The Great Political 'Engagement' Conundrum, Part Two

In the movie 'Peaceful Warrior', starring Nick Nolte and adapted from the Dan Millman book of the same name, his character 'Socrates' is asked by his athlete protegé: "If you're so smart, why are you working at a gas station?"

He replies: "This is a service station. We offer service. There's no higher purpose; service to others."

I believe if you were to poll the average citizen in the city as to what they'd prefer their 'role' to be in the election/governance system, their reply would sound something like this:

'All I want to do is cast my vote and sit back and have the elected politicians do their jobs as they're supposed to! I haven't got time to 'get involved'!

As Jerry Maguire said, "We live in a cynical world." People have lost faith. People currently see politicians (once they're transgressed, disappointed or otherwise screwed-up) as being from the same gene pool as lawyers.

Complicating things is our 'entitlement' philosophy, tied-in with our consumer culture, our value system predicated on materialism, acquisition, and possessiveness.

Then you can throw into the mix the paradox of being so very much technologically 'connected' with each other via smart phones and Internet use...and yet communication, substantive exchanges between people, instances where people actually connect...have become all the more rare.

Want a final ingredient? 'Us vs Them'. The culture of divisiveness, of blame, of hyper-fueled rhetoric rather than civil discourse, of emotional, reactionary, desperation-tinged, fear-based vitriol. With a scoreboard just off to the side, eyes always darting back and forth between it and the adversary.

Politics has become a game. Maybe the real change came with the introduction of television debates. Maybe it arrived when the power of Madison Avenue began informing and designing our lives, achieving penetration that few could ever have predicted. Maybe the lobbying, the special interests, the kickbacks, the bribery...maybe the resignations, the government ethics enquiries, all the shenanigans that we've been so fortunate to have been entertained by for decades, maybe all these things brought us to where we are today.

Never mind the greater context of the world we live in, the back-and-forth influences, how each generation seems to be finding itself in a far less kind, far less gentle, far less humane state.

The bottom-line is that the relationship between citizens and their representatives is just that: a relationship. And it's quite clear to me that we're in need of 'couples' therapy'. Now.

I don't believe that you can achieve a just, considerate society simply by invoking rules, regulations and laws. My firm belief is that if you believe to the contrary, that this is precisely what guarantees these aspects of 'quality of Life', then the game is already over. Or as the man said 'He's already dead, he just doesn't know it yet.'

To me the true measure of a society's quality is how little laws are actually required, because 'good' behaviour has been so well inculcated in its citizens (by way of family, by way of education, by way of neighbourhood, community, by way of the 'it takes an entire village to raise a child' ideology) that rules, regulations and laws merely provide the outer framework. In fact, when things are going well, most people operating under the circumstances I'm suggesting never actually bump into these limitations of behaviour. (That's not to say that 'crimes' wouldn't occur, just that for the average person, living the kind of life that average people would be living in this society I'm proposing wouldn't find themselves breaking these rules, regulations and laws very often. When they do? How does this 'proper inculcation of morals and mores' account for these instances? Well, that's the stuff of another discussion entirely.)

So to me it's clear that the answer in getting better government is not to 'change the system', to have more rules or regulations. Nor is the answer to provide more limitations on behaviour, to make our politicians more accountable, to keep them in line by way of policies and standards. We all know how effective that approach is.

Nor is 'getting a better bunch of politicians' in place an answer: where is this batch going to come from, this pristine assortment of people possessing less character flaws and greater moral rectitude, better equipped to withstand whatever the forces are that invariably pervert missions? Is there some secret breeding ground where these future candidates are being produced, growing up in an hermetically-sealed world, kept pure and unaffected, ready to be delivered at some opportune moment?

There really is only one other way to improve the government we have, and that's to increase the level of engagement not only between the elected officials and those they represent (this is the easy part), but more importantly, between the citizenry and the politicians.

Because when you remove the isolation that most politicians exist within, when you have an entirely different relationship between the voter and the voted-in, when there's authentic representation based on participation on the part of those being represented, on the part of those for whom the elected people actually work, then you've changed the dynamic, you've changed the paradigm, you've changed the culture.

Next up: What would this proposed newfangled 'relationship of engagement' look like?