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During a panel discussion at this year’s ThinkFest in Lahore, I declared that these days people engage with politics the way they do with a cola brand. After the discussion, a handful of young folk approached me to ask exactly what I had meant by this. I was simply referencing a part of the book The Fragile Absolute by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
He uses the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi analogy to describe modern ideology. Žižek writes that the very idea of consumer choice is a farce because, even though Coke and Pepsi are chemically almost identical, people express identities through choosing one over the other. According to Žižek, our voting choices are made in a similar manner and are therefore superficial.
Choosing a political party or leader today is not so different from picking a bottle of cola off a supermarket shelf. Most people do not buy a soft drink based on a breakdown of its chemical ingredients, and the exact same logic applies to how we vote. Voters do not dive into a party’s manifesto. Instead, they buy into a brand identity. When you examine the mechanics of a modern election campaign, the parallel between a supermarket aisle and a ballot paper becomes clear.
