I think there should be a new principle in politics:
To put honesty before expertise.
My definitions in this context:
- Honesty = to share information truthfully and completely
- Expertise = to have information
(I do not even have to consider the case in which Expertise = to only appear to have information.)
More relevant facts:
- Information can be exchanged and combined by everybody, freely and continuously, with almost unlimited speed and capacity (Internet).
- All people can interact continously with politics, instead of just at elections every couple of years.
- The more the public is included in knowledge of facts, influences and steps of the political decision-making processes, the more democratic.
So what would you vote for: honesty or expertise?
From these definitions and facts, I conclude for myself that it is not necessary to elect information into politics, but to have truthful information exchange with politics. In other words: honesty is more important than expertise.
But I was not the only one thinking about this principle. This is the story why I came to post about this subject right now:
On Sunday, the Pirate Party scored a stunning success in federal state elections in Saarland, Germany. The following days, this success of the relatively new Pirate Party was topic in all major German media. “Honesty instead of expertise/election program/solutions” was the first-mentioned reason by major German TV news program “Tagesthemen” on Monday for the Pirate Party’s success. A Facebook comment from an Internet user was quoted in “Tagesthemen” to express this. 2.6 million people saw it, as the anchor read his comment:
“The pirates reveal what is going on here in the state: you rather vote for a party, which says from the start: ‘we neither have a solution nor a recipe, but we want to be honest’, instead of casting a vote for a party, that lies to the people and only represents the interests of 1-3 % of the constituents.” (translated from German)
The “Tagesthemen” did not credit the user. I think it would be fair to attribute the comment to its author: The comment was posted publicly on the “Tagesschau” Facebook page under the name Johannes Passehl. I agree with the comment and like that major TV news quoted an ordinary internet user.
Outlook:
The principle of “honesty more important than expertise” might also be applied to other fields than just to politics.
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