Paranoid, the Great Detective can trust no one, least of all himself. Who taught him to fear the Other, after all? What were they hiding about the Self? Who is he working for? Who is anyone working for? What does working mean in this instance? Who is a boss, and who is a laborer, when the only produced good is ephemeral information of, at best, dubious accuracy?
Still, and despite his best efforts, he lives in a society, if not quite a state. He speaks, because he is handed a microphone, and they listen, or at least stand on the grass in front of the podium; they cheer when he pauses, applaud when he stops for breath, laugh at what he is only dimly suspicious are jokes. He promises them anything that comes to mind: more freedom, more health, more money, more leisure; less fear, less surveillance, less linguistic drift. Progress is regression is progression, after all, like the wheel on a penny-farthing.
He tries to break away, and they are waiting with flags and banners with his face on them. He drinks himself into a stupor and tries to drown himself in a fountain, and when he awakes, face up in six inches of mondegreen water, the press is there on the pavement to get his latest statement. He plays along, and they quote him; breaks away and they cheer. When he is elected, he stabs buttons in a mania, desperate to find the one that shatters the system, that rains fire down upon this idyll.
False hope, as they all are: the power he was promised was always only ever contingent. The cap of the pyramid cannot escape the stones laid below.