Futurist Jamais Cascio is terribly offended that the “staggeringly rich” Peter Thiel — an “I got mine, Jack” libertarian — wants to escape from politics. Cascio calls this the “end of politics” delusion:
Unless Thiel means that libertarians must live in splendid isolation from society and each other, he’s going to have a problem.
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Politics is part of a healthy society — it’s what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It’s not about partisanship, it’s about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space — they’re symptoms of politics, not causes.Calls to get rid of politics can therefore mean one of two things: getting rid of persistent relationships with other people; or getting rid of differential goals. Since I don’t see too many of the folks who talk about escaping politics also talking about becoming lone isolationists, the only reasonable presumption is that they’re really talking about eliminating disagreements.
It’s the latest version of the notion that “a perfect world is one where everyone agrees with me.”
Just as you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you — and it’s even harder to escape.
Further, politics may be part of a healthy society, but it’s an even bigger part of an unhealthy society.
I think it’s a grave mistake to say that politics is what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. Isn’t a market a group of people with differential goals? Aren’t contracts persistent relationships?
The key distinction is that politics is what you get when shifting coalitions vie for power over resources they don’t own and aren’t really responsible for, while a market is what you get when property rights are well defined, and all transactions are voluntary trades between clear owners of resources.
It’s not always clear how to define all property rights in non-overlapping ways, so we often resort to politics, but that doesn’t mean that more politics yields more health.