A Beautiful Lie

I suspended my class on Literature and Politics on both Tuesday and Friday, this semester, so that my 50 plus students can have the opportunity to vote in the 2017 PNG General Election. The majority of the students in this course were Political Science students, who will become bureaucrats, policy makers, and social engineers of the national conscience.

Some of them will become national leaders someday. Some of them are voting for the first time in the PNG General Election.

Voting at the UPNG Drill Hall did not take place on Friday. Students and staff gathered in numbers to exercise their rights as citizens of this country.

To their dismay, the Electoral Commission polling officials provided a limited number of ballot papers. The students demanded that the polling be deferred until the Electoral Commission attends to their concerns.

Like others voting in the Port Moresby Northwest Electorate the inconvenience meant we had look around for the next polling station where we can vote.

I then went to Fort Banner to look for my name to vote. My name was not on it. The last effort was travel to the Waigani Police Station to vote there. Unfortunately, I also was not able to vote there.

Many of us have been voting in the same place in Port Moresby for many years since we started voting.

The 2017 General Election in Port Moresby was indeed very disorganized, disruptive, and failed to live up to the expectation observed in previous General Elections. In some of the Electoral Lists for NCD, our names were misspelled, wrong bio-data such as birthdates, and place of birth.

We did finally get to vote, but on Saturday 01 July 2017 at the UPNG Drill Hall. Finally I exercised my democratic expression of political representation in Parliament.

Many staff and students missed out on voting this year. Many people have missed out on exercising their rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

I voted on my four grandchildren’s behalf. The leaders who get voted into Parliament this time around will make decisions that will affect the future of our grandchildren.

Having said that, it is fitting also to acknowledge the leadership of Grand Chief Sir Michael Thomas Somare, the father of the nation, who has set the foundation of successive generations of political leaders to make our society what it is today. Many of them shared the same seat power with him, and sometimes redefined their own destiny through selected acts, which may or may not be in the best interests of the very people who elected them to Parliament.

The exercise of democracy is felt more intensely during the elections. The populace participates freely in the expression of that freedom through a secret ballot. The selection of a leader in our society is sacrosanct observation of the rights of man to freely associate with those who share one thing in common with them.

A lot is at stake in the exercise of this freedom.

Napolean Bonaparte, the Great General, argued against the proponents of democracy, saying that they misled the people by elevating them to a sovereignty, which they were incapable of exercising on behalf of their followers.

Napolean attacked the principles of Enlightenment as “ideology”, by arguing: “It is to the doctrine of the ideologies – to this diffuse metaphysics, which in a contrived manner seeks to find the primary causes and on this foundation would erect the legislation of peoples, instead of adapting the laws to a knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history --- to which one must attribute all the misfortunes which have befallen our beautiful France” (cited in Williams 1983: 154).

The very people we elect to Parliament may not necessary create laws that are in our best interests of its voters. The leaders may, in their own volition, create laws, to protect their own interests, not matter how narrow and contrived it may seem. The last Parliament has seen some of these laws such as legislations on betel selling in the National Capital District and the new Higher Education Act, which to this day remain controversial. 

Following Napolean’s theory of ideology, more people now link ideology to “a conservative criticism of any social policy, which is in part or in whole derived from social theory in a conscious way. It is especially used in democratic or socialist policies” of modern democratic nations.

Marx and Engels critique the thoughts of the radical German contemporaries in German Ideology (1845-7): “Idea, as they said specifically of the ruling ideas of an epoch, are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. Failure to realize this produced ideology: an upside-down version of reality” (Williams 1983: 153).

 “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously indeed but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or his predecessors,” says Engels in Letter to Mehring (1893).

Thus ideology is a ‘beautiful lie’, as Louis Althusser says, invented by the exploiters to control the exploited and keep them marginalized. It helps individuals of the dominant class to recognize themselves as the dominant class.

The majority of our people accept the decision of our leaders as ‘willed by God’, as fixed by ‘nature’, or as assigned by a moral ‘duty’.

The ‘beautiful lie’ of ideology has a double usage. It works on the consciousness of members of the dominant class to allow them to exercise their exploitation and domination as natural and for the dominated to accept their domination as normal.

Is the notion of citizenry at stake? Will the elected members represent us or will they legislate laws to protect themselves and their own ideas about what they think is best for us?