The Antisocial Socialist

 ioplokon has started possibly the most niche meme of all time, wherein he reads Pierre Trudeau's Approaches to Politics (one of those books with very good chapter titles) and posts responses. If you want to read his educated responses, you can do so, but life is short so I am going to hold forth based on the chapter titles alone, knowing very little about the contents.

The first chapter is called Government by Mediocrities. And it is at least worth reading the excerpt.

My initial response was to go, yeah, that's what we have, actually, here in Canada, in contrast to the kakistocracy to the south. Even our fascists are kind of dorky. My shrink likes to say, "think of someone of average intelligence and remember that half of the population is below that." As a child, you think that the people in charge must be quite smart, to have gotten that far in life. Not good (even as a child, I wasn't that naïve!) but at least competent at putting their ideology into practice.

But Trudeau II demonstrates that they don't need to be smart, actually. He's a small, mediocre man. Have I been impressed by him lately? A little, surprisingly. He can give a good speech and he occasionally excels at stepping up when the country requires it. But his entire reign shows the gap between rhetoric and action; the convoluted, overly technical attempts to bend a system towards justice that is ultimately meant to do the opposite. Which is to say that 28 First Nations reservations are still under boil water advisories. We have made zero progress towards mitigating the climate crisis. We don't independently produce our own vaccines, leaving us vulnerable to the vagaries of US conspiracy theorists.

The more I think about it, though, the less I think the question of mediocrity in government matters. We could do with a little more mediocrity. If everyone running the show was just meh, we'd probably muddle on and mostly survive it. The problem is that most of our lives can be better said to be directed not by the state, but by our bosses, who have over us the power to decide if we are housed or not, fed or starving, and so on.

Capitalism and democracy are, at best, in tension, and more often than not, opposed. In recent decades we have seen the total victory of the former over the latter; the chances of meaningful electoral change are no greater than those of winning big at the casino, and the reason is the same, which is that the game is rigged. The idea of democracy, which is quite quaint and noble, involves the power to recall, to critique, and to sway. Most of us labour under the autocracy of the workplace, however; our leaders are unelected and govern without checks and balances. Increasingly, governments seem to agree that this autocracy is better, hence the outsourcing of what had once been the domain of the state to private interests.

And of course, most of those leaders are mediocre too. A complex mechanism like a civilization can't really be run by the best and brightest; those people tend to be quite alienating and unable to cope with logistics and organization.

This is why people get burned out on politics. This is why people are tired of all the elections even though it literally takes no effort to do the thing that most people do during elections. It doesn't make life better in a tangible way, because it's not addressing the pain points of daily life.

I don't know what the answer is, besides more fiery orators on the left (and how would we get the word out about them even if we had them, given that the social media environment is also rigged?). You certainly can't fight for mediocrity, the radical notion of living a quiet and ordinary life. To the extent that we can ever have that, it's because of hard and consistent struggle by the perpetually dissatisfied.