Puck on... Politics pt. 7

So, what’s the central issue here? Hmm? Is it backbiting? Gossip? Pride? (A personal favorite) What is it really? What is that defining sin that sits at the back of all your little play in politics? Lying? Hypocrisy? Close, but there’s something deeper, more profound and yet profoundly simple. You might be surprised to know it. Would you like me to tell you?

Yes.

Control. Oh, it leads to all the others. It makes you into hypocrites, and pride is a chief component. But what it really is, deep down, is control. Or, to put it better: Power.

Ah, yes! And just like that we find ourselves come round again. Isn’t it amazing, laughably amazing how it all comes back to the simplest, oldest, pithiest answers?

And that’s what this is about. That’s what politics is really about. Power. Control. The ability to make someone else do what you want. That’s what politics provides, or what it is a means to. And power is what you are after. But why? What happened to the meek inheriting the earth? Hmm? Why seek power? Ah, but of course, you’re right. You have the truth, so you should have the power. It certainly shouldn’t fall into the hands of, gasp, non-believers. What kind of a country would that create? But you. You would be better. At the reins of power, think what you could do. What better countries you could make because right is on your side. How quickly you forget the simple truth. “Power corrupts.”

Ironic, isn’t it? All your talk of sin and salvation and what you are really trying to do is take away the very freedom and choice that makes either possible. Because when you are in power that is exactly the goal. You don’t call it that, of course. But it’s what you do. Take away options, so they have no choice but to pick you. And politics makes hypocrites out of you all.

And to think, how often, how many times in how many ways you have been warned. Why, they went so far as to put it on the books. Ah, but you hate that concept, don’t you? The great bugbear of your age: separation of church and state. How you hate that. How you denounce and decry it. For you see it as shackles and chains keeping you from the power you crave.

Funny. Has it ever occurred to you that the concept was coined for your protection?