Power Of The Powerless 

By Sarath de Alwis –

Sarath de Alwis

If you think nothing will change, then do not bother to read this essay. We control our future with what we chose now. If you think nothing will change, indeed nothing will change. The absence of resolve, the presumption of the impossibility to make a change is self-fulfilling. 

Powerlessness can be transformed into a force capable of achieving justice. History does not teach fatalism.

There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens new roads. We can make 5th August such a pivotal moment. 

The success of the political class to perpetuate itself, mired in corruption and incompetence is because of the willingness of people to willfully disbelieve what they know to be true. They are ready to bearhug the brazen untruth, because it is so bloody convenient. 

In about ten days, on 5th August the powerless will speak to power. It will be a momentary tryst the powerless will have with the self-perpetuating political class. 

Every four or five years, the powerless go through this cycle of hope followed by disaffection. We call it representative democracy. 

The Italian writer Giuseppe Prezzolini who presciently saw the rise of Mussolini and authoritarian tyranny in his land attributed his lands misfortune to the backroom deals amongst counterfeit democratic contenders who were subverting democracy. He said it for all time. 

“Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.”

The Chili powder thrower, the ultra-nationalist with dual identity gaming the Midas touch when the revolution is abandoned in favor of tribal roots, the bloke who sleep walked in to a sea side penthouse leased by this  wifey, the four times prime minister who has known Adam Smith from the time of Adam are all part of this artifice and the myth that we call representative competitive democracy. 

They all thrive on the hocus pocus that sovereignty lies with ‘we the people’. They all hope to be back in business in the first week of September by the grace of the sovereignty of the people.  

Why do we fall into this trap election after election?  

In his celebrated discourse – ‘The republic’, Plato describes how voters manage to elect the incompetent and the self-seeking. 

“Imagine yourself in a ship. There is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew. The crew (that is the voters) don’t know that the man is a wee bit deaf and is also shortsighted. Plato argues that the crew – the voters are dazzled by the man’s appearances assuming that his relative height could mean that he is a better navigator. Plato’s allegory holds a lesson. The average voter does not possess the rational faculties or the adequate knowledge to elect competent rulers.  

The controversy over the demolition of the so-called royal audience hall of King Buvanekabahu in Kurunegala is a jaw dropping demonstration of the puerile politics that passes for sublime state craft. 

Nobody has bothered to ask why this pristine ‘Versailles’ of Buvenekabahu was leased out to a private party to run a roadside eatery. In the midst of the melee, the Prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa discovered that the king of Kurunegala had a Muslim concubine. 

When I listened to the former President, current Prime minister and redeemer who ended the war mumbling about the Muslim princess in the harem of an obscure monarch, I could only weep for him recalling the apt words of Gore Vidal the reclusive iconoclast. 

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.” 

The farcical  exchange over the council chamber of king Buvanekabahu amidst a national election constrained by a pandemic is an indicator of the impudence and imprudence of those now in power demanding a two thirds majority to shape their own ‘council chamber’ and determine the composition and complexion of their concubines. 

Last night I watched Minister Johnston Fernando who apart from distilling spirits seems to know to locate the distilled essence of 13th century Sri Lankan architecture. I also discovered that Prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa in addition to his many achievements is an authority on the cultural plurality practiced in the harem of King Buvanekabahu. 

In a sense the disarming nonchalance displayed by both Johnston Fernando and the Premier is a revealing guide of the morality or its absence in our politics. 

The national heritage site has earned many labels – a brothel a bar room or a roadside inn. The debate in the heat of a general election has turned out to be a funny kind of a moral triumph for the perverted mind.

A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame has been outraged, and by threatening the occupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.

We are a nation state with a dysfunctional democracy. Our people are largely apathetic to corruption and transgressions by the ruling clique. Mesmerized by mass consumerism we simply don’t care to find out how and why the government keeps on printing paper money. We have become a society that has put its collective conscience in cold storage. 

I have borrowed the caption “The Power of the Powerless” from the same title of a seminal paper by the Czech playwriter, philosopher and four term President Václav Havel. 

It was meant to be a discussion paper for Polish and Czechoslovak dissidents about power and freedom. 

“The Power of the Powerless” was a seminal tract that challenged the foundational fallacies or miscalculations of doctrinaire Marxism and stampeding unchecked capitalism. In it the irrepressible Vaclav Havel the  playwright with a sharp sense for poignancy uses an anecdote of a ‘shop keeper’. Behind the window of his  small food stall, he places a sign that simply states “ Workers of the world, unite!” 

It is the phrase that Karl Marx used in his Communist Manifesto to call workers for a revolution that would destroy Capitalism.

Why does he do it? He is a small-time shop keeper. What does it matter if the workers of the world unite or devoured each other?  Which is what the workers usually do when led by aimless idiots. 

He puts  up the sign with the  slogan because everyone else has put up the sign. If he didn’t put it up he feels that he could get in to trouble. The shopkeeper does not have a choice in putting up the sign. He must declare his obedience and loyalty to the State, or he will suffer.

Vaclav Havel’s shop keeper tells us the difference of the oxygen we breathe after the last presidential election in our own land.

It tells us that a sense of fear perceived or real can force ordinary people to lie to themselves. Everybody wants a ‘strong leader.’ That is how people manipulate themselves in to declaring loyalty or express admiration for a regime that is rotten in its core with blatant nepotism and tasteless tribalism. 

Why is this state so rotten? Havel’s reasons resonate with what we experience here and  now. The individual is completely degraded with a collusive media depriving people of vital contemporary information. There is a markedly meticulous undercurrent that discourages free expression. The atmosphere stifles independent thought. The state is constantly engaged in finetuning power to manipulate the collective will of the citizenry.     

The “Power of the powerless” focuses on the quiet intrusion of an intimidatory state diminishing the individual and redefining the common good. 

Havel tells us that we must view our role in relation to others in our common predicament. 

We must create a better economic and political order. If we are to do that, we must stop trying to transform politicians. Instead we should transform ourselves. 

That transformation can come only through a profound existential and moral transformation of our society. The politician we elect is the mirror image of the we the people. If he is slimy and slippery, we must ask ourselves how slimy and slippery are we?

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