Who this country picks as the next leader is a question that’s very much up in the air these days for several reasons. People are not sure when the next leadership contest is going to be, and what exactly it would look like. But it’s a contest that will have to happen sooner or later.
It’s a pivotal confrontation because it’s the first time a leader will be elected by the people after a President was ousted.
The incumbent on the other hand was elected by Parliament, which exercised constitutional powers. Nothing wrong with that, but it means that people have not exercised their direct right to choose who would lead them out of relative uncertainty after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to resign as President in 2022.
People have, in various political contexts, chosen unlikely persons when everything seemed poised to go in a certain given direction. In India, Congress seemed to be well ensconced in power and had a successor in the form of Rahul Gandhi, but the people went with a totally different individual, Mr. Modi, who the pundits wouldn’t have given half a chance at the time of his first election.
There could be a traumatised national psyche at work on the other hand after a significant national trauma. The events of 2022 in this country were not mere national trauma, they were also national farce. Sri Lankan politics became caricatured to the point that people began to doubt if tried and tested institutions in fact existed. They began to think of Parliament as being so fragile that it only existed as a façade that decorated the Diyawanna.
People began to think in terms of their own narratives. Some wanted a leader to be brought out of the blue and anointed rather than chosen, and they couldn’t care less about the methodology that would be deployed to do that.
IMPELS
The closest accurate description that could narrate the events that took place that traumatising year is probably ‘power-vacuum’. Power-vacuum could also mean anarchy, but people wanted someone in power and they wanted someone to instill a sense of direction because they didn’t want to be running amok. If they had run amok momentarily it was because there was a power vacuum, and suddenly they were asked to do something about it.
Now, sooner or later these same people would be asked to in fact elect a leader. Would they be able to do it dispassionately? It would be somewhat like asking an abused child to choose a father for adoption. The trauma is not just going to leave a bitter taste in the mouth, it’s also probably going to colour any decisions that are made well into the future.
Now, it’s not as if human beings are guaranteed to make good decisions about who is going to lead them when everything is perfect. Germans chose Hitler as a leader when the nation’s First World War trauma was long behind them. But people are sometimes guaranteed to make stupid decisions because there is some sort of collective suicidal wish that impels them to do so.
People choose leaders that excite them because they are generally bored. People may be labouring under the weight of difficult economic decisions and have to make ends meet. But in modern society, despite all difficulties, most basic needs of the majority of people are met. They have enough to eat, and they have utilities such as running water and electricity even though the same may come at a price.
The result? Despite the complaints about the economy, and other hardships, people are struggling to stave off boredom. They have leisure time which is unfortunately in most cases, spent staring at a digitised screen.
Such boredom is not bound to result in decision making that’s very discriminating. Will people vote for the ‘new shiny thing’ whatever that is, that may be dazzling them and would appear around the corner?
This is what happens to democracy when people don’t see the need to rein in their boredom. They act as if it is all a game even though they’d swear to themselves when they meet that they have to make weighty decisions that would not be taken frivolously.
Not even the intricate calculations of game theory could predict how bored people in fact vote. People are consistently taking decisions that they take because they feel they are either obliged to follow the trend or to do the thing that seems to best relieve them of their boredom.
In making political calculations of the sort that are meant to relieve boredom, people seem typically to focus on one attribute of a candidate, while glossing over other important aspects and personality traits.
For example, a nation that’s traumatised by the events of 2022 may be seeking politicians that are well-spoken and pass what can be called the ‘decency test.’
They want their politicians to be cast out of a new mould and be not merely squeaky clean but also appear refreshing in their approach to public relations. So they’d want politicians who offer a great contrast to those who are of the current crop, who are generally seen as being extremely garrulous and self-centred.
PRUDENT
But this would probably mean that the public is in danger of ignoring many other attributes of politicians that are important. That’s what voting out of boredom can do for a country i.e get a politician that’s not experienced policy-wise elected.
People lacking this sort of situational awareness when voting, are definitely not giving democracy a good name, but nations have to contend with this element of impulse-voting.
People don’t make good choices at the best of times and they are not guaranteed to when times are bad or only gradually getting better. A decent man or woman, besides, may be a very bad politician.
Voting out of boredom may also be a form of over-compensation, meaning that people may be inclined to vote for somebody merely because he or she is seen as decent. But, this is merely because there is a decency deficit — as they see it — in the current crop of leaders and people’s representatives.
People take various courses of action out of boredom, but then they would swear that these were prudent moves taken out of an abundance of caution. But why is boredom a key factor in decision making? It can be traced back to various other factors such as the high demand in this country for politically related news.
Finance and politics sells in this country whereas in many other nations sex, money and crime are the drivers of news consumption. So people who are bored with their day-to-day quotidian lives look to political news as a means of escapism.
Their voting decisions, therefore, can be said to be made in a state of boredom. That’s dangerous. Bored thinkers are not necessarily rational thinkers. They are looking for the fabled dopamine fix, and they’d be prone to being overtly preachy and sanctimonious because they don’t have sufficient danger in their lives to give them the psychological balance that’s necessary to keep their brains in good trim.
Its psychology and not pop-psychology, and a lot of the assertions made above could be double checked and corroborated with subject experts. So politics is not life or death for most people, though they may pretend it is so. To them politics could be part of an elaborate exercise in keeping their minds occupied.
But the decisions they make could be of immense consequence nevertheless, and that’s important. We don’t want some bored people making really bad decisions that may blight our future generations forever.
However, no amount of advise by psychologists could change the behaviour of palpably bored voters. If they are going to vote with a one track mind on the basis of what’s at most a whim, they may be doing a great deal of damage that would take the rest of the people of this country a long while to undo.
Let not any sanctimonious ideal be the raging cry and slogan of any election in the near future, because the most sanctimonious they are, those ideals seem to be based on the flimsiest of reasonings.
