PROBLEMS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Politics is a matter that is of interest to everyone because our lives are directly affected by it. The way politics and its outcomes are structured determines the accessibility, effectiveness and efficiency of genuine knowledge production, which is ultimately the goal of our being. Therefore, it is natural that politics is a topic of popular discussion at all levels of society. It must be emphasised that this is necessary and desirable. Popular political discourses and discussions do foster scrutiny of the political system. However, they can also produce unproductive results and, at times, even be harmful to political and societal progression. In contemporary democratic systems, we can see that the content and moderation of political discussions are structured in a way that serves certain interests but neglects the progression of society as a whole. First of all, the reliance on political parties as actors that carry out the functions of government puts them in a position of discursive leadership. Being ideologically limited to a certain scope and vested with deeply rooted organisational interests, political parties influence political discourse negatively. Second, the economic system, which is based on normatively unanchored capitalism, vests affluent actors with exponentially higher discursive resources which are then used to emphasise profit maximisation, even in situations that would go against societal interests. Third, the normative goal displacement within contemporary democratic systems, meaning the concentration on power and wealth instead of genuine knowledge production, pushes political actors to shape political discourse in the light of those two subordinate political goals. Here, those layers are examined in light of their current damage and what the ideal state of political discourse would look like.

Political Party Discourse

When it comes to any aspect of political parties, we have to always remember that in any group of people that comes together under a common guiding theme, a unique organisational character and interest evolves and solidifies over time. Regardless of whether this is a sports team, religious movement, nation or family, every group develops a distinct organisational interest. Political parties are built on a few guiding principles and the belief that those principles are sufficient to produce societally beneficial policy outcomes. Mathematically, this approach guarantees the decay of any nation. Since political parties exclude other important principles, approaches and societal groups categorically, no party can act in the full and exclusive interest of the nation it is in. Further, there is usually more than one political party within one nation claiming to be the best to run the respective government. Even if we ignore the aforementioned fact and assume that one political party truly represents the national interests fully, it must inevitably mean that all other parties are unsuitable to run the government, making them obsolete in the first place. Hence, it follows that political parties not only develop a distinct organisational interest but also proactively work to further this interest at the expense of the nation.

In the context of political discourse, this is most obvious when political parties campaign before elections. In essence, campaigning is advertising to sell a service. Although it has become common practice in contemporary political systems, campaigning ranks among the most undemocratic practices there are. The core idea of democracies is the sovereign participation of the general public in politics. Leaving aside the fact that placing a cross on a sheet of paper every couple of years is not an act of sovereignty or even participation, campaigning of political parties implies that contemporary democratic systems are irrational. Utilising slogans, advertisement videos, rhetorically well-crafted speeches and other channels to transmit emotion-laden messages instead of fostering technical and rational discourse, campaigning corrodes the main idea of sovereignty and joint societal progress. The discourse is unidirectional as political parties use their campaigns to achieve an effect at the end of the receiver of the message, the citizen. On the other hand, the citizen has a negligible impact on political discourse in the context of political campaigns. This means, in principle, that parties work against society to achieve their organisational interests. The citizen is the victim of persuasion and merely selects between actors that he finds most appealing in their attempts to convince him. From a discursive perspective, the worst dimension of this problem is that political party campaigns are purely emotional. They are fully designed to appeal to the emotions of citizens, and good decisions, as commonly known, can never be made under the influence of strong emotions.

Surely, the ideal solution is the abolition of political parties altogether, as devletist political systems suggest. This does not mean that the common citizen should now wait for states to become devletist. At the individual level, citizens can apply different discursive methods to exert pressure on political parties. First, they can reduce the consumption of party media. As modern channels of influence are expanding, citizens have more means of punishing parties with ignorance. Second, non-party discourse can be expanded by fostering political discussions and exchanges in decentralised venues and networks. Instead of relying on controlled platforms to inform citizens about politics and giving political parties managed exposure, independent magazines, television channels and social media platforms can be used to really discuss issues and not merely react to them. Third, and obviously the most effective approach, is the full boycott of political party elections. Rather, citizens should cast their votes for independent candidates who run for government offices. Via a simple supply/demand logic, citizens can steer their state away from relying on political parties to run the government.

Political Discourse In The Economy

Economic actors are engaging differently in political discourse. Here, the participation and guidance of the discourse show more variance in content but are subject to a similar overarching logic. Beginning with the logic, there are individual interests of economic actors at play that inform discursive behaviour. Each economic actor has personal interests, which are often organisational interests as influential economic actors are mostly companies or economic organisations. They are driven by the desire to maximise their profits. On the playing field of normatively unanchored capitalism, there are many ways to increase profits. For example, advertising is one way to increase consumption in the economy, and the increased consumption correlates with higher profits. Investing in financial instruments also increases profits. Consumption-driven profit maximisation can be divided into two categories. The first is consumption, which is based on goods and services that are almost necessities. A fridge is not really necessary, but it enhances our lives to such a degree that not owning it would impair our functioning massively at many different levels. Demand for such goods and services is limited, and, therefore, such consumption emerges through the need for replacement and further development. Except for the constant development and balance of lifetime for those goods, companies can do little to influence the demand for them. The second category is structured around needs. An expensive watch is not a necessity and does not influence our lives to such a positive extent that a high price is warranted. It is also not a good thing that needs to be replaced frequently. Yet, the demand for such goods remains high and is increasing. The reason for that is that companies can engage in a variety of activities to create the perception of necessity for those goods and services. This means that through exerting influence on the buyer, companies can make them want something. Advertising is one common method of doing so and it can assume many different manipulative forms. In the context of political discourse, however, there is a way of indirectly influencing demand for the consumption of goods and services that are not essential to living and genuine knowledge production. It is by influencing the norms and values of a society.

Social media is the best example of such a strategy. By promoting emotionally driven and easily digestible content, the attention span of consumers is reduced, and their assessment standards of value and valuelessness are impaired. The content on those platforms suggests quick and easy access to lavish lifestyles with little work. Also, the accessibility of nudity, which triggers biological instincts, reduces our reliance on rationality and increases our emotion-driven decisionmaking. Consumers become more superficial in their perception of what is desirable and undesirable and base their economic decisions on those impaired assessments. Other entertainment industries, such as music and cinema, can be considered here as well. It is not necessarily the case that those industries are mere vehicles, as they also gain from increased profits by producing worthless content. However, other economic actors and emotion-driven political systems also benefit from the decline in values and are expected to be greatly interested in promoting the continued production of such content. By guiding consumer preferences to easily processible and emotion-based content, the standards of measurement for politics also decline. It aids the emotion-laden approach by political parties. Moreover, politics itself needs to produce less complex and productive outputs, making the whole field a rather transactional rather than sustainable one. Economic actors, hence, fulfill an important role within political discourse. They reduce the discursive standards in various aspects of societal life to reproduce demand for unnecessary goods and services. This, in turn, has a spillover effect on politics. The demand for less valuable and more superficial goods and services reduces expectations of policymaking to ensure that consumption of those goods and services is still granted. Political discourse in itself becomes more superficial due to the adaptation of our perspective to those perspectives we are infused with from those profit-seeking economic actors.

Again, our conscious consumption decisions will determine the further development of those abovementioned processes. It is surely quite difficult to extract which content is really consumed because we have a personal preference for it or because we just consume it because it has been promoted so well. Then again, it is very difficult to get away from the overload of low-quality content. The best way to regain control over our consumption decisions is to reflect on what the reasons for our consumption preferences are. How are we engaging with societal content? How can we explain our consumption decisions? In the realm of political discourse, we would ask ourselves how our political views came into existence. Are they shaped by our own cognitive work? How can we explain those views structurally? Or are we merely reproducing views that, if they are supported, would enrich other actors more than ourselves?

Structural Political Discourse

As already briefly touched upon above, power and wealth do play an important role in how we assess politics and engage in political discourse. Power and wealth are dependent on the existence of other actors to assess their value. Whether a nation is powerful or not is assessed in the light of the power capacities of at least one other nation. The same holds true for wealth. As contemporary democratic systems, as well as most other political systems in history, are based on those two material goals, political discourse, unfortunately, happens within the borders of those two concepts. Generally, popular political discourse is focused on assessing a nation's power towards other nations and its intrasocietal and intersocietal wealth. For example, a government is often viewed as successful when it can impose desired behaviour on other nations. More prominent, however, is the assessment that a government is successful when the population of a nation is living with high material comfort. Even more so is this perception of wealth bolstered when other nations lack this standard of living. Whether this power or wealth is achieved by the oppression and exploitation of other nations is often secondary. Because the measurements of success are limited to those material aspects of politics, the results of policymaking must be, so the perspective, tangible and mentally accessible at all times. Aspects of sustainability, innovation and progression are not accounted for. This leads political discourse to be extremely short-sighted. Policies need to produce tangible results immediately, and they need to produce exclusive value to their own society, even at the expense of others. Another side effect of this is that political discourse in such limited political systems does not require much technical knowledge on the subject matters, as the chain of logic is very short. A policy is implemented, and it needs to immediately result in more power or capital for the own nation without increasing it for other nations to the same degree.

Healthy political discourse, however, would require technical knowledge. It would not be limited to short-sighted transactional thinking. Rather, healthy political discourse would require us to assess policymaking in the light of genuine knowledge production. Does a certain policy aid societal progress by generating a better understanding of the world? Which areas could potentially be affected by a certain policy, and to which degree? How would those effects unfold over time? Which doors for future development would such a policy open and potentially close? Political discourse would be less emotional but not apathetic. It is a rather zoomed-out perspective on politics that is detached from the short-term considerations of the day. Currently, citizens, economic actors, political parties and the respective politicians are all driven by personal considerations that are limited to a timespan of only a handful of years. Contemporary political systems operate purely on the basis of those considerations. Everything that is being done is a reaction to short-term inconveniences and with the expectation of immediate improvement of the personal situation. However, societal progress can be much more efficient and, more importantly, effective when the focus is not on generating power and wealth in the short run but on a lasting mode of genuine knowledge production in the long run. Interestingly, the necessary power and wealth will inevitably emerge with such a realignment of focus. All of this is absent in contemporary political discourse today. Neither are today’s societies equipped with the knowledge of the productive goal of genuine knowledge production nor are the structures designed to generate the ambition to engage in political discourse at a more mature level. Emotions are the main driver of political discourse, instead of a rational interest for long-term societal development. The only way to overcome this is to acknowledge genuine knowledge production as the highest achievable goal. Once this thought has solidified, it is time to detach from the idea that power and wealth are ends in themselves but rather means to the ultimate end of genuine knowledge production. Rectifying political discourse will help us to come in contact with devletism and its core properties.