One Hundred and Eighty Seven

I should stop paying attention to what the media call news.  It's only a way of avoiding the news.

The worse things get, the more the media concentrate on the next election to the exclusion of all else, even though elections change nothing.  As soon as one election is over, politicians begin campaigning for the next, without even pretending to govern during the interim because everyone agrees our polity is no longer governable, if it ever was.

Money and power are not why people seek political office, because those who do usually have both already.  What they seem to want is fame (or notoriety; they don’t seem to see a difference) that validates their meaningless lives.  And most people regard their lives as meaningless.

Belief in an afterlife used to console us for the apparent meaningless of this one.  But not everyone is able to believe, or suspend their disbelief, in an afterlife.  For the educated, posthumous fame is the nearest equivalent to survival after death.

Rulers used to pretend they shared their subjects’ supposed belief in an afterlife.  Such deception and self-deception enabled rulers and ruled to live together without killing each other.  But now we all know too much to live with these old myths, and not enough to live without them.

Our rulers still pretend to share their subjects’ supposed belief in the myth of democracy, but everyone knows elections in our so-called democracy seldom result in any changes.  Members of the ruling classes merely compete among themselves to decide which of them will win the legal right to rule (and rob) the rest of us.

Their competition is most important to the middle classes, who still have something left for our rulers to steal.  Yet it’s the poor who follow their competition most passionately, as passionately as they follow sports competitions; and for the same reason.  Which political party wins has no more importance for the poor than which team wins, because they have nothing left to steal; but at least the competition is entertaining.

This is what we are, and always have been: predators and prey, pretending to be something more.  Animals pretending to be human.

We could have become something more, if we didn't pretend we already were.