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"I know people are going to say 'Oh, your polls are wrong, you don't know what you're doing,'" said Bozinoff.  "But in my mind, the Liberals kind of dropped the ball and the Tories just, you know, beat them at their ground game and got their supporters out."

A pollster is telling us that there's nothing wrong with the methodology they use to forecast election results - it's the people who simply don't get how the system is supposed to work.

Why does this sound familiar?  Oh wright - it's because we've heard this same message before:

"But the methodology does work," Wright told the Star in a telephone interview form the Ipsos head office in Paris.  "We do $2.6 billion of research a year out of this corporation, and if it was all broken no one would be using it."

A confident salesman, that Wright; he knows just what to say to convince us he's boss at this prediction stuff.  Of course, it's sales, not polling, that's his primary function - he does what he does to make money first, to provide useful information for public consumption second.  The win comes before accomplishment; the what comes before the why.

Know where else this is common?  In politics.  Politics, too, is about sales; politicians are competing for votes and Parties are competing for seats in much the same was as puffed up peacocks compete for the attention of peahens.

Politics is no longer about debating policy, it's about besting opponents.  Democracy has become pugilism; the last man standing gets declared winner, regardless of what they did (or didn't do) to get there.  Capitalism is free-market economics; if we strip out regulation and focus on competition, the best of whatever will clearly emerge as victor.

Right?

If aggressive competition is the best way of doing things, why do we have a democratic deficit and a growing wealth gap?  Why have we come to a point where the success of the economy has been deemed of higher value than the well-being of the people it's meant to support - resulting in structural deficits and healthcare woes?

"We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market."

The Pope, a man who serves as the head of the Catholic Church, theoretically a conduit to God, is telling us we can no longer trust in the invisible hand.

The sellers of the world are becoming increasingly aggressive, increasingly belligerent at the same time as the services they sell are increasingly failing to achieve their objectives.  The system that is supposed to raise all ships is instead lighting the kindling of revolution.

And the people we look to to tell us everything is alright are increasingly telling us we're on our own.

We are on our own, but we're not alone.  After all, we have each other.

Many hands make light work, when they work together.  That's the big secret, the answer we keep searching for.  

We need only become conscious of it.