"'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind." (Shakespeare, King Lear)Are the politicians qualified? Are the voters informed? Is the very structure of our governance inevitably keeping us in a King Leary kind of situation?
'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.
(Shakespeare, King Lear)
We use this line from Shakespeare metaphorically, to point at a possibility for our own time: Do the politicians understand the world well-enough to make informed decisions? Are the voters informed well-enough to understand the world?
The point here is not that the politicians are mad, or that the people are blind... but rather that the world has become too complex for the kind of simple-minded politics, and politicians, that we now have, to make proper sense of what goes on and make reasonable choices and decisions.
The whole thing appears to still make sense (especially when explained in a simple way from a position of authority)—but does it really?
Can we do today as those Danish kids did in an earlier historical period, when they said that the king is just completely naked?