Chapter 8: Politics

Politics happens when a group of intelligent primates form a community. Politics also happens when communities manage economies: of resources, of talents, of trading, of currencies, of people.

Imagine a small village of around 100 people. Not difficult: there were thousands of them scattered around medieval Europe. Ignore, for the moment, that such places were subject to macro-economic feudal systems. Any such village was inevitably subject to the problem of scarce resources; food, metals, land, medicines, public utilities . . . They would develop means of deriving the best from artisans (wheelwrights, farmers, bakers, smiths, doctors, etc.) for the rest of the community by common agreement from the rest of that community as best they could.

There would, statistically, also be a village idiot; an unfortunate produced from ill-advised mating, genetic disorder or physical accident. There would also be a half dozen persons of varying degrees of sociopathic tendencies. Such a village would eventually elect a sheriff and a magistrate (or priest) to deal with the disturbances such dysfunctional behaviors generate. 

Now -- multiply this village by 1,000 or a metropolis of 1,000,000. Expand the varieties of resources that need to be managed; of talents that need to be managed; of personal expectations that need to be managed; and the statistical likelihood that our village idiots will bedevil the best of intentions. Everyone will want a say on how the resources are to be distributed, how the miscreants are to be controlled, and how, of course, everyone gets the best deal while paying the least. 

And thus we have Politics. And elected Politicians to create the Policies. And Laws to enforce those policies. And Administrators to encode those laws into Regulations. And Lawyers to interpret the regulations. And Judges and Courts to consider those interpretations. And enough Public Servants to enforce all the laws and rulings on a bewildered population constantly and consistently. 

Somewhere along the line, in a funny-movie speeded-up acceleration of our 100-strong village to a 7 Billion world-spanning sophisticated human race, we have arrived at a complex, global, expensive, unpopular and deeply divisive political Machine that boasts more public servants and politicians and hangers-on and other miscellaneous parasites than there are "wheelwrights, farmers, bakers, smiths, doctors, etc.". The mundane mechanics of self-organisation are replaced with ideologies of control. In order to deal with the potential of tens of thousands of dissidents, or even sociopaths, there evolved a need for GOVERNMENT.