Friday, 1 November 2024
The Horribly Obvious Link
No observer, however keen, could have guessed his thoughts; he had acquired sufficient knowledge of the art of life to hide his opinions even when he was alone; nay, more than that, he was afraid of coming to a clear understanding with himself.
August Strindberg - The Red Room (1879)
The Horribly Obvious Link sounds like an Enid Blyton story doesn’t it? Oh well –
There is a horribly obvious link between ideological virtue and the cowardly evasion of consequences. We see it now in political leaders, hiding behind political virtue, promoting political causes, hiding from real world effects, afraid of coming to a clear understanding.
The link is there, the cowardice inevitable, it isn’t an Enid Blyton story.
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3 comments:
My suspicion is that there are very few conviction politicians in today's world. Most politicians are playing a board game - political Snakes and Ladders. All trying to short circuit modest progress by climbing ladders and send others down snakes. And as with other board games there appear to be no real world consequences.
You can argue who was and wasn't a conviction politician - and not all conviction politicians were worthy of esteem.
But the message (old fashioned though it is) is - if you don't want to be blamed don't do blameworthy things.
When studying it in depth, I was always struck by the fact that Marxism claimed to be a scientific analysis, an attempt to uncover the objective truth about society and economics. It claimed that everything else was an ideology.
It is nothing of the sort, of course, but it was good of them to at least raise the issue and place it up front. Today, parties just seem to have given up on the question of why they think they have discerned the truth about our condition. I suspect Starmer has never even considered the issue. He is interested in the "how" and not the "what".
DJ - yes it's probably best to see them as amoral careerists, at least in their professional political guise. They do seem prone to blameworthy actions though, which is odd for supposedly professional politicians.
Sam - ideology seems to stay in the background as a way to offer a political touch to what was going to be done anyway and give them a reason for being there to offset lack of experience and ability. Democracy has evolved into a very strange mess where everyone seems to know it's a mess.
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