Thursday 11 July 2024
Too many people in politics treat power as a game
Here's a YouTube clip where Steve Baker says there are too many people in politics who treat power as a game. "We need to be rid of them" he says.
The problem seems to be that politics has always been a game. In a wider sphere, gaming the system is everywhere, from local societies to government, from claiming benefits to the arts, science, media, gaming the culture - it's everywhere.
We all know what Baker means when he says this, we have just acquired a new Prime Minister who does nothing else but treat power as a game. This much was obvious enough well before his undeserved elevation. We can't get rid of such people, it's what political parties now want in a leader, what the media want, what voters vote for.
As Santayana pointed out over a century ago, the life of reason is a heritage. Lose this and the games people play are no longer constrained by that lost heritage.
The life of reason is a heritage and exists only through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so much as to understand one another.
George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)
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2 comments:
I expect that politics is about power - power used as a scoring system in political language games.
From Wikiversity:
Wittgenstein believed that every word we speak is all part of a language game. For Wittgenstein language games were similar to an inside joke. You would only get the joke if you were in on the joke. This is similar to language, you will only understand the language being used if you are familiar with the language. That is why Wittgenstein believes that Religious language is meaningful, but only to the religious believers.
So when you consider the arcane procedures and language used in our own Houses of Parliament finding that the 'context' supports power games is hardly a surprise. Perhaps it is only recently (the last 100 years or so) that the power games are played for personal recognition rather than the general good?
DJ - I'm sure there is something in that, perhaps the language of the general good was once more moral and less political.
A few decades ago we had notions such as "all property is theft" and a book stolen from a book store could become a "liberated" book. Political language has allowed moral behaviour to be evaded for a long time now and that certainly makes it easier for politicians to play self-serving games.
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