Talking About Politics

As long as there are political bodies, there is a need to address politics, because politics is an extension of ethics and metaphysics, and there is always a need to address ethics and metaphysics.  Every person by necessity has some kind of worldview, whether rational and sophisticated or self-contradictory and asinine, and politicians, being people, inevitably govern based upon their worldviews.  Yet politics is often viewed as a topic that should be left out of pedestrian talk.

Americans sometimes go so far as to make jokes about avoiding the subject of politics (as well as religion) in friendly conversations, yet a tendency to avoid confronting a controversial and significant topic is not praiseworthy when such conversation is discouraged in everyday life.  Errors cannot deserve to go without refutation; assumptions cannot deserve to go without being rejected.  Political errors and assumptions are no exceptions, and many people will not recognize them for what they are when their culture does not feature serious political talk.

Politics, like the topics of epistemology, theology, and sexuality, needs to be discussed honestly and rationally.  When a culture does not discuss a matter openly, there is a much higher chance that its people will make and live according to mere assumptions about the subject, with only a small minority refusing to make assumptions.  Since politics affects a great deal of human life, the citizens of a country must suffer the adverse effects of whatever assumptions and ignorances they do not dispel.

Talking about controversial subjects will always be either avoided or strongly discouraged in superficial societies.  If someone cares about truth, then he or she will realize that a culture must not hide from an important issue, even when that issue is unpopular, divisive, and complex.  There are destructive consequences that follow whenever a mass of people collectively prefer to stay silent on a significant matter, and the consequences of failing to rationally approach something as intertwined with philosophy as politics can be devastating.  After all, politics shapes the very way that a society behaves.