One of the scourges of decent political debate in modern times is the cult of the personality. It goes without saying that this has always been a part of politics, players of the game have been getting embroiled in character assassinations probably since the days of feudalism. It seems however, or at least I’ve heard it said by many people and possibly partially been influenced by this myself, that this form of political delegitimising has been on the rise in recent years. This came to mind today when listening to a podcast of a talk with Brian Eno and Yiannis Varoufakis. While I’ve never heard of Brian Eno before, who incidentally has the best full name I’ve heard this week – Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno – Yiannis Varoufakis is for me certainly much more well known. He took on the EU while in his position as Greek Finance Minister, is a fervent critic of the EU although he believes in remaining in so as to tackle it from the inside and is easily and perhaps crudely described as a left wing rockstar economist. I don’t know everything he has to say but there are arguments he makes that appeal to me. My issue then is that people don’t like him not always for his politics but his character.
It is too easy to go into simply disliking someone. There have been many times I have heard people talking about an idea but found myself rejecting them because either I found them annoying or for some unconscious conditioned reaction to how they dress or their accent. It is ignorant and will make a good piece in itself at a later date, but that is for then. Varoufakis when in his position as minister took all his money out of Greece and put it in foreign bank accounts. I don’t think it was him, but the government, and I think it was after he quit his position, introduced laws to stop Greek people doing this. Some preempted this to varying levels of success but I remember chatting with a Greek at the time who disliked Varoufakis because he believed he had told people not to remove their money to safeguard what was left of the Greek economy but removed his own as he knew it was pretty much doomed anyway. Research would be required to confirm the validity of this.
The question though is whether you are capable of putting aside the supposed unpleasant act and therefore issue with his character and still listen to his ideas for what they are, or dismiss his ideas because either you can’t trust him or simply believe him to be sneakily self-preserving and hypocritical. This relates in a huge way to the current election. Boris Johnson is a lying racist scoundrel who cannot be trusted and Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semitic marxist who wants to drag us back to the Stone Age. The point is not whether either are true or not but that people seem willing to still vote for them for their policies while others refuse to vote for them because of their perceived characters. That is of course oversimplifying an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation but fundamentally this is how the parties and media seem to be trying to play it.
It is really challenging to actually listen to someones words and put everything else aside despite your unconscious biases, especially to believe in what they say after they have proved themselves untrustworthy. An extreme would be Hitler and vegetarians but that isn’t worth going into. Both arguments can be rationalised with varying degrees of success, so must we look to the emotional side of the debate? Or it perhaps comes down to your belief in realpolitik. Whatever it is it seems an enormous challenge to actually see the words for what they really are. Certainly though if we all found a way to learn how to we may just manage to drag politics from the gutter it seems to have found itself in, and who knows in the process ourselves too.
Observations and Misunderstandings 