It is impossible. It is absolutely impossible, categorically impossible. If you are intelligent, why should you be in politics? It is for the stupid, for the mediocre.
The intelligent person will have much more important things to do. The intelligent person will not be interested in dominating others. His whole interest will be in knowing himself. To dominate the other is a way of escaping from one’s own inner meaninglessness, inner emptiness, inner hollowness. It is an escape from oneself. The intelligent person is not an escapist.
Politics is an escape, a great escape. It keeps you so occupied, day in, day out, that you cannot find even a few minutes for yourself. Even when you sleep you think politics; it continues in your dreams. To be a politician is a twenty-four hour job. You cannot relax because if you relax you will be left behind. It is a tooth-and-nail struggle, it is a cut-throat competition. It is pure violence.
Why should an intelligent person be in politics? And how can an honest person ever be in politics? Honesty does not pay in politics. And even if sometimes a politician is honest, he is honest only if it pays, not for honesty’s sake. The proverb that ‘honesty is the best policy’ must have been invented by a politician. Even honesty becomes a policy! How can honesty be a policy?
Honesty is religion, not a policy. Honesty is your heart, not a policy. It is not that you are honest to gain something; you are honest for the sheer joy of being honest. You are honest even if you have to lose everything; it is worth losing everything. Honesty can never be a policy, but politics makes everything a policy. An honest person and in politics? Impossible!
The politician named Strange lay on his deathbed. His lawyer was summoned.
“As an epitaph, on my tombstone,” he gasped, “I only want to have the words, ‘Here lies an honest politician’.”
The lawyer protested, “How will people know who’s buried under that stone?”
The old man nodded wisely. “Don’t worry,” he advised. “Folks will take one look at those words and they’ll all say, ‘That’s strange!'”
Strange was the name of the politician….
Honesty needs guts. It needs you to expose yourself as you are. It needs the courage to be naked. The politician cannot do that. He has to wear masks, he cannot be naked. He has to fulfill the expectations of the masses, so whatsoever you want he pretends to be that. Whatsoever you want, he is ready-to promise it. He goes on promising contradictory things to different people; his promise means nothing. He goes on pretending different games and different roles.
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