Wily winning: A manual of mutating political philosophy - August 11, 2008
By Joseph Randolph
web posted August 18, 2008
Dear M.
Our opponents have plundered the earth since the rise of the middle class and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions that followed. Today, however, is a new day, our day, and it is one in which we can catalog the ills that have afflicted us and our planet because of our opponent's shameful history of lust for money and power. Our opponents stole political power from our predecessors at court through alliance with legislatures and parliaments during this lengthy drought within our history. The usurpers of ourselves of course made themselves richer at the expense of the rest of us and the pain of the planet, but now is our time, as our candidate has so well put it. The time is nearly ripe for our aspiring bureaucracy, patterned after that of our European brethren. We shall need a powerful leader, a man of the world so to speak, to put the authority in place to have a new country. Our candidate of course claimed he wanted to return the country to yesteryear, but of course there is no yesteryear of our country corresponding to the direction in which our politics will move our country. However much your own campaign is faltering, perhaps you shall be so lucky as to ride into office on his coattails.
You should see by now that we care little for freedom, except our own, but the ignorant have no clue about our subversive ploys, especially while we are telling them that we are the advocates for participatory democracy, as we call it. Our ignorant masses we manipulate well when we tell them government is meant to serve the people, because of course we have no belief in the fitness of the people to rule anything, not even their own household, much less their own money. On the other hand, tax rebates and the like are affronts to those who are prepared to sacrifice some of their plenty so that the poor can climb out of poverty. Meanwhile, as I said in my last letter, make sure you are adding to the numbers of those needing the climb up by every statistical count you can manage. If there are none, invent some new kind of statistics. If you cannot do it yourself, find help in the academy; there are plenty of our own there and in Hollywood too, ready to bring about our new epoch.
Remember that wolf we keep telling the voter about, that is hiding in the shrubbery or out in the woods, and only too ready to vandalize cupboards. Tell the voter that the wolf is waiting for them to drop their guard--that is, they may wrongly think that they can manage the wolf by their own devices. Dissuade them of any protection they may think they have left, such as anything that we loathingly refer to as "private."
Remember too, that the public must think of our opponent as offering them only two choices--sink or swim. We offer one--floating, and we will supply the raft and weapons (but not guns) for the sharks in the waters. Let your voter know that no shark is as savage as your opponent, and force on your opponent the admission that his politics are squeezing every man to fend for himself, for this leaves the impression that many will be left to drown or freeze or starve at the hands of our beneficent Mother Earth. If you portray his future with this kind of horror, he will come on his knees to you. This will make it easier to check to see if he has money or arms that he must hand over to you. Then you will have him in your pocket after checking his, and then you can provide him with virtually every other essential, and some not-so-essentials, so that he cannot walk away. Set him up on an allowance, like a child, and he will never leave home without you. His ventures and any adventures he had in the past will stay put. You are now in charge of him.
Remember the teaching of our teacher, by keeping the poor poor, the poor can never leave nor forsake us; he can only return to you and to us--or starve. With you he is safe; without you he is dead. Of course do not present this scenario in such ribald terms, but do convey the catastrophe that awaits a wrong choice. Nine times out of ten he will run to you as a child would with a similar warning, except that your child is an adult that you have made into a child again to your gain—and this one can vote! The tenth we do not worry about; one does not need to worry when 10 sheep are lost when 90 are in the corral. Remember, you are not about the few, but the many.
We have therefore been trying to wrestle as much control as we can back from the people who took it from us after the downfall of the court, with their markets and every other sort of egoism that produced a world and a country that we detest. We of course portray ourselves as minded by the spirit of community, rather than the selfishness of the individual ego.
If the people are not close enough to starvation for the wolf at the door thing to work, try mentioning killing the planet, for some cosmic relief. Here you can drag up centuries of wrongdoing against our opponent who is now willing to continue plundering earth for gain until Mother has nothing left to give, as She dies and ourselves with Her. Our gentle caress of nature, rather than a rabid brutalizing of our sacred Mother will appeal to those voters who prefer peace to war, and sense that everything our opponent does is with a hand of violence.
Our judges will do it quite well for us too. By the vote of these less than ten individuals the will of the whole country can be subjugated to our agenda. For our part, we have little care whether we rule from the bench or the throne, as long as we rule. One court is a good as another, whether it is that of a king or a judge. This necessitates, however, that our dearest judges be appointed by one of our own, for there is nothing so onerous as watching a political opponent live on through his judicial appointees.
We of course rule from the top down; our opponent will contend that rule should come from the bottom and go up. He therefore has belief in all sorts of movement and mobility that we either shun or prohibit or pronounce impossible or impious. We are fatalists, though not in name, because we offer opportunity, but opportunity which provides opportunity for us to be elected. You must convince your voter that he can do next to nothing about his circumstances, and that his circumstances will take political action to move. Meanwhile, and to your advantage, he will lie about and grow obese, and then require some intervention to rescue him from the predicament you have built for him for you. 
Joseph Randolph is a writer and academic who lives in Wisconsin.
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