pressing political, economic, social and cultural issues during crises, or even prevent those crises? Who created the Voyager program, equipped with its own power plants, rocket engines, a telecommunications system, unique scientific instruments, and sent its robots past the periphery and 15 billion kilometres beyond the solar system, from where it has been sending its creators a vast amount of valuable scientific data for decades? Who has learned to split the atom nucleus and obtain insane energy, both in the form of power plants and in the form of bombs of unimaginable prowess? Who created aircraft carriers capable of carrying over 100 planes, and aircrafts capable of vertical take-off? Who created an equipment system capable of eavesdropping on every person or tracking them from a satellite? Who has filled near-Earth space with thousands of telecommunications and spyware satellites? Who has learned to transplant organs, and also make a woman out of a man and vice versa? Truly, if the human species is gifted with such a powerful mind, capable of so many things – is it not able to assure its own collective security and collective access to food, water and justice? Theoretically, it can. Factually, it doesn’t.
The issue is that technological progress is achieved by intellectuals, whereas our earthly problems are handled by politicians. Due to the persisting stereotype that ‘politics is a dirty business’, intellectuals tend to eschew politics. In addition, they stay distant from the main mass of the people, and they are able to independently earn big money and manage their lives well.
By the way, from the moment of the Voyager 1’s launch in 1977, 80 people have received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and they are all scientists from the developed countries of the West. As there is no doubt about the authenticity and value of the results they have obtained, then there is naught else to do but to accept the notion that the laureates themselves and their scientific results were not fully implemented by the Western governments for the benefit of practical economics, since the Western world continues to be shaken regularly to the levels of deep crises and excessive information. It leaves one wondering how other countries, which do not birth Nobel laureates, can develop…
The world economy is growing largely due to the industrialization of third world countries and the resulting bringing in of hundreds of millions of new people. But the standard of living of an average hardworking person in the West does not improve because of this. Moreover, due to the demographic problem and the inefficient economy, some countries are forced to raise their retirement age: people in their dotage, instead of raising grandchildren and preserving the continuity of generations, are forced to earn money for their food and medicine. As they say in the East, trouble comes as a caravan, and one wrong decision of a greedy and senseless politician taken today, by its cumulative effect, can create problems for future generations and in all aspects of their lives.
One of these fundamental omissions of the West was its sharp rejection of the industrial economy. It is what generates added value and is the core of the real economy. Instead, the West has chosen a speculative-financial economy that benefits primarily the financial elites. But obviously, not everyone can trade in loans and stocks, currencies and interest. I call it the “percentage curse” or the “usury trap” – the fastest, most effective and dust-free method of enrichment for the elites, and bondage for the mass population. This situation is the main source of social tension and in the long term it inevitably leads to an economic and political crisis in society.
Even in the age of advanced technologies for manipulating people’s thoughts, we still have the chance to choose our leaders. If we do not preserve this right and start choosing worthy leaders, if we continue to justify our cocoon of indifference with phrases like ‘politics is a dirty business and all politicians are corrupt’, then we will in no way escape our miserable lot of doomed people who accept hopelessness as a priori and plummet to humiliation and helplessness, betraying the spirit of our ancestors and the future of our children.
Human beings cannot be work bees all their lives, collecting honey night and day. Human beings, in addition to protecting their “hive”, must also preserve the blooming meadows around it.
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