CARIBBEAN | Politics: The Price of Indifference — Plato’s Warning and Jamaica’s Choice

Politics did not become a four-letter word by accident — and it will not be redeemed by cynicism - Most people who offer themselves for public life in Jamaica are not thieves. That sentence is so rarely spoken aloud that it has begun to sound like a defence.

MONTEGO BAY,  Jamaica September 13, 2026 | Calvin G Brown | - Some 2,400 years ago, in a borrowed evening at the house of Cephalus, Socrates laid a small trap for his friends. Good men, he argued, do not chase office; they shoulder it reluctantly, the way one shoulders a burden nobody else will lift. And the penalty for refusing to lift it? You will be governed by someone worse than yourself. Plato set it down in the first book of the Republic, and it has been rattling around Western politics ever since — usually in a snappier paraphrase the old man never actually wrote.

The mangling has not dented the truth of it. It remains the most exact description of Jamaican political life available in any language.

Consider the arithmetic of an ordinary Tuesday. A constituency meeting is called; eleven people turn up, four of them related to the candidate. By Friday, a bar in the same division holds thirty men who can tell you precisely what is wrong with the Government, the Opposition, the councillor and the Member — not one of whom could name the date of the last parish council sitting. We speak of apathy as though the bill for it will arrive later. The bill is not coming. It has been paid, in instalments, for years.

We do not breed them

Our national conversation forgets, with impressive consistency, that there is no farm. Nowhere on this island is there a facility where politicians are cultivated from seed, pruned for integrity and shipped out at election time. They come from us. From the teachers’ common room and the credit union board, from the deacon’s bench and the union hall, from the family that has held the same market stall since before Independence.

A political party is not a factory. It is a magnet — it gathers the small minority of citizens interested enough in the business of governance to surrender their evenings, their privacy, their marriages and, increasingly, their peace of mind to it.

And most of them are not thieves. The overwhelming majority of people who offer themselves for public life are ordinary citizens with an unreasonable appetite for other people’s troubles: the member who quietly covers a funeral contribution from her own account, the councillor taking calls at two in the morning about a burst main, the candidate who loses, settles the campaign debt himself, and turns up the following Sunday to help anyway.

The few who spoil the barrel

It would be naive, though, to pretend the other kind does not exist. Some enter the arena the way a man enters a shop after closing — not to serve, but to take. They read elective office as a shortcut to overnight wealth: a procurement file nudged here, a contract steered there, a constituency fund with generous intentions and no receipts. Their damage does not stop at the Treasury. They price the entire trade.

How a noble word turned foul

Politics — the oldest craft we have for organising strangers into a common life — must now be whispered. To call a man political in Jamaica is no longer to describe his vocation; it is to allege something about his character. A dozen scandals get amortised across thousands of honest servants, and the market sets its price accordingly.

The real cost is not the money stolen. It is the woman who decides not to run.

The surgeon, the accountant, the young attorney who studies the arena, weighs the vilification of her children against the salary and the scrutiny, and concludes: not for me. That is Socrates’ penalty being collected in full — not in some distant chamber, but in the quiet, private decisions of the people we most needed to say yes.

Police the craft, not the calling

Politics is not intrinsically corrupt, any more than banking, medicine or journalism. Each is a craft with power attached, and power left unpoliced curdles — nowhere on earth has it behaved otherwise. The question facing a democracy is never whether its politicians are angels. It is whether its institutions are built on the assumption that they are not.

So: an Integrity Commission with teeth and deadlines rather than a filing cabinet with a letterhead. Campaign financing disclosure that shows who paid for the bunting and what they expect in return. An access to information regime that answers rather than acknowledges.

An Auditor General’s department whose reports are debated in Gordon House rather than filed in it. A press that stays awake between elections. And the citizen’s own share of the labour — turning up, asking, and voting in local government polls as though they matter, because they do.

Make the work worth having

Then comes the harder argument, the one that wins no applause on a platform. If we want the best and brightest in the business of governance, we must stop designing a profession that only the wealthy, the reckless or the hungry will enter.

Pay representatives properly and transparently, so that office need not be financed by other means. Give them a dignified way in and a dignified way out — a life after politics that is not exile. Demand everything of their conduct and nothing of their poverty.

Two and a half thousand years on, the old man’s trap still snaps shut on the same hand. The ruling gets done either way. The only open question is by whom — and the answer has always depended less on the ambition of the few than on the attention of the many.

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