Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe in them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic--one reason both politics and magic tend, just about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud.
Graeber, David, Debt, The First Five Thousand Years, Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn, London, 2014, pg. 342
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