Platonic politics, not porno-politics please

Our leaders are wasting precious time they have in helping those who need help, those who are alienated, marginalized, oppressed by the system created by politicians who care about wealth and power and how to keep these forever.

Come back to your senses. We have had enough of your lewd democracy, lies and deceit, and pornographic politics you practice behind a mask of religiosity, reformasi, and Islam hadari and madani and whatever shadows in the Platonic allegorical cave you are using.

Platonic politics of our times is to bring back ethics and insist on making politicians and traditional rulers subservient to the reasonable demands of the people, to educate the masses on what politics should be.

Today we have Mahathirist authoritarianism ruling, in all its absurdity, with the younger generation worshiping the principles, and the old wondering why the style of politics has not changed and how this has made the smooth transition of power both difficult and anti-democratic.

The excesses and ramifications of the age of post-truths and doctored information, viralled in a dromological fashion, has made politics take the path of the hyper-loop. The speed of destruction of people and parties in the political game is increased at a rate so intense that those entangled in the web of informational and mis-informational matrix can no longer escape the wrath of self-destruction.

Doctoring truth

There is an overdose of talk these days on the words “post-truth” and “fake news” and the way the corporate media especially is making discourse go viral, true to its ethos of profiting from reporting about conflicts. From “all the news that’s fit to print,” we now have “all the views that count as equal truths.” Anything goes as long as it sells, in an age of the globalization of packaged and branded nothingness.

Daily, especially when one is living in America and watches television, consumes the news, is amused by the programmes, transformed into televisual and online consumers, informed by newscasters and talk-show hosts arguing at each other, one is confronted with the cruel choice of accepting “truths”.

We live in a world mediated by corporate media that is now mutating into new forms: from those emanating from TV broadcasts to the self-aggrandizing personal podcasts created in an age of post-humanism and intelligent machines. The media and the way truth is “epistemologized,” produced through sound bites, click streams, fake-reproductions, sensationalized and viralled, is creating us in ways we still do not know how and to what effect.

Herein lies the complexity of the world we live in. Herein lies the need, I feel, for introspection and occasionally to “leave our mediated self,” or the Platonic allegorical cave we are forced into en masse. Now is the time to look at what we have been made to become by the words, thoughts, concepts, and definitions we consume.

This is a complex task. How do we get away from the "prison" of "reality-defining language," and find out the process of how we become "constructed"?

Lewd democracy

Keen observers of Malaysian politics, of the story of the birth of Umno, Parti Keadilan Rakyat, Parti Bersatu, etc., may now conclude that these parties began with some sense of idealism, stated vague enough to be scrutinized, using general terms such as "justice for all", "progressive society", "empathic economics", variants of rhetoric hiding realities.

These parties are now so immersed in the world of money, the shadows in our Platonic cave of political hope are now made out to be the manifestation of reality.

Once the battle for control is over, elections won, the true self of the politicians emerge, albeit the self that is constructed out of the lies and deceit of the will, the urge to dominate the less intelligent and aware amongst us, so that the uniquely Malaysian "lewd democracy" can be achieved.

Hence, the broken promises and the rationale to continue with the old ways of authoritarianism. Power is to be maintained at all costs.

"It is better to be feared, than to be loved" as written in the classic 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli. Indeed, today, in an age of post-truth and doctored videos, enemies are subjected to the worst humiliation in the attempt to overkill.

But then again, politicians, those who are not material for "philosopher-rulers", said Plato, love to "walk into their own trap". You may cite a few politicians you know.

Education and subservience

One way to keep the majority subservient is to provide them with an education system so mediocre enough and devoid of critical sensibility, they cannot differentiate between shadowy form and substance, realism and fantasy, rhetoric and true belief.

Keep them obedient so that when there is a leader smarter than many, he is put on a pedestal and allowed to be in power as long as he or she can make the masses subservient.

That's what indoctrination means in a society that cannot think of alternative futures. As if political leadership is the domain of those who have established dynasties, those with money and power, and those who could lie to the people using all the means of control at their disposal. Transfer power from father to son, husband to wife and vice versa, son to daughter, amongst siblings, amongst close and trusted friends who can maintain the culture of vulture and plunder.

The people are mere consumers of ideology created by those who own the means of production, only to subjugate. Get children to memorize useless information, pound their consciousness with useless grand narratives called "historical facts," however oxymoronic that term is, and when they grow older, train them to be voting-age zombies in love with sensational "porno-politics."

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AZLY RAHMAN is an educator, academic, columnist, and author of seven books. He holds a doctorate in international education development and Master’s degrees in six areas: education, international affairs, peace studies communication, fiction and non-fiction writing. He is a member of the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Twitter @azlyrahman. - Mkini