Elections 2018 – Paroxysm of negativities

Every sphere of life owns its window of manifestation. Politics is not an exception. The normative language of politics, called democracy, at the end of the day, reveals itself through facticity of elections. Within democratic technology of governance, elections are neither a mere procedure for registering the proportions of the general will, nor is it solely an act of measuring the common touch between people and their representatives, but something more profound is resonating from its ground, something promptly named here as the truth of political unconscious.

One should not be the Doctor of psychology to understand that there are certain moments when real compositions of things are expressed through boundary situations. Elections, given in the one step distance from power, apparently are the boundary situation of politics. Not rarely, invisible pathologies of politics are coming up on scene during pre-election campaign, those faces with engraved lines of expected power and words left without shadows victoriously marching from the unconscious plane of negativities towards realities of daytime, flooding and corrupting everything on the way.

There is a problematic gathering of conditions when sadly enough, elections, instead of creating the new possibilities of life become the very negation of politics itself.

2018 presidential elections in Georgia were a sheer evidence of the mentioned sadness. Symptoms shown through it necessitate a thorough diagnosis.

Let us pose the question here: what is the conceptual message of the recent elections? Simply following the principle of Occam’s razor the briefest thought coming into the mind is that there is not much of political in this message. Once again the exhausted binarism of Georgian politics with its utterly simplistic structure was unmasked in its tedious banality. On the one side United National Movement, politically spent force, with its detrimental rhetoric of being overwhelmed with opponents' never-ending attempts to rake over the coals for their past violations, immunized with mighty informational machinery of Rustavi 2, the most ordinary factory of lies one can imagine. On the other side, governing party of Georgian Dream with its somewhat fuzzy ideological arrangement and therefore with the everlasting burden of self-identification. It is hard to disregard the impression that even after six years from coming to power Georgian Dream is still incapable to outline even hypothetically legible answer on the most significant political question, “what is to be done?” not to say anything how those things should be done.

But as it is said, every cloud has a silver lining. What might be the positive effect from all those negativities hovering all over the recent elections in Georgia? And I might be an over-optimistic here but should not the very fact of such a ruthless depreciation of things become sufficiently concrete and sensible object of discontent, unambiguously demanding the collective work of thought from people yet to come? As the turning point of the relative minimum in politics is reached, suffocating political life is urgently demanding novel blocks of perceptions and sensations.

Speaking from the standpoint of motivational dispositions, now it is the most appropriate time to enhance the process of deliberation on new politics. It will be a tough row to hoe. Vainly to expect any easy doings. But one thing is foremostly essential. If a desirous model will rightly necessitate the gradual depersonalization of politics (as it is conventionally thought), only through personalities and personal deeds, it will be achieved. With a slight sense for being, let us take as the reference to this, words coming from the shores of poet’s intuition, precisely from the remarkable essay by T. S. Elliot “Tradition and the individual talent”, where we read the following line - “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”