Hypocrisy and Democracy

 As you may have gathered if you've read some of my previous writing, I have a deep interest in what makes the gears of societies turn. Lately, in light of the political situation in the US, I've been focusing more intently on what factors make for competent, effective leadership, and although the factors may be many, I believe they can be distilled down to a few key points. These are qualities that should not be partisan, but that have somehow become politicized. If I could accomplish one goal in writing anything for public consumption, it would be to raise the standards by which our leadership is judged, through increasing public awareness of the social and psychological factors at play in politics. An informed public, particularly one that is aware of the biases that we all commonly fall prey to, is the single most powerful tool we have in maintaining a vital, thriving democracy. Informed citizens push leaders to perform better, who in turn craft wiser social policies, which in turn enriches society, allowing citizens the luxury to become more educated and informed. It is this cycle, when functioning properly, that guarantees a society can grow and evolve, and when this cycle breaks down, societies stagnate and decay. This cycle is clearly breaking down in the U.S., and it is a tragedy to witness, like a once vital person slowly dying of cancer.

 The title may have tipped you off, but the first and worst cardinal sin for leaders to avoid, and from which it may be argued that all others spring, is that of hypocrisy. “Do as I say, not as I do” tends to grate on us as children when we hear it from our parents, and never sits well with us as adults either. Yet the political class seems completely helpless to avoid falling into this trap. Whether it be those who claim to be socially conservative only to become embroiled in sex scandals, or those who claim to be fiscally conservative but who recklessly rack up debt while in office, this is a tedious routine that the public has grown incredibly tired of. Few things offend our innate sense of justice and fairness more than rampant hypocrisy; this is cross-cultural, and we have very good sociological reasons to react this way. Furthermore, with the number of cameras out there, and the ease with which information can be accessed, politicians must realize that secrets do not keep as well as they used to. There may have been a time, a decade ago, when one could spin an image for public consumption and then become an entirely different animal at sundown, but those days are over. Leaders would do well to remember that the public is watching, and that they will be held accountable for abusing our trust.

 Political correctness has always smacked of farce, so perhaps it's simply time to drop it and be honest when in office. I for one don't particularly care if a political candidate smoked pot in school (or last weekend, for that matter), and polls show that a large and increasing proportion of the public doesn't either. What they do care about is whether a politician lies about it or other aspects of their personal lives, because this says more about their character than what one chooses to do on one's own free time, within reason. So long as a politician has sound policies based on science and reason, what they do on their own time is really no one one's business but their own. I imagine a great deal of the voter apathy that we see in democracies today emerges from this culture of boring, cookie-cutter politicians, where voting for one or another doesn't seem to make any difference. After all, they say essentially the same things, in order to placate both the public and special interests. What they perhaps underestimate is the public's capacity to respect someone with an opinion of their own, along with the public's capacity to know when they are being placated.

 Another subject in which many politicians would get a failing grade would be, of course, science. Carl Sagan once said that we live in a society that is exquisitely dependent on science and technology, but where remarkably few people know anything about science and technology, and this has becoming alarmingly more common among our politicians. When politicians can openly state that the Earth is 6000 years old, that climate change is a hoax, or that evolution is anything less than a demonstrable fact, there is something terribly, terribly wrong. Such rampant and willful stupidity should be inexcusable at the ballot box, and yet somehow, people like this are actually making policy decisions with broad and far-reaching ramifications. The only way they could do this, of course, is by presiding over constituencies that are too scientifically illiterate to realize that they are being lied to on the campaign trail or to realize the scope of the damage being done when these people get into office. While the general public may, for the most part, have been disinterested in science whey they were forced to study it in school, we have a responsibility as adults to overcome this. Only by actively attempting to gain an understanding of these issues can we hope to ensure that our leaders are not allowing our children to be taught nonsense in school, or allowing policies to be put in place that will irreparably damage our natural resources. In many places politicians are typically groomed from the public service or business sectors, but perhaps it would be wiser to start grooming the scientific community for leadership, as they would surely be less prone to making such tragically ignorant errors in judgement. Surely the business community has proven, given the economic disasters it has perpetrated on the public in the past decade, that its leadership abilities are highly overrated. Societies are inseparable from and dependent on the natural world, and any leader or potential leader who does not demonstrate an understanding of this simple fact deserves ridicule.

 Finally, I would like to point out that the middle class has been eroded over the past ten years at a rather alarming rate, largely as a result of leaders that favour corporations over actual people. There seems to be some collective delusion that business is the only driver of economic success and societal well-being, but let me be blunt: this is a lie. While the market may play a significant and important role in how societies run, it is but one component in a large and complicated machine. For some reason, we have in the past hundred years or so fetishized money and the capitalist system to the point that we have stopped maintaining the other gears in the machine, and now, as a result, we see these gears starting to grind to a halt. Let us be clear - the market, and corporations in particular, are good at essentially one thing: making money. When asked to perform any other essential function, profit will inevitably come first, often to the detriment of whatever other role they are asked to perform. Health services, emergency services, education, infrastructure – all of these areas should have nothing to do with the market, and should not be left to their own devices in order to better serve business interests. Even people who work in business do, for the most part, recognize this. However, due to the increasing role that money plays in elections, the number of businesses that contribute to political parties, and the increased lobbying that politicians must endure on their behalf, leaders have increasingly been forfeiting their integrity to the highest bidder. To maintain any hope of a fair and just democracy, this trend must not be allowed to continue.

 What businesses often forget when putting their interests ahead of the interests of the middle class is that the very people they would lay off in order to give executives bigger bonuses are the very customers that they eventually hope to win. An impoverished middle class cannot afford to spend freely, and as we have seen over the past decade, this typically leads to a choked and sputtering economy, where the very businesses whose greed caused the mess in the first place frequently rely on taxpayer bailouts to stay afloat. This is not a “free market” - this is a rigged system, rife with corruption, and like a house of cards could easily collapse upon itself without major reform. Business and politicians alike must realize that any economy must rest firmly upon the people and infrastructure from which it arises, and that trying to build an economy upon impoverished people and neglected, outdated infrastructure is like building a castle on pillars of sand. The strength of any society comes from the bottom up, not the top down, and the utter failure of “trickle-down” economics demonstrates this very well. It's predictions simply do not bear out in reality, create only increasing stratification of wealth, and make it obvious that the politicians who advocate it are not servants of the public trust, but shills for the rich. It is time to let this idea die, rather than drag its bloated corpse about, like a grotesque political “Weekend at Bernie's”.

 So, a modicum of integrity and honesty, a responsibility to the truth, and a responsibility to the majority of one's constituents – is this too much to ask? It really shouldn't be. If this is too difficult for any political party in any country to manage, then they are probably in the wrong line of work. When did our standards fall so low that we stopped demanding these things? It's hard to say, perhaps because our standards have been eroded over such a long period that we barely noticed. Now, however, it is getting so bad that we are noticing, and it's time to start demanding these things again.