When things, societies, practices and systems don’t work, you don’t do more of the same but question its postulates. You don’t change the cosmetics and the demagoguery around it, but its core. By changing only the surface you’re just dabbling in propaganda and marketing – rebranding the same soup, changing the package but leaving the contents intact.

Mircea Eliade published a book in 1951 called Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase (Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy). In French the word technique has a connotation, a nuance lacking in English, where it stands equally as the procedure of how something is done and technology. Technique and technology are one and the same, although we separate them in the scope of our thinking onoto the material (or immaterial in the digital realm) means of doing something – as technology and a way of doing something – as technique. But they are both tools and techniques become technologies, media. In the theory of media Marshall McLuhan called media the extensions of man. The message delivered is irrelevant because the technique/technology is already a message in itself – the content may vary but the technology/technique already changed the way we behave, that’s its real message. Everything is a tool, from a pickaxe to a water heater, computer, a car, a flyswatter, shamanism or language. They are things we extend ourselves into and they serve a purpose.

So change in politics cannot work if there is not a change in techniques and technologies as well. If politics as an active act of governing the material and immaterial assets of a culture, polis, community was once effective it was because it was not just cosmetics, while most of today’s policies have become a beauty pageant, an oratory exercise in empty inspirational speeches and/or accusations of an arbitrary opponent you can hate “together”, a tug of war in who has the better publicity team. If a system doesn’t work repeating the same action and changing only the way you call that thing within the system won’t change that thing. You can mask the meaning in more and more words to try and neutralize them but that doesn’t make them go away. Shell shock was first called exactly right, exactly what It was – a shock to the system due to unnatural and unhuman conduct of killing something living for something inert. Then it was deemed too graphic for the soft, sensitive feeble mind of the public and it was softened to be easier to swallow as – combat stress reaction. Today it has become even more softened and classified as a “disorder – posttraumatic stress disorder or, to make it even more bland, it is mostly used as letters – PTSD. The core thing is still the same, the shock is still there you just can’t see it among the forest of neutralized letters.

Cosmetics means nothing and when politics becomes cosmetics it means exactly the same. Only real change results in real change, only implementations of new techniques and technologies break the circle… or we can keep doing the same things over and over again and just give them different names, cross our finger and hope they will go away if we don’t look at them.