Politicians as Tabulae Rasae of Power

Kamala Harris reimagined as Lara Croft, by CaseyColton on DeviantArt; CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

John Locke argued way back in the 17th century that humans are born “blank slates” — tabulae rasae in Latin — such that everything we come to believe and think is conditioned, after birth, by those we interact with. The theory makes some sense, but I think it overlooks the role that our biology plays in our conditioning. It is, I believe, the combination of biological conditioning and cultural conditioning, given the unpredictable circumstances of the moment, that determines our behaviours — what we say and what we do.

The concept of tabula rasa drew my attention recently when I listened to speeches by several US political leaders. What really surprised me was the utter inconsistency of their positions and arguments, not only over extended periods of time but even from week to week. The press loves to point out these inconsistencies, punctuated with ’embarrassing’ sound bites from their archives, but the politicians and their supporters seem completely undisturbed by these inconsistencies and sometimes outright contradictions.

It’s as if “that was then, this is now”, and what the politician said four years ago, or even last week, is of no consequence. We can be cynical and say all politicians lie and say different things to different groups at different times just to get elected, but that doesn’t account for why their audiences don’t seem to balk at the blatant contradictions. Are politicians really that shallow that they’ll read anything on their cue cards, as long as it brings them applause? And are citizens so dumb that they’ll believe a politician espousing to believe something today that they said they utterly opposed in a speech they gave last year?

If you’ve read some of the history of Trump, you’ll know that he was apparently horrifically abused by his father, that he has perpetuated similar abuse in his treatment of his dysfunctional family, that he has a ferocious and uncontrollable temper, and that he is always quick to utter racist, sexist, xenophobic and misogynous remarks to deflect and assign blame to others rather than accept any responsibility himself. He is, in short, a seriously damaged man, and now that he’s showing signs of forgetfulness and early-stage dementia, his behaviour will potentially become even more extreme.

So why has he become so popular, despite this behaviour? I would argue that it’s because he’s willing to say anything, in any tone of voice, that he thinks voters want to hear, and because, paradoxically, voters who like what he says are more than willing to overlook that he said the exact opposite four years ago, or last week, to another audience, because that was what that audience wanted to hear.

Trump is and always has been, I would argue, desperate for the approval from the public that he was always denied growing up. He has been told he is, and most likely fears he is, and in many ways has become, a complete failure — he is, for example, the most unsuccessful businessman in the history of human civilization, as has been documented even without full access to his tax records. As a result, he will do and say anything for approval. He doesn’t care about disapproval levels — he can write them off as jealous or stupid or “failures”, as he often does with detractors. He just wants, desperately, a ‘core’ of people who will cheer, reliably, whenever he says or does anything.

To some extent, that is now what political machines, and corporations, at least in the west, have inevitably been grooming and promoting to the top — wildly insecure, traumatized people who are willing to tell the public anything, including lies and contradictions, as long as it gives them approval from their ‘handlers’ and from some fervid segment of the public. This is as prevalent in the corporate world as it is in the political sphere. Elon (“we’ll coup whoever we want”) Musk (who might soon surpass Trump as the biggest business failure ever) even bought a multi-billion-dollar social media business (essentially with other people’s money) just to give himself an endless supply of milk-able “likes”.

When I look at all the current leaders of major western political parties and corporations, and at what they have said at various times in their ‘careers’, they all seem to come across as tabulae rasae. They all want approval, to be liked, to be popular. They are all seriously fucked-up people.

Most importantly, these sad, fake ‘leaders’ want approval from people who have power. Political party machines have power. Big corporations and their oligopolies and lobby groups have power. The military and ‘defence’ industries have power. The criminals that run the construction and housing industries in most countries have power. AIPAC has power. The police have power. The church has power. If any of these groups promise approval to one of these sad figures who’ve been desperate for approval all their lives, they’ll say and do anything they’re told to say and do, just to get that approval. There’s a very sad reason Trump agreed to speak to the Black journalists’ conference.

So we end up with Blair and May and Johnson and Sunak and now Starmer in the UK, all indistinguishable from each other in their positions and platforms, because they all bow to power and approval from the same power bases. Likewise Harper and Trudeau in Canada, and Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden in the US. None of them did what they promised to do, yet most of them were re-elected promising more of the same. Hard to know which is more frustrating — the parade of cardboard cutouts with different faces and talking points that all perpetuate the same agenda, or the citizens who keep falling, over and over, for their earnest deceptions.

So now we have Kamala Harris stepping into the fray. Yet another different face with well-scripted talking points, but who, despite never having been much in the limelight, already has a long record of hypocrisy, obfuscation, and flip-flopping on many issues. And yet the citizenry is cheering wildly as she says, in one speech, that she wants to see an immediate cease-fire in Gaza (later qualifying about it being only ‘temporary’), and then the next day espouses unqualified support for continuing and escalating the genocide in Palestine by the deranged Israeli government.

Harris is about as far from a ‘progressive’ as one can get, but a lot of people are so desperate to believe ‘anyone but Trump’ that they will apparently believe anyone saying anything, even when she says the opposite tomorrow. I suppose we’ve been groomed by the righteous, meaningless ‘progressive’ speeches of Sanders and AOC to accept that it’s all just talk, anyway. It doesn’t mean anything. We’d like this, they say, but we all know it ain’t gonna happen.

Here’s an interesting analysis (starts at 52:30) in which civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis and host Briahna Joy Gray actually describe how Tabula Rasa politicians, including Harris, actually operate. Alec summarizes:

If they were from Alabama or Mississippi they’d be Republicans. They are empty vessels. Most of the people who succeed in our political system are not speaking from moral conviction. They are responsive to power. Whoever [gives them support and approval], they are beholden to. That’s why it’s a bad political strategy to be enamoured with any politician. [Instead, what makes sense is to] figure out what policies you want to see enacted and then organize — build power — so that whoever’s in office has to listen to you.

This is not to suggest that there is some unified, organized clique that is pulling all the strings in western governments. Our political ‘leaders’ aren’t members of a cabal, they are just tabulae rasae who will say whatever gets them approval from those who have power.

And there’s no cabal of people in power either — political and economic power shifts constantly and it is frequently competitive (oligopoly and oligarchy only gets you so far). The revolving door assures the losing politicians that they will be supported by business and other power leaders with cushy jobs when they lose, and supported back into government when the new incumbents lose political favour in turn. These cardboard cutout ‘leaders’ are just conditioned tools of the system, caught up in it like everyone else.

It’s the same in business. Many large corporations now have token women and token people of colour as their ‘leaders’, but those leaders themselves have no power, they just do what those with the actual power (the controlling shareholders) tell them to do. And if these ‘leaders’ dare demonstrate independent thinking that might challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, their career is over, on both sides of the revolving door. (I’ve seen it happen, and it isn’t pretty.)

There’s no conspiracy here. Certain people aspire to power because they have been pathologically conditioned to endlessly crave approval, praise and attention. They are willing to strike any kind of bargain to get it. The people who have obtained such power, whether from such devil’s bargains, or cronyism, or corporate corruption, or inherited wealth and position, are conditioned to do what they must to retain it and to deploy it, including finding and installing appropriate tabula rasa cardboard cutout ‘leaders’ to do what those in power tell them to do.

When you have a civilization that only pretends to listen to its citizens, which has grown to the point it’s become massively dysfunctional, and which is infested with trauma, and is running out of the resources needed to sustain it, it’s no surprise that it’s all falling apart.

The real question is not how ‘leadership’ and power have become so destructive and so awful. Rather, it’s why the citizenry still puts up with the four horsemen: Corporatism, Imperialism, Propaganda and Incompetence, when they never receive any benefits in return for their support and approval. Eventually even Propaganda’s overworked horse pulls up lame.

My answer in recent years has been that we are simply no longer capable of imagining any alternative. We have no knowledge of history to know that it hasn’t always been like this. And, having never exercised our imaginations (thanks largely to Hollywood), we have no capacity to imagine a future that isn’t like this, only more so. Or maybe, these days, inevitably less so.

So we put up with it. Like our pathetic ‘leaders’, that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do. That’s why we vote for people who offer us promises, hope, and prayers. That’s all they have left to offer.