Us and Them

by William Bowles • Thursday, 29 March, 2007

We are so used to the ruling political class making decisions ‘for us’ that we forget that they exist and act only because we allow them to. We allow it because we think that once elected, our representatives will act in our best interests. And because ‘we elect’ them every so often—itself an illusion produced by the illusion that once elected, they ‘represent’ us—our involvement in the political process ends.

This relationship between ‘us and them’ is essentially a one-way-street with the ruling political class invariably telling us that whatever they do, they do in ‘our’ interests or the ‘interests of the state’, the assumption being that the state’s interests and our own are the same. They call it a social contract...

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