Politics, part deux: power, lies and culture
- Politics is a polarizing lens that creates conflict by dividing all aspects of human existence into either/or choices and then forcing humans to pick sides.
- Politics is useful as a means of ratifying positions. It is a terrible means of evaluating ideas.
- The jerks you remember from high school are still running things, and they haven't gotten significantly smarter or nicer.
- One means by which political groups consolidate their power is by making participation in public democratic life so onerous that human beings with healthy priorities drop out of the game. This also teaches regular people to hate politics, and stands as another good reason that a fully functional society requires institutions that transcend the political.
- In 2005, America is operating on an interconnected, bipartisan lattice of lies and self-deception, and the brilliant thing is, it's self-perpetuating. The last thing anyone wants to do is admit that they have been deceiving themselves for really bad reasons.
Editor's Note: The original Xarker Manifesto was published on this site on June 29, 2005. Subsequent changes and additions appear with a date attached.
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