It seems to be received wisdom these days that you must “earn" the right to criticize a person in public office or a political entity in electoral majority. How is the right earned? By paying compliments. This credits valuable coin into your emotional bank balance with said person or entity which you are then allowed to expend on criticism. In the absence of coin, your adverse comments carry no weight and must be dismissed as incoherent rants.
This wisdom is often yoked to another- invoking precedent from the putative adversary, thus ensuring that no assessment of a present-day event is possible absent reparations for the original sin: “He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone".
This power trifecta is completed by a slam-dunk. “Do you have a better idea”? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Between these triple punches, it must seem that all dissenting voices will be stilled. Any adverse comment, having been added as a post scriptum to elegiac paeans, will be reduced to the metaphorical equivalent of Cindy Crawford’s mole.
The word “Democracy” a portmanteau of two Latin roots: demos (people) and kratos (power), points to the relationship between electors and the elected. The elected serve, and serve at, the pleasure of their electors. The power and badges of privilege they enjoy are not birth rights or entitlements; they are perquisites meant to facilitate the work enjoined upon them. While this is the formal democratic construct, its real-world manifestation is rather different, particularly when a particular elected official is repeatedly reelected into the same office, or, as is often the case, successively more powerful offices. The longer this streak continues, the more likely it is for the incumbent to start associating the power and badges with herself, the person, rather than her elected office. Interestingly, this metamorphosis is bilateral; the electors begin to posit the person at a higher plane of existence than the one they inhabit and frame the relationship in terms of their gratitude rather than the official’s accountabilities. Indeed, even when such officials begin utilising their authority coercively, electors don’t merely condone it; they applaud it as decisiveness and fortitude. Parallely, elected officials, having the bully pulpit of office at their disposal, can use it to stoke anxiety and fear, amplify voices calling for assigning larger and larger gobs of personal discretion to themselves, and stifle even the slightest querulous note.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a morality tale which reminds us of the very short path in elected office from humility to hubris. It makes pointed references to the shared culpability of the vast assembly of citizens in elevating one among their own into a plenipotentiary above them all. Democratic societies on every continent have elected strongmen into office over the last decade. In each instance, a vocal minority of electors, willingly provide an elaborate apologia for the excesses of their caesar and work in concert to drown out discordant voices.
With this, let us go back to the popular wisdom trifecta with which we began this essay. If you are a citizen of a democratic jurisdiction, you are a shareholder in the societal power which places people into elected office. This, in and of itself, gives you the right to express your views about elected officials: favourable, indifferent or unfavourable. In contemporary discourse, the implicit assumption is that the exercise of the right to vote is the sole opportunity for voicing opinion about those aspiring to office. Nothing can be further from the truth. The duration of appointment is not, and should never be, devoid of an ongoing feedback loop which conveys the ebbs and flows of public opinion to those in elected office. These feedback loops can take many forms. Social media allow anyone with a smartphone, a data connection and a Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Blogger etc. account, platforms to air their views. Regular news outlets such as newspapers, news broadcasters on TV. radio or digital media are collectively labelled "Fourth Estate" in acknowledgement of their role as the watchdog over the other three "estates"- legislature, judiciary and executive. In some countries, regular opinion surveys monitor citizens' approval or disapproval of their presidents, prime ministers or monarchs. The Gallup Presidential Approval Rating traks how Americans view their president, week after week. In India, we are used to local or state elections being described as referendums on national leadership, particularly when the state is ruled by the same political configuration as the centre.
A range of ideological alignments point to wide differences in views about the devolution of economic, social, cultural and administrative power across the society. I am not obligated to ever agree with a single prescription or policy direction of those in office; indeed, a vibrant, plural political discourse demands that such differences exist. The incorrigible sceptic is not anathema to democratic polity, she is its strongest pillar.
Politicians become adept at the arts of deception and deflection. It takes little imagination to rake up real, and often imagined, injustices committed by someone else in the past, as covering fire for behaving atrociously in the here and now. Today’s atrociousness can even be framed in terms of rebalancing the scales and writing wrongs. This sets the hapless electors up for an infinite regression of finding and fixing old iniquity and creating brand new inequity for redressal by a future demagogue of the opposite persuasion. Invoking the past is a surefire way of perpetuating atrociousness.
Finally, an eye for critical evaluation is not equivalent to an eye for creative imagination. It could even be argued that critiquing requires the diligent patience of an auditor while creativity requires the uninhibited voyages into the terra incognita of future possibilities. In 1915, Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity sitting in a patent office in Bern. Several dozen astronomers and astrophysicists then provided the first conclusive proof of the theory when a solar eclipse came along in 1919. This is how it should be in democratic polity too. Officials must exert their minds and imaginations for best acquitting their official responsibilities. And ordinary citizens must constantly probe their prescriptions for vulnerability or ineptitude. Officials should encourage and stimulate critical evaluations, so they are not blindsided by the law of unintended consequences.
Power has been shown, repeatedly, to be a desensitiser of self-awareness. Healthy democracies take the job of keeping elected officials on their toes seriously. And democratic societies that stifle critical voices must be mindful of Plato's insight, proven repeatedly in the real world, of the unfortunate propensity of democracies to morph into tyrannies.
This wisdom is often yoked to another- invoking precedent from the putative adversary, thus ensuring that no assessment of a present-day event is possible absent reparations for the original sin: “He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone".
This power trifecta is completed by a slam-dunk. “Do you have a better idea”? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Between these triple punches, it must seem that all dissenting voices will be stilled. Any adverse comment, having been added as a post scriptum to elegiac paeans, will be reduced to the metaphorical equivalent of Cindy Crawford’s mole.
The word “Democracy” a portmanteau of two Latin roots: demos (people) and kratos (power), points to the relationship between electors and the elected. The elected serve, and serve at, the pleasure of their electors. The power and badges of privilege they enjoy are not birth rights or entitlements; they are perquisites meant to facilitate the work enjoined upon them. While this is the formal democratic construct, its real-world manifestation is rather different, particularly when a particular elected official is repeatedly reelected into the same office, or, as is often the case, successively more powerful offices. The longer this streak continues, the more likely it is for the incumbent to start associating the power and badges with herself, the person, rather than her elected office. Interestingly, this metamorphosis is bilateral; the electors begin to posit the person at a higher plane of existence than the one they inhabit and frame the relationship in terms of their gratitude rather than the official’s accountabilities. Indeed, even when such officials begin utilising their authority coercively, electors don’t merely condone it; they applaud it as decisiveness and fortitude. Parallely, elected officials, having the bully pulpit of office at their disposal, can use it to stoke anxiety and fear, amplify voices calling for assigning larger and larger gobs of personal discretion to themselves, and stifle even the slightest querulous note.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a morality tale which reminds us of the very short path in elected office from humility to hubris. It makes pointed references to the shared culpability of the vast assembly of citizens in elevating one among their own into a plenipotentiary above them all. Democratic societies on every continent have elected strongmen into office over the last decade. In each instance, a vocal minority of electors, willingly provide an elaborate apologia for the excesses of their caesar and work in concert to drown out discordant voices.
With this, let us go back to the popular wisdom trifecta with which we began this essay. If you are a citizen of a democratic jurisdiction, you are a shareholder in the societal power which places people into elected office. This, in and of itself, gives you the right to express your views about elected officials: favourable, indifferent or unfavourable. In contemporary discourse, the implicit assumption is that the exercise of the right to vote is the sole opportunity for voicing opinion about those aspiring to office. Nothing can be further from the truth. The duration of appointment is not, and should never be, devoid of an ongoing feedback loop which conveys the ebbs and flows of public opinion to those in elected office. These feedback loops can take many forms. Social media allow anyone with a smartphone, a data connection and a Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Blogger etc. account, platforms to air their views. Regular news outlets such as newspapers, news broadcasters on TV. radio or digital media are collectively labelled "Fourth Estate" in acknowledgement of their role as the watchdog over the other three "estates"- legislature, judiciary and executive. In some countries, regular opinion surveys monitor citizens' approval or disapproval of their presidents, prime ministers or monarchs. The Gallup Presidential Approval Rating traks how Americans view their president, week after week. In India, we are used to local or state elections being described as referendums on national leadership, particularly when the state is ruled by the same political configuration as the centre.
A range of ideological alignments point to wide differences in views about the devolution of economic, social, cultural and administrative power across the society. I am not obligated to ever agree with a single prescription or policy direction of those in office; indeed, a vibrant, plural political discourse demands that such differences exist. The incorrigible sceptic is not anathema to democratic polity, she is its strongest pillar.
Politicians become adept at the arts of deception and deflection. It takes little imagination to rake up real, and often imagined, injustices committed by someone else in the past, as covering fire for behaving atrociously in the here and now. Today’s atrociousness can even be framed in terms of rebalancing the scales and writing wrongs. This sets the hapless electors up for an infinite regression of finding and fixing old iniquity and creating brand new inequity for redressal by a future demagogue of the opposite persuasion. Invoking the past is a surefire way of perpetuating atrociousness.
Finally, an eye for critical evaluation is not equivalent to an eye for creative imagination. It could even be argued that critiquing requires the diligent patience of an auditor while creativity requires the uninhibited voyages into the terra incognita of future possibilities. In 1915, Einstein came up with his General Theory of Relativity sitting in a patent office in Bern. Several dozen astronomers and astrophysicists then provided the first conclusive proof of the theory when a solar eclipse came along in 1919. This is how it should be in democratic polity too. Officials must exert their minds and imaginations for best acquitting their official responsibilities. And ordinary citizens must constantly probe their prescriptions for vulnerability or ineptitude. Officials should encourage and stimulate critical evaluations, so they are not blindsided by the law of unintended consequences.
Power has been shown, repeatedly, to be a desensitiser of self-awareness. Healthy democracies take the job of keeping elected officials on their toes seriously. And democratic societies that stifle critical voices must be mindful of Plato's insight, proven repeatedly in the real world, of the unfortunate propensity of democracies to morph into tyrannies.
