5 August 2008

It is a fair question: why do Politicians want the job?  The canned answer is that they want to make their country or community a better place in which to live, based on their interpretation of what's better.  Generally that doesn't last long because an incoming pol realizes very quickly that there is great competition for the priviledge of defining what's better - and for whom.

So let's change the question: what kind of people want to become politicians?  I contend that potential pols have to love attention and aspire to be a part of it.  They like to be fawned over, appreciated, feted and admired.  Fame matters.  But we all know fame fades, and even can become an unpleasant burden; what then?  Well, the reason fame matters - appreciation, admiration - is that it creates presumption of worth, and worth needs to be adequately compensated, because those who have fame deserve it; they are special people.  And that's generally where corruption comes in - essentially it's because they deserve it.  They are smarter, more knowledgable, more in the know - and they deserve to be allowed to exercise the power they expect to be able to wield - because...they deserve it.  Politician is a high, high ego position, and with all this deserving there ought to be outward signs, right?  Success in our culture is demonstrated best by money or the appearance thereof.  And successful people help their friends because their friends always deserve it since they are also special people, and because somehow money moves around.

In politics altruism dies quickly because with increased exposure to people it becomes more and more difficult to define; all have their own definitions of what altruism entails, and it usually centers around them  - they all deserve it.  So what?  It is helpful to realize what goes into the makeup of a politician and to take that into consideration when listening to him pontificate, preen, promise and cajole, and to understand that all the rest is, after all, human nature.