I wish I could claim that politics is terrible in a specific country.

It isn’t.

The world’s eyes are trained on American politics. I’m not going to spend a lot of words on it, but if you work as a P.R. for any organisation and- before the welcome party is even over – you’re already pulling overtime deciding how to dress up a Sieg Heil salute for the media, you might want to open Indeed and update your CV, because it’s going to be a long four years.

But I live in England, and politics has been ridiculous for a while, here, too. I used to live in Italy during Berlusconi’s prime, and guess what? It was terrible, there, too. And somehow it has managed not to improve after he died, either.

God, I just turned 36 and – in politics years – I feel like I’m aeons old. I spent 20 years under Berlusconi’s shadow alone. You get a lighter punishment for killing someone.

My point is that watching the electorate choosing a leader feels like watching a post apocalyptic soap opera. Not a good one, either, with clever writing, plot twists, and tridimensional characters. No. We get the villain (the politicians who will inevitably get elected) telling the hero (the electorate) to slathe their body in honey. Then the hero gets swarmed, stung and bitten by wasps and flies, like in the third canto of Dante’s Inferno. Every episode for twenty seasons. And the hero still hasn’t connected the dots.

After twenty seasons of the villain telling the hero to cover themselves in honey, the hero finally understands why they’re always tormented by insects: it’s because women have a right to abortion! And the villains gets elected once again.

Sometimes, the villain will openly post pictures of them with the CEO of Asbestos inc., and tell everybody that they will start shoving asbestos into teddybears.

“But they mean well,” the hero will coo.

After a lifetime of this, I’m starting to see democracy akin to placing a group of toddlers next to an infinity pool filled with fuel, shoving a box full of matches in their pudgy hands, and then congratulating ourselves because this is clearly the best system we can come up with.

But the truth is that I’m just being unfair and jaded. This could work.

This could work, but.

We’ve all had to deal with people. We’ve all heard comments so ignorant that left us speechless. Comments that are followed by an awkward silence broken solely by the sound of your bollocks cascading to the ground.

There’s a reason why, election after election, we’re getting closer and closer to totalitarianism. We can still save ourselves, but if you think that doing nothing and hoping that a collective consciousness will be suddenly ignited by mainstream media, then I have some flying pigs to sell you.

There’s a famous, very old book called The Betrothed by Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni. In it, a guy called Renzo needs to see a lawyer because of reasons, and decides to bring him some chickens as a gift (it’s set in the 17th century.) So he grabs a couple of chickens by their feet, and goes. As he walks, the chickens – now finding themselves dangling upside down and facing each other – start pecking at each other.

We’re like Renzo’s chickens.

Instead of focusing on the hand carring us as an offering to a rich somebody and start a class war, we’re too busy pecking at each other in an endless culture war.

The problem isn’t just that we are gullible; it’s that we actively choose not to learn. The educational systems, which were once designed to foster critical thinking and debate, have become little more than factories churning out passive consumers rather than informed citizens. The irony is that in an age of unprecedented access to information, we seem more ignorant than ever. We are so overwhelmed with data that we can no longer discern fact from fiction, truth from spin. Worse still, the tools designed to help us learn — social media, news outlets, online forums — have become instruments of manipulation, drowning out any meaningful discussion with a cacophony of misinformation.

And so, the cycle continues. The electorate votes, the politicians continue to lie, and the machinery of totalitarianism grows ever more efficient. One right at the time, freedom is shaved off. It doesn’t come in the form of a dramatic coup or an overt military dictatorship (not yet, at least,) it comes in subtler way.

Like a predator that doesn’t shove you in a van to spirit you away, but undermine your confidence with venomous narcissism, controls who you can see, keeps you financially dependent… until fear of upsetting the captor becomes the only reality we know.

No one’s stopping you from speaking out, they’re just making it so inconvenient that you stop doing it.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The electorate can still save itself, but only if it wakes up and takes responsibility for its own education. The real work begins now — outside the classrooms, away from the politicians, and in the places where actual knowledge resides: in books, in conversations, in critical thinking. It’s time for a revolution of the mind, one that demands self-education, asks uncomfortable questions, and, above all, refuses to be spoon-fed lies.

There are books, there are podcasts, there are actual experts out there, and, no, they don’t appear on your social media feed between influencers doing the Macarena.

Surround yourself with good people.

Organising is the next step. Once the electorate begins to understand the depth of the problem, it must come together to challenge the system. The power lies not in individual protests or isolated cries of dissent, but in collective action, in the shared will to demand real change. No more blind obedience. No more accepting the status quo. The future of democracy depends on the ability of the people to recognise the wolf in sheep’s clothing and to say, “Enough.”

If we don’t act, we’ll find ourselves in a society where questioning anything is considered subversive, and the only “truth” is what’s been handed down from on high. If you want democracy to survive, you need to read, you need to ask questions, and most importantly, you need to start holding politicians accountable.

Or soon, we won’t be in the driver’s seat anymore.

Or rather, we’ll still be.

Like a toddler holding a steering wheel while the car’s being driven by a drunk uncle who’s just trying to get to the pub.