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Sometimes, politics just don’t make sense and defy all logical reasoning and rational thinking. Just take a look at the political system of North Korea, for instance. People come to power in all sorts of ways, and often populism, ignorance and cultural values trump logic and rationality. Cees Bruggemans talks all things EFF in his latest offering for BizNews. From a party that has gone from 0% to 6% in electorate representation, the EFF is seemingly a force to be reckoned with – especially because it appeals to the working class (and often impoverished) masses. Sometimes sense is not always popular. – Tracey Ruff
By Cees Bruggemans
Results-driven policy statements need to make sense. For one wants to fully understand how the proposer hopes to get to his better life for all.
All rational people suffer from this efficiency syndrome. Let us see whether it adds up, where the pitfalls are, and then grade it like a school report, indicating what might work, what needs attention, what can be taken seriously, and what might be written off as whistling in the wind.
Requiring more effort before anything is truly taken seriously.
Fair enough. Many of us are trained this way. Our modernity seeks results and we naturally look for it in those governing us, or proposing to govern us.
However, such suppositions are serious liabilities when having to address what are clearly revolutionary radicalising forces in our midst. For they do not suffer from any such thinking, intentions or inclinations.
One thinks EFF & Julius, but not only them. The governing party at times starts to sound like this, too, having acted like it for years, yet this still often being lost on innocent audiences, trying to gather information and making “sense” of it all in their desperate result-seeking (and their own – shrinking – place within it).
The likes of Julius aren’t necessarily motivated to make nuts-and-bolts sense to a result-driven audience. They have only one mission: to make sense to the downtrodden, appeal to their sense of right & wrong (us vs them), sell them a new vision of what can be had (cutting through all of life’s difficulties to the essence of the desired outcome, where knitty-gritty does not in the least matter, but where the picture of outcomes very much does).
Let there be desired outcomes!!!!
There is therefore no future in analyzing such proposed policy platforms, for their reasoning does not matter an iota. Doesn’t make sense? Since when is that supposed to matter?
What matters is whether the castaway voters can identify with the proposed outcomes. The long wished for things finally coming into view.
For a party that went from zero to 6% of electorate representation in 2014, the next leap will again not be a matter of fine, coherent, logical reasoning, except to the extent that the main proposed outcomes match the desires of those wavering multitudes open to seeking promising new political homes.
We are talking ignorance here, but not ignorance of outcomes. Yes, that’s what we want, exactly that, and so long denied by now. And they sound so good, they clearly know what they are about.
Julius Malema
So they get out the vote, Jules & Floyd. That’s the next leap, to 12% in 2016, and 18% in 2019, as more and more of us come to recognise that the comradely visions are the thing we all want.
Even a child can identify with what is being proposed. Let’s have it, Jules, preferably in our lifetimes, for time is running short for many of us.
Rationality? That’s for bean counters & other small minds. It is the vision thing that counts for the radicalising electorate where reasoning is homemade, and ways & means don’t trouble anyone.
Populism. The ultimate shortcut to earthly heaven. The stuff of dreams & other past-times. Escapism from reality for the Masses. And there are masses of those.
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