It Isn't Democracy, Just Boxes and Chairs

We're conditioned to hope and hate, forget and repeat... and live in a box designed by someone else's intention for us

I'm only a cynical bastard if what I say is mostly untrue. This isn't about exceptions such as activists, investigative journalists, real leaders and revolutions. This is about “everyday life” wherein we're frustrated at our shrinking living standards but still able to drink a beer on the weekend.

Politicians from the majors know where they stand with us. They must be nice to get allocated an office by their party. Then we're a nuisance to be tolerated the next four or five years. If they engage, we'll keep asking for more. So, it's better to speak in generalisations, and avoid us as much as possible until we're mentally exhausted into silence.

Unless it arrives with destruction, protest has as much chance of survival as a television news cycle.

But the politicians repetitively turn up for the Media to say something they know we want to hear. It makes no difference whether it's positive or negative, they just must resonate our too often uneducated opinion about the latest topic. They need us to know they exist so that we can forgive them before the next election.

We're conditioned to hope and hate, forget and repeat... and live in a box designed by someone else's intention for us.

I'm inside a 'pretty' box that feels real, taught to believe that everything outside is terrifying darkness. No matter how much my little-little box keeps shrinking-shrinking, I'm going to bend and squeeze to stay inside it... and never discover that inside is the lie, and everything outside is all that matters.

Constitutional democracy is more for the politicians than voters... which makes them fear other politicians more than us. There's always someone who wants their chair, or to fight them for the chair with the bigger cushion. From our viewpoint, them switching places doesn't change much. Different faces don't alter the nature of politics, only who builds the boxes.

We've little to do with who rules the DA or the ANC, or the Democrats and the Republicans, or Labour and the Tories. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Cyril Ramaphosa and their kind live in a world of chairs not boxes.

You're right if you pointed out that there's leeway at the bottom. At some point, they had to climb out of the box and onto the chair. It's more probable that someone lowered a ladder. No matter how they got there, ask yourself how many local politicians names you knew when they got elected in your backyard. And if they later got kicked out of Council for being a thief, was it because of Public action... or because another politician or their own party wanted their chair? And of all those thieves that lost their chairs, how many got sent to that box called jail?

There are too many useful idiots and not enough anarchists.

It isn't democracy, just fucking boxes and chairs.