Call to arms?

‘At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite.… Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased  to mean equal distribution of institutional wares.’

So wrote Ivan Illich in 1973.

Boy, oh boy! Wasn’t he prescient? Isn’t the whole political process a huge steaming pile of shit at the moment? The rationale for the political process seems to have become inverted in the last fifty years or so. Perhaps the power elites decided that the Second World War demonstrated that power from the people was too implausibly dangerous a proposition to be allowed in a nuclear world. What is certain is that the role of the politician as the representative of the (enfranchised) mass to the powerful has been inverted to become the interlocutor of the powerful to the mass. They no longer tell uncomfortable truths to The Power (I see Disraeli talking to Victoria in my head), but now explain to the people why not only are their aspirations impossible, but now explain that we are explicit in creating the horrors that haunt the world. We have become victimisers of ourselves.

So while our life turns to pain and shit we are told that it was our greed that set the fire that burns down the world. Was it, bollocks?

We’ve been greasing the machine (those of us fortunate enough to have jobs), not riding on it. Perhaps the point is that we cannot expect the politicians and the political process to fix things. They’re not in the fixing business. Nor will daddy dictator or mommy religion mend the world. But you can.