A Teacher Writes to Students Series (73): Hating Politics
A Teacher Writes to Students Series (73): Hating Politics Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former Professor, Department of Economics, SRCC, DU Suppose you are afflicted with political disaffection and you are wondering why there is expanded social reproduction of bad politicians indulging in nonsense and how good politicians can come into existence to take up…
A Teacher Writes to Students Series (73):Hating PoliticsAnnavajhula J C Bose, PhDFormer Professor, Department of Economics, SRCC, DUSuppose you are afflicted with political disaffection and you are wondering why there is expanded social reproduction of bad politicians indulging in nonsense and how good politicians can come into existence to take up the life-enhancing issues bothering the people and the planet. After all, how can there be implementation of good economics without there being good people-oriented politics in the first place?One way of understanding your political disaffection due to thepolitical incivilityproblem all over the world, is to draw on Hay (2007), who attributes it to public choice theory and neoliberalism you are exposed to in the classrooms. According to the public choice theory, politicians and public officials, like the rest of us, are necessarily “self interested rational utility maximisers”. This has come to colonise the way we think about everything from electoral competition to the behaviour of public servants and citizens. And this public choice theory has partnered neatly with the neo-liberal insistence that we should co-ordinate as much of social life as possible via the market’s invisible hand. The depoliticising effects of these mutually reinforcing assumptions, ideas and practices are the primary drivers of political disaffection. Be that as it may, how to get out of the murky politics everywhere is like falling into a political blackhole, which is like getting out of the rabbit hole inAlice in Wonderland. “The Rabbit represents the motif of frustrated desire. His antics inspire Alice to follow him down the hole and into Wonderland, but he constantly stays one step ahead of her. Led on by curiosity, Alice follows the elusive rabbit even though she does not know what she will do once she catches him. She pursues him out of pure curiosity but believes that catching him will give her some new knowledge or satisfaction. Even when the outcome is unknown, the act of chasing implies that a desired goal exists. ”Robert Reich is a great demystifying educator. He has some very important points to tell us, humorously though, about the nonsensical and nasty politics ruling the roost, and how to overcome it (Reich, 2017). “Anyone who watches the former U. S. Secretary of Labor and The Daily Show and CNBC commentator’s podcast, viewed on his Inequality Media website, has seen Reich’s informal lectures on student debt, social security, and gerrymandering, which he accompanies by quickly drawing cartoons to illustrate his major points. Collected here, for the first time, are short essays, edited from his presentations, and Reich’s clean-line, confident illustrations, created with a large sketchpad and magic marker. Economics in Wonderland clearly explains the consequences of the disastrous policies of global austerity with humour, insight, passion, and warmth, all of which are on vivid display in words and pictures. ”Reich wrote this book with comic spirit as a conveyor of progressive politics because “Young people today are much more visually acute than they were a generation ago. They pick up visual cues much faster. I think a lot of that comes from watching films, and videos, and the Internet. ”Just as Reich’s book is highly recommended to econ students to get the bitchy political world demystified, so also Lewis Carroll’s book,Alice in Wonderland, is recommended “for any budding economist” as “it reveals to the reader a strange world that is and is not ours. It prepares for them recognising the unfamiliar and strange amongst the familiar and it is often the strange and unfamiliar that make seemingly inexplicable behaviour explicable. Conventional or bad economists are unable to see beyond the fog that is the received economic wisdom. This is why these economists were unable to see the financial crash of 2008 looming in front of them, when all the danger signals were showing red. ”One explanation I have found brilliantly interesting as to why bad politicians abound is from the great Professor Richard Murphy of the Sheffield University Management School:“… all modern politicians are simply and straightforwardly junkies…I’m not accusing them of taking illicit substances or even illegal substances. I’m accusing them of being addicted to dopamine hits. Dopamine is the natural substance that we release within our bodies when we have a high. That high can come from eating a chocolate. It can come from the greeting from a friend, or being told we’ve done well, or in my case, it could come if you click the subscribe button and the like button for this video because that would make me happy, which probably is the worst ever link to such a request in the history of YouTube. But the point is that dopamine is the thing that makes us feel happy in the short term. And I have a very strong feeling that most politicians, now serving their countries, are only in the game for a dopamine hit…What they want is the dopamine hit from winning. And winning is all that matters to them. They are desperate to get into office just to say. I won, but they don’t know why they wanted to win and, in that sense, their goal of winning is as hopeless as the goal of making a profit is for a business, or the goal of being happy that many people say that they have in their personal lives. Each of these is, in effect, an epiphenomenon. An epiphenomenon is a byproduct of something else. The dopamine hit from winning an election comes on the night that the result is announced. The dopamine hit from maximising profit comes from when a profit is reported to the press, and happiness, well, what is happiness? You can’t actually pick it up, or see it. You can feel it, but it never comes as a package in its own right. It always comes as a consequence of something else. And it’s that something else that really is important, and that’s just as true for politics. In politics, it’s what delivers the dopamine hit to the politician that matters. I don’t mind them being dopamine junkies, if that’s what they are, if they are also seeking to understand what gives them the hit. If they got their hit from reducing child poverty, I wouldn’t mind them being high when they can announce that they’ve succeeded in that goal. If they get it, by putting people to work, or by delivering sustainability, or by improving the quality of a child’s education – I mean a real education, not just exam results – then again, I wouldn’t mind if they had the dopamine hit, because the dopamine hit would then be the epiphenomenon of something well done. But the trouble is, our politicians are dedicated to dopamine hits that come from simply stabbing their enemies in the back. Is that all it’s really about? That, plus the little news slot that he might get each night which makes him feel happy that he is supposedly setting the agenda, although what for and why, no one knows. This is really worrying. There is no substance to create the dopamine. There’s just the media hit at the end of the day when it comes to most of these politicians, and media hits don’t count. People don’t care about their politicians getting media hits. In fact, they’d rather their politicians didn’t get media hits when they’ve got nothing to say because most people are pretty bored by politicians who do have nothing to say. What they want to hear is that the politician has something good to report. That is truly justifying their presence on our screens. And that so rarely happens that we have to come down to this idea that the politician is only in this game for the dopamine hit and nothing else. The short-term, easy win that gets them a headline is all it’s about now. And that has hollowed out politics to the point where it is simply not delivering for the people. The politician has stopped trying to understand what it is – what the real matter of substance is – that will deliver the epiphenomenon of the dopamine hit and simply goes for the hit in itself, which the media provides. And until we can persuade politicians to go back and deliver substance and not just a temporary high for them and no one else, then politics is not going to answer any question that our society poses of it. ”As to how good politicians can emerge into the political class, read the case study from Pakistan mentioned in the references below (the second one). This rekindles hope against hope. Watch:https://www. docsville. com/politics-1/videos/how-the-world-went-madRead:https://www. amazon. com/Why-We-Get-Wrong-Politicians/dp/1782399755Do you think that it is possible that “citizens can distinguish between issue-related conflict and uncivil personal interactions, implying that it is possible to maintain high public trust, satisfaction in a democracy, and policy compliance with fierce political competition, as long as it remains issue-based and civil”?ReferencesColin Hay. 2007. Why We Hate Politics. Polity. Gulzar, S and M Y Khan (2024), “Good Politicians: Experimental Evidence on Motivations for Political Candidacy and Government Performance”, The Review of Economic Studieshttps://doi. org/10. 1093/restud/rdae026https://angrytunbridgewells. com/2017/06/19/alice-in-wonderland-economics/https://www. npr. org/2017/11/12/561222216/robert-reich-shows-off-his-cartooning-skills-in-economics-in-wonderlandhttps://www. youtube. com/watch?v=B0osc88WDZ0&t=331shttps://www. sparknotes. com/lit/alice/section1/https://ajps. org/2024/08/12/when-politicians-behave-badly-political-democratic-and-social-consequences-of-political-incivility/Robert Reich. 2017. Economics in Wonderland. Fantagraphics. This entry was posted on July 27, 2026 at 11:52 am and is filed underA Teacher Writes to Students. You can follow any responses to this entry through theRSS 2. 0feed. You canleave a response, ortrackbackfrom your own site.