On politics

The word "politics" comes from the Greek term "politika" and means "affairs of the city" (Gr. polis = city). It is the art of managing the affairs of a community (village, city, county, state, union of states, world, etc.) with the aim of enabling a peaceful coexistence of citizens in a just society with a fair distribution of wealth. This aim involves the management of education, health care, social security, defence, economics, and many other communitarian affairs.

The ultimate tools and modes of political management politics has brought about during the last millennia are: state, governance, democracy, capitalism, military defence, military alliances, state unions, united nations, and many other systems and organizations. Yet, we still confront immense poverty, injustice, social chaos and conflict, war, illiteracy, misdistribution of health resources, and other imbalances and infelicities in the world, which politics has not been able to cope with. On the contrary, a considerable amount of imbalances and infelicities is caused by politics itself. An example is the current disastrous situation in the Near and Middle East produced by the former Soviet Union, Russia, USA, Israel, EU, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and their allies. The countries and societies (such as Palestine, Irak, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia) they have destroyed in synergy with domestic powers, will hardly be able to recover in the next 500 years. The next country to be destroyed succeeding Syria's extinction will be the last link, Iran, in the chain of devastation so as to create a large desert from North Africa to India.

I am convinced that without a fundamental revision and change of its basic ideas and values, politics will never be able to fulfill its mission to enable a peaceful coexistence of citizens in a just society with a fair distribution of wealth. The reason is:

1. The basic ideas politics has achieved in the course of its history, that is, the idea of state and the idea of democracy, are suboptimal. Both are not only deficient inventions, but they are also prone to crime. Especially the state, that is, every state, due to its egoistic-authoritarian constitution grounded in the monopoly on the use of force, is inescapably an immoral and criminal superstructure over individuals, i.e., its own citizens. For (i) it is primarily interested in its own existence and persistene to the effect that it is ferocious and violent towards its citizens, on the one hand, and foreign states, on the other. Violence against a foreign state need not necessarily consist in a military attack, war, or cyber attack. Even a mono- or multinational economic or financial embargo against a state is crime against its impoverished citizens as human beings. (ii) In addition, the ferociousness and violence by the state towards individual citizens and foreign states is supported by regular democratic elections in that citizens implicitly approve by voting their state's constitution, existence, and behavior. In this way, citizens are democratically involved and democratically participate in their state's ferociousness and violence. So, from a political-ethical point of view both the state and its populace represent constitutionally sanctioned criminals.
2. Human beings, including myself, are morally and intellectually imperfect and incurable egoists. Both as politicians and as citizens they will often fail to do the best they can.