The Biggest Lie Politicians Tell

 That they care about you.

Think about it. How much do YOU care about total strangers? And how much do you care about millions of them? You care primarily about yourself, your family, and your friends, mainly in that order. Then there's acquaintances, work colleagues, and various people you deal with on a regular basis.

That's not to say you never care about other people, in particular strangers. If those strangers are "humanized" for you, if personal stories of their plight are brought to your attention, that evokes a sympathetic response in you. You are capable of empathy. (I'm assuming you are a normal human. There are pathological humanoids who are classified by biologists as the same as us, homo sapiens, that are incapable of empathy.) But you don't have a burning concern for strangers, most of the time.

What makes you think politicians are different from you?

In fact they care LESS about strangers than you do. (Most of them, with a small minority of exceptions, which I will come to.)

What they care about is POWER. What the hell do you think politics is about? It's about POWER. And politicians want to get and keep power.

YOU are an INSTRUMENT, to be used both to GAIN power, and to exercise power OVER.

That's pretty obvious, isn't it?

So how do politicians get away with it?

I guess people don't think, so they don't see the obvious.

But oftentimes people become "cynical," as the politicians like to say as a putdown, that is, too many false promises by the politicians are broken, too many pipe dreams are spun like so much political cotton candy, that people stop believing the bullshit.

All that I said above isn't just about the U.S. It's true in all countries.

Now there are some people who go INTO politics because there is something they care about, something about the world they want to change. If it's something to make the world better for humans, let's call them progressives. They want progress. If it's something to make things worse, call them reactionaries. Like wanting to take away hard-won rights, as the right to abortion.

Don't make the mistake of equating the word progressive with left, or reactionary with right. The terms Left and Right are used in very broad senses to encompass in both cases a variety of people with various agendas, ideologies, and attitudes. Some of the people and movements lumped in them are wholly inappropriate, especially in the case of what is "left." Two examples: environmentalism and abortion. Environmentalism is simply a rational concern with the fitness for human habitation of the world we live in. What's "leftwing" about THAT? As for abortion, that it should be identified as "leftist" is absurd. There are progressive Catholics who are anti-abortion, and Republicans who favor abortion rights, as the recent smashing success of pro-abortion rights referendums in states where GOP legislatures and Governors outlawed abortion proves. Having the right to control one's own body doesn't seem to be a left-right issue.

The reason environmentalism and abortion rights are associated with leftism is because reactionary propagandists (which includes the corporate power establishment media, the so-called "mainstream media," have made them shibboleths tied to leftism, and decades of indoctrination has branded leftism as bad, evil, socialist, communist.

So to recap: The Biggest Lie politicians tell is that they care about you.

"Smiling faces, smiling faces, tell lies." [The Undisputed Truth - "Smiling Faces Sometimes" (1971)]