Office, isolation and personality

Gracchi posts marvellously on the problem that politicians, by virtue of their office, are isolated from real life:

What instantly strikes me though about the kinds of lives led by Presidents and Prime Ministers is that increasingly they are veiled from outside sources of information- they are by the nature of their office out of touch with people's lives....Isolation encourages madness, hubris and mistakes.

This raises deep issues. The problem Gracchi identifies is as old as politics itself. In Hiero, written 2500 years ago, Xenophon describes how tyrants are isolated and trapped by their office.
Which raises the question: why does the problem, with the dangers Gracchi rightly identifies, still exist, perhaps more so now than before?
Here's a thought. Might it be that modernity actually exacerbates the problem? One feature of modern life is that it gives great weight to personality as an active force. It sees people as individuals, not mere bearers of social roles. It therefore thinks that individuals can stamp their personality on their office. But perhaps the truth is that personality is over-rated. Perhaps instead it is office that stamps itself onto the person.

Comments

[dearieme]

Yes, but perhaps we choose people who are happy to isolate themselves, who have spent much of their adult lives isolated from the world. Having seen how our former PM, the Loathsome Wee Twat, sought out the company of the rich and famous, do you really suppose he had ever enjoyed the company of the ordinary?

[cityunslicker]

but surely our great leader of today is seeking to rectify this by his munificent granting of citizen juries?

Slightly more seriously, who says ordinary people have a clue about what needs to be done?

Remember Churchill's quote about time spent in an average voter...

[Chris Williams]

Whoa, there. What's so modern about the politics of personality? Ever hear of aristocracy and monarchy?

[dearieme]

It's not so much about having a clue about what's to be done, as about understanding the world partly by learning to see it through their eyes. Since much of the knowledge that you need is tacit and distributed, you are cutting yourself off from it by isolating yourself.

[Blissex]

«Slightly more seriously, who says ordinary people have a clue about what needs to be done?»

Well, this assumes that «needs to be done» is somehow something that is uncontroversial, that a capable, well informed manager can just figure it out and then do it. In other word, New Labour managerialism, or the eternal Whitehall "we know better as we went to Oxbridge and «hoi polloi» didn't". Politics as efficientism.

«Remember Churchill's quote about time spent in an average voter...»

No surprise there, as Churchill was exactly in the "we know better" tradition.

But hey, the country belongs to the average voter, and if the average voter, as a co-owner of a large condo called "this green and pleasant island" can't be bother to pay attention to its running, they deserve the consequences.

The two essential (and more or less sufficient) conditions for a country to be happy and prosperous are for the elites to feel they are in the same boat as the majority, and for the masses to be vigilant and participate in public life to some significant degree.

Conversely a ruling class with assets and lives in the Bahamas and sullen, uninterested citizens are a sure recipe for disaster.

My metaphor of human society is that of a group hunt for bison or whatever: to get a good catch the leaders *and* the others need to care and to be somewhat fair to each other, or else the bisons will not be found or will escape, ...