They say the mark of a true politician is the ability to take a question once asked, to speak for several minutes at length, and impress upon the asker that their question has been answered when in reality they have said nothing of substance. This ability demonstrates a principle that we are taught quite early when we start to learn how to become effective public speakers, namely that most of the time what you say is irrelevant, instead what is important is how you say it. There are various percentage figures that are often attributed to this principle giving various ratios all of which create a heavy bias towards delivery rather than content.
When you think of the skill set of any public speaker, there are a number of careers that you can consider which require that skill. For example, a teacher needs to be confident addressing large groups of people, they need to be able to speak clearly, to captivate their audience, and be able to explain whatever it is they want to convey with salience. If both of these careers share this skill set, does that mean anyone who is effective in one, could be effective in the other? The immediate answer here can either be yes, or no, depending entirely on how revered or maligned those respective careers are in your mind. To put it another way, if you are disillusioned with the political system and still hold reverence for the education system then you would likely argue the two careers cannot overlap and transitioning from one to the other would be difficult. If however, in reverse you are disillusioned with the education system, and hold the political system in reverence then you would be able to argue the counter point.
To give an example, one defining characteristic that is perceived by the general public is that teachers aim to convey truth and politicians aim to convey lies as truth. You can however make the argument that teachers often find themselves in the position where they have to lie to their students, not because they want to but because the reality is depressing and ultimately the job of a teacher is to inspire and motivate their students to keep learning and growing - something which they won't want to do if you tell them their endeavour is fruitless. There is a reality that is inescapable, that social mobility is not as ubiquitous as we are told when we are children, that inspirational quote "you can be whatever you want to be" is something that breaks down with age as caveats are added and the reality hits you when you realise that certain paths in life are not open to you simply because of where you were born, what colour your skin is, what gender you are perceived to be, among many other things.
What then do politicians and teachers have in common? Well one could argue that both share the job of trying to inspire and motivate - the former need to convince voters to continue to vote for them in order to keep their jobs, in order to do that they need to convince them there is a positive future for them as a reward for doing so. Most people would immediately recoil at the thought of a politician being inspirational, not because there have never been inspirational politicians but because they are rare. In modern history, political agendas pushed to one side, from a purely objective point of view, politicians such as Barack Obama were effective at inspiring others - whether you were one of those who were inspired or not is irrelevant here, to deny they were inspirational to someone somewhere would be delusional - or to borrow from Harry Potter, as Ollivander said "He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great" - exemplifying the fact that greatness is an order of magnitude, not a measure of good or evil.
Indeed one can even go much further and say that some of the greatest politicians throughout history were some of the greatest examples of evil that humanity has ever produced. Yet their aptitude in public speaking and persuasion remains self evident, again demonstrated in many cases by the fact they were elected to their posts. So why do many recoil at the drawing of parallels between desirable and undesirable careers? Perhaps the answer is a reluctance to admit that the number of people in each of those careers who are actually good at their job is comparable. The number of politicians the public would feel comfortable identifying as good at their job is probably comparable in percentage terms to the number of teachers they would identify as such if they received the same exposure in their jobs as a politician does. That might sound harsh at first, but when you break down the number of schools that exist and how they perform, there is a ranking, whether we like to use it as a marker of quality or not it does exist. Education is not a constant, and although a set curriculum exists and inspections are used to check it is being adhered to, the result varies wildly.
What all of this boils down to is the realisation that both of these careers like any other are simply that - careers. The people that do them are doing a job, the only real problem is that they are not jobs that are easy to get into, and once you are in them they are not easy to walk out of and into another career. In this regard both of these careers can really be considered a vocation, in that once you pursue these career paths, you more or less have to commit to pursuing them for life. In the case of a politician those who stay in the job for a long time are often referred to as a career politician with negative connotations, the same disparaging judgement isn't made when it comes to teachers, again this can be chalked up to the former being undesirable and the latter being desirable, but in reality there is something much more sinister at play here - the idea that you have to stay in the same job for life. Politicians perhaps can be seen as the greatest example of our discomfort with that idea, perhaps because they gain the most public attention. They do however represent that permanence regardless of whether we deem their performance worthy of it.
This all raises the question, should any job ever be a job for life? Some vocations come with the expectation that you will stay in that field for life simply because of how much effort it takes to get into it in the first place - for example if you become a Doctor, it is a given that you will be expected to be a Doctor for your entire professional career, in part that is because of what you had to go through to get there but in part it is also because of how difficult it would be to replace you at short notice. As for other careers however, the less significant we perceive each role to be the more forgiving we are when it comes to the thought of someone leaving it - so much so that it is becoming increasingly common for people in general to assume they won't keep the same job throughout their lives. In fact, if you were to ask most people if they wanted to work their current job from now until retirement, the likelihood that they will say yes will relate entirely to their age and how close to retirement they are. The younger the person is who you ask, the longer they will have to work in that job, the more likely they will be to reply with protest and profess desires to do something else - whether they ever follow through on that desire is an entirely different question.
Which brings us to my final point; most people end up staying in the jobs they have up until they are pushed, or something forces them to make a change. They stay in those jobs because there is a sense of security to be gained from having some work, even if it's not right for you. The question is, how many people have pursued jobs that are perceived as lifelong vocations and now feel trapped in those positions, unable to move into any other career and feeling obligated to remain because they recognise how much effort it took them to get there in the first place? If the answer to that question is anything other than zero then by your own admission you have to recognise no matter what job you take as an example, there will be people doing it who really shouldn't be, and the grim reality you might find yourself approaching if your answer was high, is the realisation that the vast majority of people, in every career, are doing jobs they really aren't suited for.
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