The tedium of power

The tedium of power

The running of systems, the matters of governance and finance and policy, and control of complicated, slow-moving enterprises, all of these things are boring as fuck. I mean boring to anybody who is not looking for refuge from the real world in fine-print and paperwork and densely worded documents.

If you like action you don't want to run anything, you don't want the responsibilities of power, you want to be a foot-soldier on the front-line. You put somebody who likes to do things, somebody with a short attention span who likes to be stimulated, in charge and they have to delegate everything to the boring people. All those cocaine drug-lords like Pablo Escobar or Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, you know they have to be boring men themselves, or else they delegate responsibility for the day-to-day shit, in which case they are more figureheads than anything else.

The people that you think are so powerful and dangerous, they are worthless for conversation unless you are “talking shop”, and even then they are repetitive and annoyingly pedantic. Everything has a price, and power (that is not delegated to underlings), you pay for by becoming gray and bland.

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Envy and the public sentiment

Envy and the public sentiment

How much of the public wrath about banking crises is really legitimate and honest, and how much has nothing at all to do with concern about the economy and is just about wanting to make rich people suffer? People are losing jobs and homes, or they live in fear of it. Outraged mobs of the poor are to be expected.

I personally, imagine that envy, and schadenfreude are way more likely motivations than any desire for justice.

None of this is to say that these people don't deserve to suffer, but most humans would have made the choices they made and would still have wanted their bonuses at the end of fucking everything up. There is nothing unusual or unnaturally evil about any of this. The media's "the people are up in arms" stuff is about boosting their ratings by pandering to what they perceive as the public sentiment, not to provide an accurate reflection of it. The truth is that there is no "public sentiment", just worried people looking for something to distract them from life. 

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Ron Paul's Popularity

Ron Paul's Popularity

There is the glamor of rebellion, for one thing, and here it comes wrapped up in a familiar package, that of the old white guy who has always been in charge. There is also the notion of being the one person in the room with common sense. Paul will always be unpopular, therefore his supporters will always be able to see themselves as smarter than everybody else. Being the one person with rational, fair ideas in a town of jaded windbags ensures that the marginalized will flock to you, but no one else. They will flock to you because they identify, and then they will sit on their message-boards and commiserate, continuing to be marginalized but being able to look at the rest of the world with smug satisfaction. "We know better", they say to each other, "we always knew better".

Anything that goes against the conventional and familiar is doomed to failure. Likewise anything that involves rational thought and forgoes high emotion. Whatever failings your average politician may have, they all know this.

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