Shaman and politicians: What’s the difference
The lack of confidence on democracy is hardly understandable if you think that ‘basically’ the principles of democracy has not changed that much in the last two centuries.
Herb Roe [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)]
What is a shaman? A shaman was a person ‘connected with gods’ that whenever they was presented an ill person grabbed some strange grass, sang and dance for a while, claim for an expensive sacrifice and expected anything to cure the guy. Sometimes it happens that the guy cured by himself and then shaman explained that it was due to his magic. When the ill guy died was the will of the gods or just due to his sins or faulty sacrifice.
Fortunately, modern medicine starts to cure many illnesses by a tough scientific research and systematic in the treatments. And they know that not everything can be cured and there are plenty of situations where they tried something and if it does not work, then they change the treatment.
What happens now is that politicians resemble shamans. They are the rulers of a society that demands solution for its problems, but they have no comprehension at all what they have to deal with. Like shamans they are connected with gods (they called it ideology). Like shamans they sing and dance, (speeches at parliaments and TVs). They also grabbed some strange grass, (they use to create a new public department plenty of their friends), or even they create a commission). And of course they claim for costly sacrifices, (now they are called taxes and citizen’s effort). And wait for the problem to solve by itself.
And like shamans, they failed systematically with their measures. Then, they blame others (world economic context, disloyal opposition, or the lack of liberties, etc) or the lack of collaboration of the citizens.
The reason behind this systemic failure is that current society is much more complex. Why? Because is much more interdependent. The commerce between countries is possibly at his historical maximum and internet has changed everything.
Currently we can see many movements and political parties providing simple solutions to hugely complex problems. Economy is a problem that even the scientific researchers on it hardly scratch the surface of the problem. Some of them unfortunately achieve to be elected. Of course they fail systematically but they easily find an alternative, blame others.
I have never seen a single one political leader saying, the problem is extremely complex, we lack of data to make a proper diagnose, or we lack of a model to understand the problem. So we need to look for new solutions, then we will test them in a pilot project and then we will try to extend once we got a better understanding of the issue. This would be kind of a scientific approach.
When will the scientific approach come to the political parties? As soon as we, the people, call for it. Political parties are not willing to implement it because the members of the political parties lack of knowledge and humility to assume a scientific approach to reality.
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