For years, you’ve grinded away at community organizing. Making posters, drawing people to rallies, knocking on doors – You even got a few discussions on their local radio. Finally, you earned a position as a staffer working with your State Senator. In their office, you are pained to watch your boss make a deal with the devil every day – taking you on was one such deal. You don’t perfectly align politically, and your boss can smell the contempt you have for their corruption – but they had no better options. And soon, their seat will be yours – you are in an unchallenged blue+20 district. Your resolve is unfaltering, your morality is unswerving: You smirk to yourself, confident that you will do what none of the corrupt politicians before you have had the courage to: You are going to push the make everything better button.
The big day comes before you know it. You wake up in the morning, don your finest suit, and walk into your new office. You ring up Hillary Rodham Clinton: “Hey Hilldawg, I would like to press the– Wait, what’s the sigh for? I just wanted to press the– What do you mean why do they always do this? What are you – WHAT? How could there not be a button?”
Hillary Clinton. AP Photo.
Furious that Clinton (known Zionist) chose to hide the button from you, you resort to your backup plan. You draft the loyal citizens of Middleborough, MA, to form a citizens’ militia to fight against the terror-state of Israel yourself. You freeze everyone’s rents so their homes are waiting for them when they get back and mandate a diet of Sabra to all citizens so that they may better know their enemy. As you near the gates of the Mediterranean, your citizens begin to contract scurvy due to the lack of vitamin C in Sabra, so you ban scurvy. You die of scurvy.
Having no power is a fantastic luxury. You can believe whatever you want, untested and without consequence. Is the new front in the eternal war between good and evil taking place between gamers and the woke? Sounds about right! How likely is it that the elites of the world are all conspiring together, and you really are the only one who knows the real truth? Why not 100%? Why not 1000%? And you have probably already noticed this, but in case you haven’t thought about it in a while, you have been totally in the right in every disagreement you have ever had.
Achieving excellence in some domain is one of the most rewarding experiences available to us, but there is an alternative path to achieve this experience: reality denial. There seem to be few reasons for someone with no power or responsibilities to dance with the delusions described above, to daydream and explore them. But the longer they indulge in grandeur and fancy, with no tests, trade-offs, or consequences, the more deeply you believe your delusions. The more corrupted by them you become.
It is a tradition as old as time to imagine oneself plucked from their circumstances and dropped into a life of incredible excess – to dream of getting rich quick. For most, it remains an idle daydream, but millions of people every year will put real work, effort, money, and power into some scam or shitcoin. They will, inevitably, lose what they earned, and they, having paid their toll to truth, will abandon their folly.
Power doesn’t corrupt; it amplifies. It is a force multiplier on all of your existing vices, and it ensures that all of your convictions are tested, each and every one. Power is the capacity to inflict dire consequences, but also the power to learn from them, to become a more worthy wielder of it. Assuming you are sufficiently reasonable and responsive to the needs of your constituents, it makes you better, not worse. And if you fail to do so, it casts you aside – power seeks those worthy of it.
Power seeks you. It yearns for you. Humility blights too many of the best of us, stunting our ambition. Do not fear power; fear a life of hollow delusion. Do not fear consequences; fear being rotted away by untested conviction. Seek power madly, recklessly, and unflinchingly. Take on whatever responsibility you can, wherever you can, as soon as you can – and learn what you can from it.
The goal of this piece is to drive you towards the path of power, the goal of the politics server is to make it as easy as possible to take the next step. As always – join today.