The Disease called Politics (1962)

mwkaufma

s/politics/money

davidw

What a bunch of sophomoric blather. "Politics" is just how large groups of humans organize themselves. It can be done well or done poorly. It can be done with a thought to the most vulnerable, where minorities have rights and where it's not simply mob rule. "Politics" is how we decide whether or not to protect certain aspects of the natural world from exploitation, and how much. Or how much to help people who can't make their own way in the world for whatever reason (illness, age, whatever).

PunchTornado

If you expect some arguments in this text, you'll find none. It is just some absolutist language, x is y and y is z.

GaryBluto

Is it just me, or has Hacker News seen an uptick in politics-focused posts and comments recently?

aliasxneo

> But now the game of politics has expanded to the point of embracing the whole of life. It claims to be the only game. If only I had a dollar for every Redditor that has tried to explain to me how "everything is political."

komali2

> It means that politics is not the art of life. Politics does not sustain life or serve it. Rather politics is the organization of power, and power is the enemy of life. For the measure of power is its ability to make life what it would not be; to break, bend, control, crush, direct and destroy life. This smells like anarchist writing to me. I never heard of this writer before, but a cursory search doesn't indicate they're an anarchist, but they are a "counter culturalist," a term I'd also never heard before but I can grok the meaning. I guess this site thought is about "panarchy," which seems to be to be anarchy which lives in peace with other ideologies for the purpose of experimentation and full expression of humanity? > In those notes the basic idea of Panarchy, namely “tolerance for all our tolerant experiments” is spelled out in the most convincing and rational way. Personal and social life is seen as a continuous experience in living where everyone learns from his own or other people’s actions and efforts and in doing so each person advances and develops. Without the freedom to experiment we lack the basic pre-condition for a rich and meaningful human life. > In other words, Panarchy advocates full tolerance and freedom of experimenting in one’s life everywhere and for everyone. https://www.panarchy.org/debellis/onpanarchy.html I find that when I talk to people about the basic tenants of anarchy as envisioned by someone like Kropotkin, they're often surprised. They're expecting men in black balaclavas throwing molotov cocktails, and I'm telling them instead about sharing your extra food with your neighbors. There's quite a few anarchists in this tech scene, most prominent and likely known by readers here would be Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Signal. If you vibed with the idea of the article here, namely that for some reason politicians seem to always be insane and doing mad things, you might enjoy some overviews of anarchism. Keith McHenry is local to people in SF, you may have seen the Food Not Bombs tables out and about, he rewrote the anarchist cookbook to be far more useful: https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html (skip the absolutely atrocious vegan recipes at the end. I respect the man as a thinker but my god not as a cook) or Kropotkin is probably the most readable historical anarchist https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-anarc... . And of course David Graeber, whose frequently gets mentioned here, though his books are often quite long and academic.

jruohonen

I am the poster and what prompted this post was: https://jruohonen.hcommons.org/2026/10/10/eukidsact/ And, yes, "we must call madness madness wherever we see it". But it gets kind of tiring because the insanity show just goes on and on.