"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."
That passage is a pretty good example of how the series works: both humour and science fiction work as satire by allowing us to look at our world with a fresh perspective, and The Hitchhiker's Guide uses both at the same time to ridicule the absurdities of the modern world.
As a sci-fi fan who appreciates surreal humour, I love The Hitchhiker's Guide more than life itself. Having said that, the above passage has always bugged me a little.
When it comes to politics, most people are at least a little unhappy with how things are, and have an idea of how things should be. So how do you make the world a better place? You can take a revolutionary approach, where you push for a big change that will make things exactly as you want them. Or you could take the evolutionary approach, and just change the system in little ways to make it more like your ideal, even if it isn't exactly right. The first way certainly has a better outcome, but the disadvantage is that it has longer odds. Essentially, revolution is a long shot to get a perfect world, while evolution is a good chance at a better but still imperfect world.
Of course, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive; even while planning your utopia, you can spare fifteen minutes to go vote for one of the candidates you find unsatisfactory, thus giving you a hedge against your revolution failing, or at least being delayed.
And that leads to one of my supreme frustrations with politics: people who work on one approach but not the other. As you can see, I'm a dreamer with a practical streak, so I tend to focus on the evolutionary approach. I don't begrudge the revolutionaries their existence, but I'm alarmed when they ignore the evolutionary efforts going on around them. As I said, you don't lose anything by throwing a little effort behind practical efforts. Instead, it's emotional motivations that turn the two approaches to political change against one another. Not willing to entertain the possibility that their way isn't the best, they have to convince themselves that the other is useless, if not counter-productive.
So every election we find ourselves pulling teeth, making and remaking the point that even if you believe the candidates are corporate puppets, you don't lose anything by taking a moment to vote for the corporate puppet that will maintain a woman's right to choose, or gut government programs. And that brings us back to the lizard parable. Surely if there is any lesson to come out of last year's Presidential Election, it's that there is a "wrong lizard."
I can understand that things may happen to push people towards either approach to political change. Say, after Barack Obama was elected in a blaze of optimism, but did not deliver as much change as many desired, I could understand that you might go away with the idea that we need more radical change. And I'm sure that in the alternate universe where Bernie Sanders is currently putting together his cabinet, many of his supporters are feeling disillusioned that he isn't going to build a socialist wonderland, and now they're thinking that they just can't win while working within the system.
And yet I find a lot of people are trying to make the case that Trump's presidency shows that all politicians are awful and the system is corrupt. I can't understand how you would get that lesson our of our current circumstances. If you're watching night-and-day changes in politics after an election, that doesn't show that everyone in the system is bad. If anything, it shows that there is great variety among politicians.
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