Concept:
Bodybuilding, the art of meticulously sculpting every muscle of your body in order to achieve an ideal image; proportioned, symmetrical, statuesque perfection.
Politics is more like bodybuilding than one might think, expect instead of molding your body, politiciens painstaking the scalp their personalities in order to optimize their appeal to voters.
According to french marxist philosopher Guy Debord, this is emblematic of a larger problem.
Written in 1967, "La Société du spectacle", warns of a culture driven entirely by image, in which people are more concerned with how their perceived than how they actually are. It is a society fundamentally altered by the power of advertisement that perverts reality so then the only thing that matters is the projection of an aura, mystic or specific representation.
The Image:
While we're all constantly preoccupied with managing and creating our image, the content of these images is inconsequently. All that matters is the shininess of the form.
This image is always communicated to us through media. An idea of media very different from Debord's days.
We live in a time where we are saturated with so many images, endless blogs, websites, tv channels, tumblrs and youtubers.
As a result, there's a cutthroat race to gain the most amount of attention and political news has to compete in this same realm. How can rather dry issue of balancing the budget possibly compete with 10 awkward texts from your ex girlfriend?
The anwser: Make politics more entertening.
Politics as a distraction:
Indeed we can see that politics is becoming more and more like a spectater sport. The candidates olympians at the arts of bullshiting. The estetic of the debates are only a soundque away from a monday night football or a UFC fight.
We find ourselves in a media landscape where spectacle is approved in vehicle to succes. Is the reason why the line between clickbeat, journalism and ads is getting fuzzier everyday and since political news is almost entirely consumed through media outlet, the line between politics and entertainment is disappearing. We now expect that same gratification from our politiciens that we do from our buzzfeed articles.
This is what french philosopher Francois Debrix tabloid realism, a form of politics structured around easy headlines and common sense dialogue. He says: "Americans do not want to read or hear that they are underpaid, overworked, bullied at work and the home when serving their country in foreign lands, they want glamorous stories, scandals, exceptional events, news they can build dreams on or develop a sense of anger from, in short they want to be entertained".
If we are primed to love spectacle, than why not go with the most spectacular candidate?
The thing that sound best in the spectacle driven society is distraction, doesn't matter whether or not there are 40 plat holes in starwars the force awakens, what matters is that you clicked on the link promising to expose those plat holes and that you like to think that there are. Likewise it doesn't matter if hundreds of muslims in New Jersey celebrated 9/11 on art, it's a much more exciting narative.
Entertainment as a form of politics:
We can all agree that entertainment was supposed to be a distraction from the serious truth of our political lives, but now politics has become a parody of itself and reflect a greater truth. As Guy Debord famously said: "In a topsy-turvy world, the true is a moment of the false".
Despite the fact that Trump may constatly lie about facts, there is an element of greater truth in his lies. The truth that in our image driven society we dont want the truth, we choose to consume a projected image of what we desire to be true. We would rather vot for someone who embodies a reality that we want to belive than a person that actually reflects the reality of politics.
A formal definition of politics has its roots in the greek word "politikos" of, or pertaining to, the polis, where the polis is the city state or a community and as such politics concerns a community of citizens and their everyday interaction.
Conclusion:
For Aristotel, civic participation isn't just a duty, it is the very think that defines human beings as being apart from animals. As political animals or zoon politikon, humans are enthought with the logos, the ability to use reason and speech more and more.
We seem to be animals that crave distraction and politics is just another way to get that.
If thousands of years ago human beings were civic political and social animals concerned with justice, what have we became?
Are we still human, or a we zoon clickbaitcon, zoon distracticon, zoon whatisovertherecon?