[warning: by participating in this thread you run the risk of breaking some forum rules if you aren't careful. Doing so may result in moderator action; this is a loaded topic]
[Also, totally not based on any other thread ever. Ever.]
It keeps coming up, so I thought.... well, who better to make a thread about it? I do all the controversial shit. This one's gonna be run a little differently though -- I'm asking you all to police yourselves. THAT'S RIGHT -- I WON'T REPORT YOU IN THIS THREAD. No matter what! I'll ask any participants to please take responsibility for what you post, and if you see someone stepping over the line, in the words of Captain Planet, "The Power is Yours." It'll be on your own heads to keep this topic from getting out of hand; my hands, in this topic, are tied behind my back.
It's the least I can do, since this might very well resemble atheist-baiting. That is not my intent at all. I'm looking for open, frank, honest discussion.
So here's the question of the day. Given the opportunity, how would you go about getting rid of politics? I promise, this is not a trap. I might even share my own plan later.
How would I get rid of politics?
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=298Cw3_qGwE[/yt]
ahem. Tyranny seems to work -- you don't see many demonstrations in Pyongyang. But destruction of any particular brand of politics is, by its own nature, a political act, so I can't see "getting rid of politics" as even a logically sustainable sentence, let alone an idea you can actually carry out somehow.
Politics is all the stuff involved in government. Without an actual government there is no politics. Anarchy is what you're left with basically.
And to people that want to say things that basically come down to "yeah but any type of decision making is politics", I'll say "no, no it isn't".
People love reducing things but that doesn't make it true. Believing that your pet can talk is not a religion, asking your neighbour for sugar is not capitalism, closing a door is not science, telling someone to go get a job is not politics.
So yeah, if you want to get rid of politics, have an anarchist revolution
You'd think so, but you'd be wrong
Kill everything.
I'm serious. The best, and most absolute, way to eradicate politics is to remove all that practices it and engages in it. Taking a broad definition of "politics", that could be said to be everyone in the human race. We all engage in "office politics" and such, and so, the only way to remove all semblance of "politics" is to remove all humans.
You love me?
I'd remove all opposing ideas. You can't have politics without conflicting arguments.
I agree with this gentleman. Any act against current political institutions would be considered a political act in itself. Once politics is removed what then? There will be groups trying to lead, people wanting to rule. There's no escaping politics.Originally Posted by mdk
For a world truly without politics, let's take a spin in my time machine to the age where Neanderthals stumped around. Oh wait...even then, they had leaders, shaman and all sorts of people that influenced the social dynamics of their group.
Wow...never realised sociology would pay off
Elly, you could disarm the entire world...and a day later, some guy would get all Shaka Zulu and figure out the most effective way to modify spears to use on other people. (Yes, he did that; he transformed Zulu warfare with his system).
That's part of human nature, the adaptability thing. So too is the cooperative/competitive pack mentality of a social animal. You could do away with politics on a certain level only to have it grow back in a few generations and the mistakes repeat themselves, even if everyone is too hubristic to realize they're making them. Not because history magically repeats itself so much as that human nature is fundamentally unchanged and people tend to follow certain well worn behavioral paths in large groups. We react in certain similar ways to certain stimuli, for the most part. Everyone? No. Most people? Yes.
We organize into family units, small village communities and ultimately towns, cities, provinces and nations because we are social animals, and that means some lead, some follow and the leaders know how to keep the followers in line. A lot of us are very hardwired to obey authority, that could be social programming, but it could be a biological as well.
A variety of utopian political ideologies fail largely because they attempt to ignore human nature. It's powerful and it hasn't changed much since Thucydides did his writing; you can read "The Peloponnesian War" and have that sense that they had the same problems. You can read Tacitus' accounts of his time in Roman politics and get that same deja vu. (You can read Aristophanes and Chaucer and get dirty jokes, which is where I tend to gravitate toward.)
Get rid of politics? It'll not happen without a radical and fundamental change to human nature that has yet to occur in thousands of years of written history...evolution tends to work more slowly than that; mammalian instincts of the sort we possess came about over millions of years of it. Ever since the Dinosaurs saved us from the reapers, that is.
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"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
- Bertrand Russell
You would like Xenophon's Education of Cyrus.
Xenophon was a romantic that felt that tyranny had its uses. Not unlike Machiavelli. But these guys were more into practical methods of ruling than anything. Xenophon, like Plato, saw the clamor and disorderliness of the mob that demanded the poisoning of Socrates and sought a system by which to order society. (Not a coincidence, both were students of Socrates) Athens was a pretty fucked up place, much like Paris during the Terror, basically.
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"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
- Bertrand Russell
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