The Illusion of Influence

By Glen Wallace

The illusion of influence by the populace has perpetuated the current flawed republican form of government.  Had our government been in the form of a constitutional republic with appointed rather than elected governing officials the citizenry would have likely revolted a long time ago.  But under a pseudo democracy as we have, the people tend to blame each other for the problems of the government.   Which is understandable given the illusion of democracy makes people think that the electorate are the ones  wielding the influence over the politicians that are deciding what laws are created that governs society.  Constituents think all that needs to be done is sway their fellow citizens to vote another way.  When that doesn't work, people get frustrated, but unfortunately they don't give up on the representative democracy system altogether.  For some reason, for the vast majority, the populace never even considers the option of completely altering their fundamental form of governance. If only they realized that we are living under an appointed republic and not a democratic one, then the people would declare our government unacceptable. Instead, they just keep tilting at windmills thinking 'this time will be different' and all will be well if only their candidate will get elected to office.

Unfortunately, the illusion serves as useful fiction for those that are in power.  It becomes much easier to manipulate the people when they think they are the ones in charge.  Once the illusion is in place many different forms of manipulation become available that would be much less potent tools if the populace lost their sense of importance in running the country.  I believe a certain degree of malaise and apathy would come over the constituents with respect to the day to day governance of the country if they didn't think they had a role to play in that regard.  However that apathy would quickly be replaced with a sense of outrage if their material condition or freedoms were severely compromised.  Such outrage could then easily evolve into a mob that could leverage its numbers and in a real act of influence, overthrow their dictator.  But once the illusion is present then among other techniques of manipulation, perhaps none works better than the old divide and conquer technique whereby parties of different political persuasions are pitted against each other, thus distracted from the pillaging of the resources and freedoms.  But the 'dance off' between the parties is as carefully orchestrated as a professional wrestling match.  When the ruling elite like things just the way they are, they order a continual partisan stalemate with both sides so evenly matched that no resolution occurs and therefore no change happens with the matter at hand.  However, if the powers decide they want something changed, like the enactment of a new free trade agreement, the powers order a bipartisan unity that insures that the agreement is passed.  Never mind that such free trade agreements hamstring the peoples ability to leverage, through tariffs, the trade deficits that the US is continually experiencing .  The interests of the masses, or the democratic majority, are not what matters in our so-called representative democracy.

Another case in point is the recent proposed legislation known as CISPA and SOPA.  While many may think that the first round attempt to pass those laws failed because of a grassroots movement came together in protest against those bills, I doubt the general public had anything to do with the failure of the two bills.  I believe those with influence, the large cap internet corporate behemoths such as Google, Amazon and Ebay protested and thus stopped the bills.  In our society, the only hope the proletariat has is if their interests and the interests of those with real influence are one and the same.   

In another case, back during the Clinton administration, I believe it was during his first term, all of a sudden there was this upswelling of a populist tax reform movement.  It seemed every day there was all this talk and pressure to reform both the tax code and especially revenue enforcement in favor of the common man.  It even got a great deal of national mainstream news coverage where the news would interview people who would give their horror stories of dealing with the IRS.  But from my recollection this sudden movement occurred when the Democrats held control of not only the presidency but also congress and given that the Dems tend to be less inclined to be for tax reform, they took on the role of being the resistors to these reforms that predominantly the Republicans were putting forward.  And so the true life narrative in this case played out that the Dems played the role of preventing any significant tax reforms to come out of this new tax movement.  Now, fast forward to the George W Bush administration where I believe at least at some point during his tenure the Republicans had a significant amount of control of both the presidency and congress.  So, wouldn't that have been a good time to revive the populist tax movement that sprung up during the Clinton administration?  Well if there ever was the goal to help the masses with their taxation then that would have been a good time but that was never the goal.  The brief tax reform movement during the Clinton administration was just a planned theater designed to reinforce the illusion of influence for the masses to think they started and brought to the public conscious the need to reform the system of tax collection for their fellow citizens.   By making the movement so public with the help of the mainstream media which is in collusion with the powers to reinforce the illusion, the public had their mistaken belief in their political potency nicely reinforced.   Look at all the power they seemed to have and look at how it was only because of those darn Democrats that nothing came of the movement.  Of course the powers that were actually behind the sudden movement were counting on and weren't disappointed in the public's short term memory insuring that almost everyone would have forgotten the brief tax movement once the occasion came to pass where what had been seemingly the only obstacle, the Democrats hold on power, to success in reaching the goal of the movement, no longer existed.   I didn't forget, but I think almost everyone else did.  

One more example of the lack of influence by the common man over public policy in our supposed democracy is the demise of the trolly car system back in the 1950's.  It was a perfectly good public transportation system that every one seemed to love to get around and also had recently been updated with new cars at the time of its dismantling.  If the people were really the ones in charge then it must have been at their behest, demanding that the trolly cars be removed that caused the system to be brought almost entirely to a halt around the country all at the same time.  One might think people despised those trolly cars because they were so quickly removed from service around the country.  But that wasn't the case at all, from what I have heard from people who actually used the trolly cars when they were in service, the trolly cars were heavily utilized and enjoyed by the public because the system did an excellent job with its intended purpose of getting  people to where they needed to go within the city.   The trolly cars did such an excellent job in fact that their use was replacing the use and consumption of oil, automobiles and the batteries that started those automobiles.  So, there is good evidence to indicate that those three industries: big oil, big auto and battery manufactures colluded and used their real influence over politics and government and in one of the worst ever acts of crony capitalism, pressured politicians in a successful attempt to trash the then perfectly good trolly car system.  That the people liked the trolly cars didn't matter because in the minds of career politicians, the people don't matter and as result the common mans opinion has no influential sway over the actions of those career politicians who make the public policies that we all live under. 

A popular technique to reinforce the illusion is to assign make-believe titles to the public such as 'taxpayer' as though being a taxpayer affords a citizen any special rights not available to a citizen that doesn't have to pay any taxes.  But still the citizen is humored into thinking that he is saying something significant when he cries "I'm a taxpayer!" People tend to equate being a citizen with paying taxes so much so that the term 'taxpayer' has become synonymous with the term 'citizen.'  But from a legal standpoint, such a synonym is inaccurate.  There is no quid pro quo contractual agreement between a citizen paying taxes and receiving some good or service.  There are many revenue sources and potential revenue sources that a government has at its disposal to cover its expenses.  The expenses, what the government spends money on, are typically determined by an elected so-called representative who is supposed to make their government paying decisions based on the wants and needs of their constituents.  The is no de jure reason for the representative to make an expense determination based on a monetary consideration provided by the citizen by way of payment of taxes.  Paying taxes does not necessarily provide you the citizen with any special privileges over and above the privileges afforded to the citizen that pays no taxes at all.  While there are laws that demand taxes be paid or the citizen may face certain penalties, those laws were created by the representatives to insure revenue but not as any civil intervention in a breach of contract matter.  So it is a mistake to think of the term 'taxpayer' as synonymous with the term 'citizen.'  From a rights, privileges and entitlements as a citizen standpoint it doesn't matter that you are a 'taxpayer.'  But it is so much easier to pilfer revenue from the citizen if they don't think of it as pilfering but rather as consideration in a binding business agreement between themselves and the government.  

Sometimes you will hear, on one occasion a politician urging Americans to support, with the help of military force if necessary, the spreading of democracy around the globe.  But then on another occasion the same politician, when faced with a question as to why some change hadn't been enacted that would have been in the general public's interest and that the majority of Americans want to come about that politician might respond with a "whoa whoa whoa this is not a true democracy where we go around willy-nilly doing whatever the whims are of the masses, allowing the tyranny of the mob to come about, we are instead living in a constitutional republic where we have these wise representatives to make the tough decisions about what is best for us and therefore we shouldn't be worrying our pretty little heads about such matters and should instead turn our attentions over to a sporting event or the latest celebrity gossip and stop meddling and interfering with the decision making process of the important people!"

We should have either, as much as is practicable, a pure democracy or a constitutional appointed republic that is revokable by the citizens.  It should be very clear by now the ineffective coupling between the desires of the populace and the government's response to those desires that exists in a so-called representative democracy.  

Representative Democracy as a Failed Experiment

By Glen Wallace

In NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof column, A Failed Experiment, he points out how in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy there has been a rush by the wealthy to equip their homes with backup generators as a workaround to a crumbling infrastructure that has led to frequent power outages in the NE.  While he is not entirely clear in his column what the experiment is that has failed, he seems to be indicating that it is our political system that has failed to address the problems of not only our infrastructure, but also crime, education, healthcare costs and climate change. (On a side note, I am still skeptical about the dominant paradigm of climate change, but I will leave that for another essay.)

In addition to not clearly stating what the experiment was that failed, perhaps out of the limits of space that the NY Times allots him, he didn't present a clear solution either.   Well, let me chime in on both accounts.  I will present the experiment that failed as the representative democracy that we and most of the western world lives under and a solution of a return, as much as is practically feasible, to a true democracy as was originally practiced and invented by the ancient Greeks. 

If one is to stand aside and think mindfully as an observer it should quickly become clear that there seems to be some inherent flaws to our representative system that are intractable.  The cause and nature of those flaws can be found by looking at basic human nature and psychology and the vulnerabilities therein that are easily taken advantage of and manipulated by certain vested interests in their interests.

One psychological tendency is to affiliate oneself to what could be called a clan, tribe or wolf pack.  We are inherently very social creatures and any perceived threat made by another group directed towards the group we identify ourselves as being a part of will frequently provoke an instinctual reaction to protect one's group and also fight the offending group.  Clan feuding or warfare, then, can quickly develop from seemingly small offenses.  Additionally, one could imagine it would be easy for someone knowledgeable about these human tendencies, to deliberately manipulate the masses by means of either engaging in false flag attacks or by pushing the emotional buttons and convincing one side that some act by the other side should be considered an insult.  In the group dynamics there is nothing more uniting than having a common enemy.  That unity is only strengthened the more the common enemy is despised.  I have become convinced, then, that the biggest ally for any political candidate is his or her biggest critic.  And the more outrageous that critic is, the greater the boost is for the target of that outrageous criticism.  Eventually the supporters start to lose touch and forget why they even support their candidate and merely focus on why they dislike the opponent and his or her supporters so much.  As a result, the supporters, the constituents, also forget, or demand, that their candidate, once in office, takes care of things like the infrastructure, education and health care costs.  All their energy is focused, as if under a trans like delusion, on the enemy clan as the root of all the ails of society and the world.   

Here in the US we have two main political clans and they go by the names of the 'Republicans' and the 'Democrats.'   And within each clan there are figures, the politicians, that take on patriarchal and matriarchal roles to the adult citizens who subconsciously want to revert back to comfort of childhood when they could always look to Mommy and Daddy to take care of everything.  Childhood was such an easier and simpler time for most that the lure of the comfort of that time makes it difficult to resist when a politician offers to effectively"kiss the boo boo and make it all better."  The elected official then is effectively offering to act in a parental role, where they are taking care of everything on a societal level, that the parent took care of, on a household level, when the constituents were children.  Most of us, as we were growing up, didn't have to occupy our thoughts with whether the roof was due for new shingles, or that the electric bill was paid on time or the myriad of other details of daily necessities of modern life.   So why, our reflex becomes, do we need to be concerned that our politicians aren't making sure that the infrastructure, the house of civilization, is being kept in good repair.  Sure, such questions may occur to us from  time to time -- especially during a crisis like Hurricane Sandy,  but as soon as the crisis passes, those questions quickly fleet from the forefront of our mind and become like a fictional story of history. 

The solution then, is to force upon ourselves the role of being the grown-ups that we of voting age are all supposed to be.  We can no longer kid ourselves into believing that the responsibilities of governing a society can be left in the hands of a few individuals that are confronted with a plethora of temptations while being afforded a level of ivory tower isolation that protects them from public accountability.   And the only way we can stop primal regression into feuding clans, is to come to dissolve our political clans and come to the realization that we are one big family with a lot of adults that are perfectly capable of sharing the burden of deciding how to run this country.  It is when we are faced with a true democracy, where every adult citizen gets an equal say in how things are run, that we realize we can no longer escape dealing with our adult responsibilities of dealing with things like infrastructure maintenance and repair.  And like a family all living under one roof, we will realize that there is no other acceptable solution than to find ways to get along rather than finding ways to fight each other.  There are already many examples where we as a society automatically realize that, when we are all together a one group in an enclosed space, whether it be an airplane cabin, an elevator, or a restaurant, that we must achieve a certain degree of civility that facilitates everyone getting along with each other.  I believe that same automatic realization of peaceful coexistence and cooperation will also kick in once we realize that in a true democracy we all have to work together as adults to come to solutions to all of our shared problems.