Wily winning: A manual of mutating political philosophy
By Joseph Randolph
web posted July 28, 2008
Dear M.
You undoubtedly witnessed the embarrassment of our opposition this week when they had to fire one of their own because the man complained about the mass of citizens being complainers. Truth of the matter is that we benefit every way when this happens, because we have made citizens perpetual complainers while presenting ourselves as the only remedy for resolving their complaints. So we need the complainers that our opponent complains about, because we solve the problems precipitating the complaints while our opponent thrashes about by identifying the problem as the complainer. So you see he serves as a martyr for our cause as he destroys his own. This is because he ignorantly infers that citizens are ready to scrutinize themselves for their own faults. You see how our opponent dooms himself by an analysis which makes us rich and him poor at the polls--I mean lopsided voting which provides us with opportunity for political office. Remember, we don't tell the people the truth; this was the mistake of the underling our opposition fired. We tell voters how they can blame someone or something else for their problems. And if they claim they have none or too few problems, which is rarely the case in the culture our politics have fashioned upon unsuspecting voters, we simply supply them with a list. The list will never end because remember we are utopians; nothing less than imagined heaven on real earth would prompt the list of wrongs to be righted to shrivel up.
Of course no one runs his household effectively by complaining all the time, but we are not running a house, rather a whole nation that we have taught to complain about everything but their complaining. And we are living off cultural capital built up by prior generations in gargantuan amounts that allows us to pulverize and pillage with no appreciable loss to our immediate selves or the current generation. This tactic presents no loss for us, because future voters don't elect us before they are born, but the living and breathing ones do. Do not forget who the voter is, but at the same time, present various futuristic portends that you use to warn your voter about if our opponent wins the coveted office we aspire to. Indeed, we can charge our opponent with ruining the current and future world, and here we bring up the future world of the darling grandchildren, and by so doing add to the perception of ourselves as selfless and thinking about others, again. "Future generations" we call it.
The fact of the matter is that we are thieves, plain and simple. We steal in the light of day what someone else worked for for a whole lifetime, day and sometimes night, and in the case of our country, many lifetimes. In other words, the prosperity of the country was built up by the very values that we now denigrate, but the pile of prosperity and cultural capital is so high we can scoop from the top for a long time before anyone significant notices the pile is dwindling, and in time may disappear. We see we are not selfless, as the adoring public thinks of us.
Examples are not hard to come by. Take the hallowed "freedom" word of our opponents. We care not a whit for it, but the ignorant think we do, because we make civil and legal protests when the opposition starts to talk about surveillance, for example. In fact, we claim our opponent is squeezing and will eventually extinguish the freedom they claim to protect by undermining it with surveillance. The fact of the matter is that freedom must be guarded, and while we clamor that our freedom is being impinged, our opponent guards it for us, while we clamor against him and for freedom. Don't forget the sliding board I have reminded you about. We can have our freedom and destroy it too.
Oh yes, energy costs are escalating. You need not worry if you notice how much the citizens are complaining over the cost of energy resources. This is our resource, the complaining I mean, and it is infinitely larger than any puddles of lubricant lying under our feet that we prohibit from being brought to the surface. Remember from this complaining comes our opportunity. So of course we blame the source, which are the producers of energy, particularly if they are profiteers. In the past, and in the present, we haul them into our hallowed halls asking to see their malicious profit books exposed. You see we wish all the citizens, I mean voters, to think that businesses should operate as charities, though of course we do not often say so, because some of them are business owners. Remember numbers here, however; the owners of business are much much fewer than those working for the owners. Remember what I said some time ago, we are not for the little guy, but the more guys.
We can suggest also to the voters that we, the government, take over the resource industry in in toto. Of course we make them think that in some way they will be taken better care of this way, because the plundering gouging profit motive will be abolished. Energy is only the latest opportunity we have for ourselves to extend our base of power, with complaints at near record levels over that stuff that people use as fuel in their cars, but there are others of course. Health care is one. You see the way it works; keep the complaints coming, by giving the people something to complain about. We then announce ourselves as the problems solvers by taking over the problem, when in fact it is ourselves who have significantly provoked the problem, by keeping the profiteers out. By this move we take more and more responsibility away from the people, who are only too glad to give it to us, with little realization what they are giving away. We get what we want, their vote, and they get what we want them to have, and which they do want, for a while--but that is another matter.
So for us bad news is always good news. When there is no bad news, we must create it, but we do not want to come off as pessimists, but the opposite. The way we handle this problem is to announce the depression or quagmire we are in, and then to announce the way out, which is to flee to our waiting arms. Those arms are always in the form of a life jacket without which the one in peril will drown. So we announce a bail-out—you get the idea. After a while the people will come to see that when they go it alone, they always end up with problems. We are only too ready to assume responsibility for them if they will only favor us in November. 
Joseph Randolph is a writer and academic who lives in Wisconsin.