The happenings of the political elite have an incredible habit of morphing into pieces of fiction. From the comedy of Yes Minister to the dark, sordid tales of one George R. R. Martin, this monstrous fiction morphs into one gargantuan sketch that repeatedly defies reality. How you believe a scenario should play out in a private setting is the opposite of how they play out within government institutions. The people are adjusted to a reality that is not real at all. Fakery is widespread, and applying the rules of reality to politics is simply unfeasible. This seems awfully coincidental.
The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is further embroiled in a premiership-threatening scandal involving his appointment of former U.S. Ambassador and Epstein bestie, Peter Mandelson, despite it being known he was close to Jeffrey Epstein before the appointment.
The former foreign office senior civil servant, Olly Robbins, testified in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee on April 21 wherein he stated that the government was heavily leaning on the vetting process to get Mandelson confirmed, even going so far as to say that the government had a “dismissive attitude” towards the vetting process. Starmer’s government evidently did not care what the process produced; they thirsted for Mandelson’s appointment, which is in line with previous arguments made by ministers in the infancy of this scandal who claimed the appointment was “worth the risk.” He also revealed that the prime minister’s team heavily pressured the government to find an ambassadorship for a disgraced Lord who campaigned for an individual that was found guilty of child sex crimes. However, Robbins being an establishment stooge seemed to show more disdain for the individual who leaked the information that snowballed the scandal with Mandelson rather than the system that allowed Mandelson to get the job, stating the individual or individuals who were involved should be prosecuted.
The news reads like an Agatha Christie novel with vast criminality, corruption, paranoia, and evil taking center stage. The most important people in the country, who can issue diktats at any moment that turn entire worlds upside down, are appointing deeply immoral friends to high positions, pressuring others to allow it to happen, and backtracking like scared children when the truth comes to light. However terrible this looks, and it doesn’t get much worse than appointing the friend of the most famous pedophile in the world to the highest diplomatic position in government, the sense of fiction and theatrics involved is intensely helpful to the state’s existence and its ability to sustain growth.
Read A Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings and you will find that you view the actions of characters differently to how you would if a person in the real world did the same thing. “It’s just the world they are in,” after all. Something similar applies to the real-world political realm because there is a manifestly different set of societal rules that are followed among those circles than by civilians. On a practical level, this means that politicians can freely break promises whenever they want, for almost any reason, and they will summon a chorus of supporters who justify it on “political” grounds. For example, the dodgy “sexed up” Iraq War dossier presented by Alistair Campbell that massively overstated the threat of the Hussein government contributed to the death and displacement of millions of people. Yet, Campbell can still host one of the most popular political podcasts in the United Kingdom. If a private citizen came forward to the police and gave deliberately exaggerated evidence that led to the wrongful imprisonment of an innocent person, they would be prosecuted and even end up in prison themselves. So the fact that Campbell uses the aura of the political world to squirm away from full societal castigation should show the real power of this fictitious reality.
Those with a libertarian or anarchist bent find these alternative realities feverish. The state takes your income and uses it for its own purposes. It does so under the threat of violence, with no opt-out and renames this process of legalized theft, taxation. Theft is transformed into charity. Except this charity gradually takes larger chunks of your pie, kills thousands of foreign people with it, burdens your life under a vast Gordion knot of red tape, thereby restricting your personal ceiling in life. It is easier to navigate the labyrinth than to find individuals, on a large scale, who recognize that this linguistic manipulation of theft is but one lynch pin in the structure that upholds this alternate reality. Therefore, it is allowed to remain in place. If I steal from my neighbor and tell the police that I did so because my neighbor is far richer and I needed my boiler fixing, watch as scowls of judgement and indignation layer the faces of observers. They are justified in doing so, but the absence of such scowls to similar actions in the political world is alarming.
Much has been made in recent times of two-tiers of justice. Yells ring out of “Two-Tier Keir” and these yells are accurate, but they limit the discussion to individuals and to individual governments. The entire system is grounded in two-tiers of justice because state actors are allowed to operate with far more flexibility within the ethical norms set out in the current legal environment than a regular citizen. Tell a story about how a private individual appoints a liaison to a different organization where it later comes out that the vetting process was rushed and pressured by the appointer. The consequences are the immediate removal of the liaison whilst the appointer is likely suspended immediately, pending investigation. Transform the appointer to the prime minister who suffers no immediate loss of power, may continue exercising power, and can even simply offer apology without any real repercussions barring a feigned promise to investigate how the appointment was allowed to happen. This is the reality of all political realms.
It’s an objective fact that wherever the state exists there are two different realities. The political reality is allowed to exist because its mythology infects every single pillar that holds it up. There are very few people who have experience living in a country without a state. People know nothing else, thus they believe the current state structure to be the norm and there is no recognition of these two tiers of reality. Academia serves to intellectually justify this political reality and the corporate press platforms these academics to spread word to the dwindling number of those who are political engaged. The politicians who live in this political reality benefit from its existence hence they do not question it and exacerbate it. The veil on this alternate reality needs lifting for the managed stagnation of western civilization to end.
