In Boris Johnson's Britain, citizens and journalists treat politics as a soap opera. Johnson and his people look like characters who are increasingly becoming masks of themselves, actors who have learned their lines but either don't believe them or are not good at their craft.
Watching a successful soap opera, we care about the problems of the main characters. But we know that they are actors, creations of fictional fantasy. We may be saddened by their struggles and sufferings, but we know they go home after filming.
The «falsehood»
In political soap water we have the reverse situation. We know that the protagonists are real people, but the words they utter and the script they play out has little to do with reality. We are invited to get to know their family, to take an interest in their clothes and houses, to learn about their holidays and their children. We call them Kyriakos and Mareva, Boris and Adonis, Alexis and GAP, as if we know them.
Of course, politics has always been a performance, the theatrical part as important as the executive part. But as a soap opera or reality show, the plot becomes believable and the play successful the further it is from the reality we live and know. In the theatre we get lost for a while in the fantasy world being staged. In political soap opera, we are constantly in a twilight zone where truth and lies are confused.
We are victims and victims of a collective fraud. We know or suspect the huge gap between what Mitsotakis says and the real situation: in «Operation Freedom», in the great «success» of the government in dealing with the pandemic or in the «temporary» increase in the cost of living. However, we are willing to believe them. Statements and actions belong to different epistemological worlds that are confused, to a «false truth». We know the distance between statements and reality as well as the political actors do, but we are committed to an alliance of willing believers.
So more ICUs lead to more deaths, schools and transport do not transmit the infection, fewer students lead to better universities, etc. Do officials lie about being graduates, is there a risk of prosecution of bankers who give loans without collateral? No problem, we change the law, no more degrees needed, the criminal law is repealed. As a medieval edict used to say, the power of the Pope (see Mitsotakis) is «diaphragmatic»: he can change the law or exempt someone from its application. He can make something from scratch, he can legalize illegalities. Twilight zone, «false truth».
The illusion
The fraud survives because of our own chronic delusion. We know that much of what we are told is not true, is wrong, or is a lie, but we continue to accept it. We believe in principles and values that have nothing to do with reality. We believe in human rights, but we do not care what happens in Lesvos or Chios. We believe in democracy, but we do not mind that our representatives are breaking their commitments. We believe in social cohesion, but we do not mind that poverty, unemployment and austerity are growing, inequalities and millionaires are multiplying. We believe in the free market and freedom of speech, but we don't mind Marinakis' oligopolies.
A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr, the physicist and researcher of the structure of the atom and quantum theory, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, shows how the «falsehood» works. A scientist who visited Bohr at his country house, shocked because he had a horseshoe over the door, tells him: «I can't believe you think petals keep evil spirits out of the house.» «Neither can I.» replied Bohr; «I have it because I'm told it works just as well even if you don't believe it.» This is how ideology works today: we all know that Mitsotakis' democracy serves corruption, direct assignments to friends, well-paid temps, private colleges and clinics, and a media that supports the government.
We know that the rule of law is a rhetorical claim that is touted when it takes opponents to court and exonerates our own, but condemned when it does the opposite. Yet we act as if democracy and the rule of law work even though we don't much believe it. Perhaps we should take Marx's advice, Groucho Marx: ’This man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don't let him deceive you - he is a corrupt idiot.«.
Our society decodes the hypocrisy and hypocrisy of politicians, but it does not change. We have deconstructed ideology, but we continue to operate according to its dictates. Unlike previous eras - ideology always made up reality - we know deception. We are more honest because we are more cynical. So ideology functions primarily as a critique of ideological hope: don't believe that things can get better, that the world can change. The first job of ideology today is to prevent any resistance by presenting it as impossible, utopian, unrealistic. We have made pragmatism a utopia, banal realism a radical aspiration. We live in the age of mass delusion, we are voluntary victims and indifferent observers of nihilistic cynicism.
The cynicism of power
The examples of cynicism and the nihilism of power are daily. Cynicism uses morality hypocritically to undermine it: it accepts it on the surface and at the same time violates it. «We know that what we tell you is a lie and what we do is wrong and unjust, yet we say it, do it and cover it up with moralistic excuses.» Politicians know the gap and continue undeterred, exploiting the modern principle that a lie that is often repeated becomes truth and, the postmodern one, that what is often repeated becomes boring and repels people who stop engaging with it. It's the government's dual policy on the pandemic.
The recognition of the importance of moral justification makes cynicism an ideology that tries to anticipate and respond in advance to possible criticisms of its hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, of course, is the tax that lies and injustice pay on truth and virtue. On the other hand, we, the debunkers of ideology, are like the child who, while getting spanked daily by the school bully, comes home happy because he realized that the bully is stupid and uneducated.
We know that there is a distance between the beautiful but false mask of power and the ugly reality behind it, but we still admire the beautiful mask. We know that behind the claims of universal principles lie certain interests, but we continue to accept them. We know that the emperor is naked, but we continue to pretend not to see it.
Political cynicism is the result of capitalist moralism, of the false coupling of economy and morality. Capitalism has always tried to wear moral clothes since its practice inevitably leads to an increase in the most obscene injustices.
From Adam Smith's «invisible hand» to Max Weber's Protestant capitalism that turns extreme selfishness into service to the common good, to the Blairite trickle down, Clinton and Simitis (the crumbs falling from the tables of the rich feed the plebs) and Mitsotakis' economic growth through the impoverishment of the majority, moralism has always been a companion of exploitation. But as Shakespeare says, nothing will come from nothing.
Costas Douzinas
