Figmenters

Figmentation: Creating figments of imagination.

Wanted: Figmenters. Must have creative abilities and personality that tends to favor gothic horror stories. May be employed in activism, politics, journalism or law as plaintiff attorneys and be able to create modern boogeymen.

As children, our parents used to make up characters to scare us. In Latin America it is El Hombre del Saco who carries naughty children away in a sack and eats them. In the U.S., it’s the boogeyman who hides under their bed and gets them if they misbehave. In Brazil, it is Cuca, a crocodile woman who steals children who will not go to sleep.

Similarly, we have professionals who are hired to create figments of our imagination to scare us. In the world I usually live in, the world of food, there are plenty of boogeymen such as the idea that everything is made up of chemicals; or pesticides, present in such tiny quantities so as to present no risk, in your food. These are boogeymen because they are fabricated, they are not risky but are made up to scare you to sign up for activist alerts or to scare you into buying alternate products. 

But, surprisingly to me, those are not what scare people the most. A Chapman University survey found that the number one fear is, “Corrupt government officials.” This was a 2021/2022 survey and that has been the number one answer for the last six years. That covers three presidents and a whole host of people in Congress as well as state and local officials.

At the state level, the Washington Post reported last year that, since 2006, 11 out of 18 people serving in the New York States’ top offices, including governors, “succumbed to scandals.” In addition, since 1961, four out of eleven governors have wound up serving prison time in Illinois.

That’s horrible but a professional class of activists, journalists, politicians and talking heads appear to be in the business of demonizing any government officials that have a different political philosophy. They make up or skew facts about presidents, presidential contenders; IRS, DOJ, or FBI officials; Congressional representatives or Supreme Court Justices. 

In the vast majority of cases, most of the people who serve are, unsurprisingly, self-interested. The 1986 Nobel Prize winner economist explained that people going into government are just as self-interested as your everyday garage mechanic or CEO of a large corporation and we would do well to think of their profession as “politics without romance.”

There is no doubt that there are corrupt officials, and they should be drummed out, but facts and factoids are magnified to make virtually any individual appear to be not just guilty, but monsters. In part this is true because bad news sells. A Reuters Institute study found that 42 percent of Americans are trying to avoid it. But those that remain apparently find that, the more vitriolic the attacks, the more interest they generate. 

There is one president and one vice president, 535 members of congress, 50 governors, 2.1 million federal employees, 1,621 mayors and 145 million state and local employees. That’s a pretty large denominator to compare against a very likely small numerator of corrupt officials. The higher you go, the more it matters but it’s also true that the higher you go, the more likely corruption will be exposed by courts, checks and balances, or votes.

We will probably continue to see markets for figmenters casting those who serve in government as boogeymen. Then again, maybe those who disagree with philosophies and outcomes will seek out more logical arguments than those made by the figmenters and the markets for boogeymen will disappear.