Politics Is For The Mediocre

By Osho

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 - he won't 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, and 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 24-hour job. You cannot relax because if you relax you will be left behind. It is pure violence.

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. 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 in politics? Impossible!

A 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!'" And Strange was the name of the politician...

Honesty needs guts. The politician has to wear masks, he has to fulfil the expectations of people, 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.

And the whole world complains about these politicians, but somehow man is so stupid that if he gets out of the clutches of one politician, immediately he enters into the cage of another.

Man has to be freed from his stupid mind; only then will he be free of the politicians. Hence politicians don't want you to be intelligent. For thousands of years they did not allow people to be educated because that was dangerous. Now they allow people to be educated, but the education is such that it makes you less intelligent.

When the child enters the school he is far more intelligent than when he comes back from the university. Those 20 years will destroy much that was immensely valuable. He will carry just words, jargon, theories, knowledge. He will have sold his intelligence and he will have brought home just dead knowledge.

The older generation tries to mould the mind of the new generation. The teacher is just an agent of the older generation. He is the agent: he corrupts the minds of the new, but the corruption is done with such skill that you will not become aware unless you are really alert, watchful.

Courtesy Osho International Foundation and Times of India Speaking Tree