Politics: Power and Beauty

I NEVER really took time to look at him. But those who did said he was a particularly good looking young lad. He was the talk of the university and girls threw themselves at him. Very easily, he won the title of Mr UZ in the annual pageant. I hung around with a bunch of nerds that believed that the beauty of any person is in their brains, and this famous fellow was not mentionable in brainy circles. I was part of the dirty mob that sang such slogans as “we drink daily and pass annually.” Unlike us, Mr UZ was the type of guy that would take several minutes in front of a mirror, turning and twisting to check if every bit of him was in its place. To his credit, he had a pleasant and polite personality. That way he was impossible to ignore. He carried himself like a true celebrity, going around wearing that “can you see me look” on campus. He was bound to make the mistake that all celebrities make, which is to allow fame to get into one’s head and lead him to tragic decisions. He made his tragic decision during the orientation week when new students, fresh from high school, were trafficking into the university with excitement and gusto. As a public figure of some quantity, Mr UZ was asked to address a hall full of students on the subject of HIV and Aids on campus. Even as he delivered the sobering news about the deadly disease his audience could not stop clapping and screaming, especially the girls. One never witnesses so much applause for such bad and sad news. Mr UZ was not even an orator, his was the Denzel Washington looks and nothing more; and he knew it. The resident orators were seated down impatiently waiting their turn to harangue the audience with speeches that were called “adumbrations” for their verbose and militant pretensions. Most of our speaking at UZ was more for the sound than the sense.

In the thickness of the excitement, Mr UZ dropped the suicidal bomb: “Just so that you know, I will be running for the post of the SRC president, this year.” Even more applause exploded. But the politicians were not impressed. Consequences were going to come Mr UZ’s way that night. The following morning every building in the university had a poster with a long message that had the topic: “Politics is not a Beauty Pageant.” The cadres had seen that Mr UZ was trying to use his looks to smuggle himself into power on campus. He wanted to translate his fame on the ramp into popularity on the political podium. His message on the dangers of disease on campus were not exactly social responsibility but some public relations gimmick to sell himself as a responsible and caring political leader. When the elections came at the end of the year Mr UZ had been muddied. If I remember well he garnered one vote, which must have been cast by him. There was a joke that even his campaign managers and girlfriend did not vote for him. A good 25 campaign managers, fully paid, he had. That is what a thankless game politics at many levels can be.

The Will to Power

The anecdote of Mr UZ helps this article simply as a metaphor of how politics at many levels has become a dirty game that has become a preserve and a monopoly of the ugly. In my maturity I think Mr UZ was going to make a great leader that valued his social responsibilities. The scoundrels that eventually took over, or colonised student leadership, emptied the union coffers. Looting is what they did. At UZ political office became a province of the hooligans that we were. It was true student politics in two senses: we were students, and were also immature, learning the art and science of leadership, even if we called ourselves revolutionaries.

The example of student politics is minute. Politics at a world scale was far long ago been captured by the hooligan spirit of the dirty, ugly and dangerous. The political arena became a hard hat area where social responsibility and ethics became a liability. Friedrich Nietzsche, that German nihilist philosopher, demonstrated the nihilism of politics as “the Will to Power” in a treatise by the same title. In Nietzsche’s celebration of conquest, power and domination in 1901, are described the maddening desires and fears that drive the human passions for power. Appetite for power grows into insanity. After reading Nietzsche’s exposition for the first time I concluded that most tyrants of the world have been weak and vulnerable individuals who do not really love power but fear weakness and powerlessness. Deep inside such figures as Hitler himself was a terrified little boy that was crying for love and protection from the world. Fear, weakness and fragility might be the actual stuff of the tyrants. Their strength, hardihood and cruelty are performances that are deployed to hide their fear. In actuality, war and violence are a weapon of the weak, fearful and vulnerable. Not that madness is an excuse for evil but such people as Hitler and other tyrants of the world might be people that needed help in form of healing and rehabilitation. Machiavelli did reflect on the problematic of princes that come to power through their crimes and evil. Such princes, even if they are not princely, are more of patients than anything. They tend to have no other means of engagement than resort to evil. They needed to be protected from themselves before people were protected from them.

The Will to Live

There is another politics. Power can be beautiful and glorious. The nihilism of the Will to Power takes glory away from power and leaves it beastly and ugly. Chief amongst the philosophers of liberation in the Global South, Enrique Dussel condemned the idea of politics as war. Diametrically opposed to Nietzsche, Dussel proposed the politics of the Will to Live that rejects the paradigm of war. Politicians have to be opponents and competitors but they don’t necessarily have to be enemies. Political opponents, opined Chantal Mouffe, can be adversaries without being enemies. It is a central thesis of the philosophy of liberation that power has to go and come with glory or else it becomes domination. The world over, politicians in the left and the right side of the ideological divide have been bought and sold to the Will to Power that believes politics to be a necessarily dirty game. Power can be exercised with art, science and above all beauty. The “fetishism of power” that Dussel condemns is the political idolatry of political nihilists that make themselves gods on earth. Fetishism of power has no humility as politicians in the left and the right; begin to forget to humble themselves before their populations and nations. “Obediential” politics is that which loves and fears the people and its primary objective is the “will to live,” to preserve dignity and lives of human beings.

Partisan and personal political fights, the world over, degenerate into crises and populations pay the price. To be a politician has become the art of being trumpy, self-righteous, and not able to admit failure and mistakes. The will to power has pride and arrogance, it is blind to its evil and failures, and distributes blame to others and never to the self. The failure by politicians to critique and humble themselves and to listen to critics has been the root of fundamentalism at a world scale. The humility to learn from mistakes and to listen to dissent is the beginning of political wisdom and the Will to Live. In that way, politics can be powerful, glorious and beautiful. It is a myth that to be a politician is to be a trickster or a monster; people can be led through obediential power. The Zapatista of Chiapas in Mexico say “we command while obeying” and “lead by following.”