"The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions. All questioning is a forcible intrusion. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light." Across the post-industrial West, elections have become eerily manipulated events indistinguishable from corporate advertising campaigns, in which candidates regularly make pronouncements that are obviously insincere or flat-out false but vital to placating millions of voters on hot-button emotional issues. The world loves the untrue statement, and the sliest, most successful politicians deeply internalize this fact. But few politicians are consistently sly in reading accurately the crowd's daily and hourly shifts in passion, and those who are -- because of the fact of their slyness -- usually find it wiser to cave in to these shifts than to lead the crowd down the hard road elsewhere. Because even our best politicians are cowed by the electoral herd, we must look to another group for the true source of power in our age. Robert D. Kaplan rocks. In this piece, he channels the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, with McLuhanesque results. The Media and Medievalism | 
