Something isn’t the air

Something isn’t the air – political choice. It seems to be fading away, or maybe there never was much genuine political choice and the lack has become more obvious. Perhaps the internet is showing us what we never had, as if the only political choice we ever had was to be political or apolitical.

Yet the adoption of a definite political outlook seems to cause a substantial number of people to become unhinged including political leaders. This in turn seems to be one of our major problems, our collective inability to analyse our way out of unhinged political games. As if having a political outlook is more of an affliction than a personal philosophy. An affliction which mostly damages those who don’t have it. Seems designed that way too, which isn’t good.

To be political in the modern world is to accept a broadly totalitarian standpoint on political, economic and social issues. This isn’t how political standpoints are sold to voters, but modern political parties owe nothing to vanished traditions apart from the brand. Our only voting option today is the least unhinged option and even that is dubious. A kind of bad cop, mad cop scenario.

Disraeli’s Great Game has evolved into a vast and vastly corrupt patronage network with tentacles reaching into every aspect of daily life. Government is presumed to be responsible for everything of social and economic significance, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong played on an increasingly global scale.

Within the Great Game, political, economic and social life are doctrinal issues or they can soon be made so. Anything else would require analysis which is no longer how the game is played. Analysis has no role for climbers of the greasy pole. Nothing lies outside the Great Game, including the arts, the natural world, technology, science, religion, history or even the facts of everyday life. It wasn’t always so, but it is now.

What we see across the developed world is a relentlessly promoted and universally applicable range of political narratives. It is not a battle between the political left and right – there is no such political division. Political diversity is almost wholly contained within wider political narratives which now comprise the Great Game. Power struggles only occur between political factions within the Great Game. Nobody else is close enough to power anyway. Power plays are doctrinal, strategic, tactical or merely personal conflicts.

A political standpoint has become a standardised allegiance to the Great Game, not something personal. A remarkably simple allegiance too – much like supporting a football club. Easy to grasp and easily adapted to a vast array of political, economic and social issues.

It all requires so little mental effort that over time almost universal assent to the Great Game seems inevitable until the unhinged find that in the long run, unhinged policies don’t work too well.

Can’t be long now.