Why Do We All Have a Politician Within Us?
The Political Discourse
To talk about politics, before looking at institutions, it is advisable to focus on language. The political is not born in the State or in Congress: it is born earlier, in the way discourses are constructed, in how words are organized to acquire ideological strength, to appear as truth.
In this verbal architecture, there are two structural elements: the false and the fallacious. Both share an etymological root—fallere, Latin for 'to deceive'—though they result in distinct notions. Falsus gave us “false”, that which contradicts facts, distorts data, or asserts something that never happened.
Fallax, on the other hand, led to “fallacious”, and refers to what is not necessarily false, but is misleading: statements that appear logical, where even two correct premises can lead to an incorrect conclusion. The fallacious deceives more by its form than its content, for it does not need to lie to convince.
Refuting the false is relatively simple: just contrast the statement with evidence, documents, reliable sources. It is a technical more than conceptual process, even routine when information is accessible.
The fallacious, however, demands different attention. Reviewing the content is not enough: one must examine how ideas are connected, the order they impose, the logic they simulate. A statement may sound reasonable and yet lead to a wrong conclusion if it is articulated in a biased way. The fallacy does not prevail for what it says, but for what it leaves out. Its strength lies in what it blocks: it interrupts questioning, avoids complexity, prevents anything from being discussed.
That is why it has been, from rhetorical manuals to contemporary propaganda, the privileged resource of political discourse. Not because politicians ignore logic, but because they understand that politics is not sustained by facts, but by narratives. What is sought is meaning. And in the public sphere, what prevails is not what is demonstrable, but what is believable: narratives that explain, simplify, and organize uncertainty in an emotionally manageable way. In that context, a well-presented fallacy sticks more than an uncomfortable truth. Not because it is more solid, but because it is presented as obvious: it does not ask to be thought about, only accepted.
Fallacy has integrated so deeply into political discourse that some fallacies are now a structural part of its functioning. The false dichotomy reduces everything to two options—political, economic, ideological—forcing bipartisanship, immediate positioning, and suffocating any alternatives. The false cause, for its part, offers a single explanation for what is multiple and complex. Everything is focused on a single culprit, a figure, a situation, and from there, what happened, what happens, and what should be done is rearranged.
These two fallacies are not simple mistakes: they are tools that organize the political narrative. They make it more manageable, more effective at convincing. That is why they are repeated so much. Because they simplify. And what simplifies, often, deactivates the need to think further. Thus, the fallacious is not just an occasional tactic, but a structure that sustains and extends power.
At this point, it is worth recalling what philosopher José Antonio Marina discusses in The Passion for Power. There he proposes a definition of corruption that allows us to think about the phenomenon beyond money or crime. Corruption, he argues, is not just stealing or diverting funds: the deepest form of corruption occurs when someone clings to power beyond the time or sense that justified it. It is occupying a place that may have once been legitimate, but no longer is. It is not simply about remaining, but forcing the conditions to do so, even if that means degrading the system, emptying it, adapting it to the needs of whoever can no longer let go.
This drive for permanence becomes especially dangerous when it intertwines with already consolidated economic and power structures, those minorities occupying dominant positions. The politician who seeks to persist corrupts himself not just by what he takes, but by what he gives: his permanence depends on the backing of those groups, and in return, he favors them. Rarely is he the one who concentrates the most wealth; his role is different. He becomes a symbolic guarantor of a system that supports him as long as he is useful to it. He is not the core of power, but he represents it. And to sustain that representation, he needs to reinforce the discourse.
Thus, political language becomes a closed architecture, where each word serves as an ideological brick. There is always an enemy that justifies urgency, polarization, obedience. Past corruption is used to distract from present corruption. Urgent measures are evaluated for their immediate effect, without considering future consequences. Criticism is discredited using emotional logic that casts all dissent as betrayal.
The discourse becomes hermetic not only by what it says, but by everything it manages to prevent from being thought. The fallacious does not just deceive: it immunizes the system against criticism. It makes it impermeable.
The Corruption of Thought
The fallacious does not exist only in political speeches. It lives also in our ways of communicating, in how we buy, in how we desire. Advertising and marketing have trained us to think in terms of simple causes and immediate solutions: if something is missing, there is something to solve it; if you are not happy, it’s because you lack something you can buy, choose, acquire. It is a constant false cause, sustained between desire and object. The promise is not just to obtain something, but that it can complete you. And in that daily operation, without fanfare, the fallacious becomes habit.
A car does not promise transportation, it promises freedom or prestige. A cream does not promise hydration, it promises youth. A beverage does not promise to quench thirst, it promises belonging. Each object carries a story that surpasses it, an emotion that legitimizes it, a promise that makes it necessary. And so, without noticing, we get used to thinking that desire has a clear cause, and that this cause is external, available, ready to be solved, reached, or consumed.
And as in politics or consumption, the fallacious is also present in how we think, justify ourselves, speak to others and to ourselves. Not always as a deliberate deceit; many times, it is a defense, a mental shortcut, a way to avoid what we do not want to face. We say things that sound good but do not withstand questioning. We simplify the complex so as not to confront it. We seek culprits to avoid looking at ourselves. As in politics, we resort to false dichotomies to reduce every experience, every decision, to just two possible options. And to false causes to justify every emotion, every situation, every thing we did or avoided. And although often we are not lying, we are also not telling the whole truth. Just as in the public sphere the fallacious sustains power, in the personal it sustains an image: of coherence, of security, of knowing who we are.
But not everything that shapes or defines us can be considered fallacious. Many of those internal structures—our desires, beliefs, intuitions—were legitimate. What organized us inwardly was not a mistake. That which once shaped us, helped us interpret the world, allowed us to move forward, had its moment and meaning. It sustained us when uncertainty threatened to overwhelm everything. The desire that guided us, the belief that explained the incomprehensible, the self-image that served as refuge: all that functioned as an inner government. It marked the path, ordered conflict, gave direction.
But like any power that has held office too long, that internal power also begins to resist letting go. Even if reality has changed, even if we have changed, what resided within us at another time insists on continuing to mark the way. Not because it still makes sense, but because it does not want to yield its place. It no longer responds to a need: it responds to its will to persist.
And like any power that begins to lose legitimacy but wishes to perpetuate itself, it becomes corrupt. It justifies itself, protects itself, armors itself. Not with crude lies, but with reasons that sound coherent but are not enough. It insists on arguments that no longer explain, but continue to function as a reference frame. It resorts to the false dichotomy to trap us in a choice between two extremes. And to the false cause to reduce any internal conflict to a simple, functional, seamless narrative.
And so, almost without realizing it, we end up reproducing in our inner life the same structure we criticize in politics: a discourse that no longer seeks to transform, but to preserve power, even at the cost of emptying the system it should protect.
The difference is that, in politics, as crude as it may be, someone always benefits, often at the expense of everyone else. But within us, when this logic prevails, nobody wins. What inhabits us—that internal power that insists on remaining beyond the time allotted—no longer cares for us or guides us: it persists at the cost of itself, as if continuity mattered more than the meaning it once provided.
Perhaps the real problem is that, accustomed to the political stage, we have assumed that every government must be replaced immediately by another, without interruption, as if immediate succession were the only way to sustain order. But perhaps, within us, it need not be so. Perhaps we can allow ourselves a vacancy, even if only for a while. Not to fall into emotional anarchy, but to create a space, an interval, where a new direction might emerge. Not to return to who we were, nor to confirm who we are, but to open the possibility of one day being up to what we could become.