PRESTIGE GAMES
The secret to electoral success? Promising sun to the cold and shade to the hot, preferably in the same sentence. If we map political language, which is inherently ambiguous, onto logical and temporal variables, their seasonal "truths" translate like the expiration date of a yogurt taken out of the refrigerator. Politics is a system in which coherence borders on the thermodynamics of a vacuum, and we can model it as a sleight of hand. Political art is built with bricks made of dreams held together by mortar: the principle of explosion (ex Falso sequitur quodlibet), meaning that if a system accepts both a proposition and its opposite as true, then any conclusion can be drawn. It's a magic show where the voter hopes to be deceived again next time. The politician suffering from—fantastic lies—first convinces himself of the lies he must tell and then convinces the electorate. The illusionist's hat is always empty: the system is made of doub...