4 ms·

It's not though, is it?

• int_19h 8y ago
  We are conditioned in many ways to think of the myriads of unwritten rules and customs that surround our day-to-day interaction as natural and obvious. But they are a product of our society and its culture, and a very political product at that - they are what makes abstract hierarchies of power in that society concrete. It manifests even in very simple things, like how you address others (think about things like the T-V distinction, or, in some languages, how different names the person has can be used in different combinations to claim or defer to authority). When you have more than one person, and they interact with each other, they need to deal with things like authority, rules, fairness etc - all of which are political. The reason why I wrote "three" is because it's the minimum at which you can have the majority forcing some authority or rules on the unwilling minority, which is when that politics becomes explicit.