7 ms·

Against Persuasion

51 points by Petiver 5y ago

hashkb 5y ago
I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
- Leparamour 5y ago
  >why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong. Maybe he was on the autism spectrum?
- drooby 5y ago
  Perhaps Socrates was not in fact wise….But perhaps he would have told you that.
  - programmarchy 5y ago
    He did tell us that, but nobody believed him!
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    He was literally "stoic" which is a wisdom that you can't change most things in the world so you survive as best you can and if you can't you accept that you can't control when your life ends either. If people still read the Classics, this would be widely known as table-stakes.
    - kritiko 5y ago
      Socrates was not a stoic. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium roughly 100 years after Socrates’ death.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Speaking truth to power has always had its risks, yes. But, wisdom isn't the same as self preservation. Down that road is acquiescence, and cowardice. Perhaps he made a choice: to be remembered as unprincipled in the face of personal risk, or to die in sacrifice to his principles and be a guiding light for those who seek the truth for millenia to come.
- User23 5y ago
  Socrates is attested not just by Plato, who was a huge fan boy, but also by Aristophanes who didn't care for him and Xenophon who was fairly neutral.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  Based on my readings of the contradictions in the various accounts, I would say he intended to die. He, in effect, I think, found a way of enacting the story of Empedocles, where Empedocles tries to die by jumping into a volcano so he will have just seemingly vanished and be believed to have ascended to godhood but was revealed by his bronze sandals. And in some ways seems reminiscent of Yukio Mishima. And it seems to have worked, to a degree. Over 2,000 years later, everyone from layman to politician invokes his name and death as often as they do Jesus. Not existing is often a really good way of kind of existing seemingly forever.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Is it dumb? Only if you believe self-preservation is more important than everything else at all costs. He chose to remain faithful to speaking truth (or what he believed to be true and asking questions to humbly discover it) rather than acquiesce to a bunch of manipulative tyrants. Such actions not only commit you to stand by the truth in thought, word, and deed, but they inspire others to do the same and thus disperse the evil of the world. It was a blow to the systemic lies of myth and sophistry employed by the powerful of the world. Socrates did not choose death. He chose truth while accepting that he would be killed by those in power. Big difference, except for a utilitarian. Now whether he should have chosen exile, I don't know. In some sense, what he chose is heroic and more inspiring than skipping town. Christian martyrdom is like this. A Christian remains steadfast in the truth even to the point of death. This is a faithfulness to Truth that cannot be destroyed by evil men who would use fear to part us from the truth and toss us back into the darkness and slavery of lies. In remaining faithful to the truth, the martyr truly lives and is truly happy no matter what pain comes his way, whereas some men spend decades rotting in the misery of lies. The martyr loves the truth to the point of the extinction of self. He also dies in anticipation of the Beatific Vision. This is the greatest fulfillment of a rational being wherein the doors of the soul are flung open to the infinite fullness of truth. In the vanity of the City of Man, on the other hand, men love themselves to the point of the extinction of truth and thus live in death and misery. The truth will set you free and so in a sense Socrates died as free of a man as you might have reasonably expected a pagan to be in his position.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- playdead 5y ago
  > I still think Plato invented Socrates. No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his conversations. > If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened. Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the Crito.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  We all die, mostly in dumb ways (cancer, sick bed, car accidents, obesity, etc.) The smart way to die?
JadeNB 5y ago
I know it's a cheap way of thinking about it, but I just can't get over writing a whole article (on further reading: a whole book) trying to convince your audience that they shouldn't be trying to persuade people. (Of course, that's not the whole of the point—it's that discovery should be a collaborative process, not a one-sided process of the 'right' imposing their worldview on the 'wrong'—but writing a Boston Review article, or, rather, a book from which a Boston Review article is excerpted, is a pretty one-sided process.)
09bjb 5y ago
The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve your mental schema of the world.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel that something they value is threatened by the other side's position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't matter existentially to them?
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    People only have so much mental bandwidth. If you lived completely alone, and one day someone walked up and started talking to you, and it was the only person you'd seen that month, you might take hours to talk to that person. You might thoughtfully consider their position, even if you didn't agree with it. We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of space for ourselves in our own heads.
- bamboo2 5y ago
  Psychedelics.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games". But such techniques are merely tools without specific morality or ethics - never give the human a free pass on morality or ethics because only humans can make such decisions.
coding123 5y ago
I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that, we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).
- nonomaybeyes 5y ago
  I don't think it's that symmetric. Generally it's the faction that holds the power that doesn't want to consider anything other than its own perspective. The lower factions understand the perspectives of the others perfectly well.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    In the current situation in the US, which faction holds the power? I would say neither clearly holds the power. The Senate is split 50-50. The conservatives hold the Supreme Court, and the liberals hold the House and the Presidency. And those have flipped in recent elections. So both sides are fighting as hard as they can, because they are this close to winning control. But "fighting as hard as you can" is not conducive to thoughtfully listening to the other side.
- jfengel 5y ago
  The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-do-not-as-i-say/?mtrref=undefined&gwh=7F86A6DD2A809C0106EC38EB7D3062C9&gwt=pay&assetType=PAYWALL https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall) Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg). Your statement is probably true, but it's as a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. If one side insists long enough that that the other side is literally evil, they won't be understood no matter how hard their opponents try. Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals. Instead, the response is usually to do the same thing even harder -- which works, because it generates enthusiastic support from the far right and grudging support from the center, while compromise bores everybody. It eventually resulted in Trump, whose primary skill is in being deliberately offensive. And it would have worked again, had a literal pandemic not intervened. He remains incredibly popular with the right -- not because he tries to understand liberals, but because he specifically rejects the notion that there's anything there to understand. This conclusion is repugnant, and I rejected it for a very long time. But it seems inescapable. And I have no idea what to recommend, because it seems clear that no amount of me trying harder to understand is going to help. I do believe, however, that additional calls for equivalence are detrimental. They deny the reality that the split is asymmetric, and therefore shunt us into lines of thought that will continue to prove ineffective.
gringoDan 5y ago
This reminds me of a Slate Star Codex post, Epistemic Learned Helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn... Essentially, this essay argues that sometimes it is rational to ignore attempts at persuasion altogether – there is always someone more adept than you at arguing their point, and since they are so convincing you are incapable of distinguishing the truth, so you fall back on your Bayesian prior.
- aeneasmackenzie 5y ago
  40K said it best: “An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded”.
smoldesu 5y ago
This article, for all of it's words, doesn't really justify it's thesis at all. In one hand, it declares that we all must put aside our differences to pursue lives of ethical piety, and in the other hand it demands that we cannot ask questions to get there. At no point along the essay does it seem that the author entertains a middle ground between the two, which frankly confuses me even more. And for all the Socrates-bashing they indulge in, they seemingly forget that the purpose of a Socratic Seminar is not to walk away feeling personally dejected, but mentally enlightened. If all you can take away from it is offense, then why bother learning anything in the first place? Persuasion is a two-way street. Rhetoric is not. If you dislike the way someone says something, then don't conflate that with the actual thing they're saying.
- fluentmundo 5y ago
  No idea where you got the notion that the author is Socrates-bashing or that the author “demands that we cannot ask questions.” The piece is so obviously a love letter to and defense of Socrates! You seem to have completely misread it. The author obviously thinks persuasion is “a two-way street,” that asking questions is good, and that Socratic dialogue leaves people more enlightened: it helps make their ignorance more precise.
ZoharAtkins 5y ago
I wrote a full length response to this article here. Basically, I think it raises two questions: 1) what does the socratic mode miss? 2) is it better to have a conversation between two socratic types, or does does socratic dialogue require one dupe? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-aspire-to-be-socratic https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-aspire...
mariodiana 5y ago
The lament in this essay is that we're not open to persuasion in our politics. How about considering that politics itself is the problem. A person of a more libertarian bent, like myself, would assert that it's the conflation of government and society, the political and the social, that's the problem. They are separate spheres of human activity. That same sort of person would tell you that politics is a method for conflict resolution, given the inescapable fact of force in human relations. Politics is about force. The social, by contrast precludes the use of force. Society is about cooperation. If you accept the above view, you try to reign in what politics applies to. But that is not at all what our politics is like today. Today, we try to do all sorts of things through the power of government. We inject force into aspects of society that should instead be left to cooperation. In fact, we go beyond that. We consider that use of force moral, since it's in the service of the pursuit of "utopia." I don't expect non-libertarians to agree. I just want to point out that no one should be shocked at all the fighting in the political sphere. Moreover, I would further assert that no one should kid himself or herself that "openness" or "persuasion" is the solution. Lastly, I would point out that when the question "how should government accomplish such-and-such" is posed to someone of libertarian bent, no amount of persuasion is possible, one way or the other. All arguments are superficial. At the bottom, they ignore the point that government shouldn't.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "Politics" in general is how groups of people make collective decisions. If you move that decision-making out of the realm of government, those decisions will still be made, and still be made by politics, but will typically not involve some of the affected.
  - mariodiana 5y ago
    I emphatically do not accept your definition. Politics is the mechanism for controlling and administering force used to preserve the peaceful cooperation of human society. My whole point is that the political and the social has been conflated.

51 points by Petiver 5y ago

I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.

Leparamour 5y ago
>why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong. Maybe he was on the autism spectrum?
drooby 5y ago
Perhaps Socrates was not in fact wise….But perhaps he would have told you that.
- programmarchy 5y ago
  He did tell us that, but nobody believed him!
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  He was literally "stoic" which is a wisdom that you can't change most things in the world so you survive as best you can and if you can't you accept that you can't control when your life ends either. If people still read the Classics, this would be widely known as table-stakes.
  - kritiko 5y ago
    Socrates was not a stoic. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium roughly 100 years after Socrates’ death.
klyrs 5y ago
Speaking truth to power has always had its risks, yes. But, wisdom isn't the same as self preservation. Down that road is acquiescence, and cowardice. Perhaps he made a choice: to be remembered as unprincipled in the face of personal risk, or to die in sacrifice to his principles and be a guiding light for those who seek the truth for millenia to come.
User23 5y ago
Socrates is attested not just by Plato, who was a huge fan boy, but also by Aristophanes who didn't care for him and Xenophon who was fairly neutral.
apocalypstyx 5y ago
Based on my readings of the contradictions in the various accounts, I would say he intended to die. He, in effect, I think, found a way of enacting the story of Empedocles, where Empedocles tries to die by jumping into a volcano so he will have just seemingly vanished and be believed to have ascended to godhood but was revealed by his bronze sandals. And in some ways seems reminiscent of Yukio Mishima. And it seems to have worked, to a degree. Over 2,000 years later, everyone from layman to politician invokes his name and death as often as they do Jesus. Not existing is often a really good way of kind of existing seemingly forever.
bobthechef 5y ago
Is it dumb? Only if you believe self-preservation is more important than everything else at all costs. He chose to remain faithful to speaking truth (or what he believed to be true and asking questions to humbly discover it) rather than acquiesce to a bunch of manipulative tyrants. Such actions not only commit you to stand by the truth in thought, word, and deed, but they inspire others to do the same and thus disperse the evil of the world. It was a blow to the systemic lies of myth and sophistry employed by the powerful of the world. Socrates did not choose death. He chose truth while accepting that he would be killed by those in power. Big difference, except for a utilitarian. Now whether he should have chosen exile, I don't know. In some sense, what he chose is heroic and more inspiring than skipping town. Christian martyrdom is like this. A Christian remains steadfast in the truth even to the point of death. This is a faithfulness to Truth that cannot be destroyed by evil men who would use fear to part us from the truth and toss us back into the darkness and slavery of lies. In remaining faithful to the truth, the martyr truly lives and is truly happy no matter what pain comes his way, whereas some men spend decades rotting in the misery of lies. The martyr loves the truth to the point of the extinction of self. He also dies in anticipation of the Beatific Vision. This is the greatest fulfillment of a rational being wherein the doors of the soul are flung open to the infinite fullness of truth. In the vanity of the City of Man, on the other hand, men love themselves to the point of the extinction of truth and thus live in death and misery. The truth will set you free and so in a sense Socrates died as free of a man as you might have reasonably expected a pagan to be in his position.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
playdead 5y ago
> I still think Plato invented Socrates. No, he was an actual historical person. Plato of course wrote a more literary depiction of him, not a direct transcript of his conversations. > If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? You should probably actually read the dialogues (at least the Apology and the Crito) and you'll understand what happened. Socrates explicitly chose not to escape prison and to go through with the execution, and he gives his reasons in the Crito.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
We all die, mostly in dumb ways (cancer, sick bed, car accidents, obesity, etc.) The smart way to die?

JadeNB 5y ago

I know it's a cheap way of thinking about it, but I just can't get over writing a whole article (on further reading: a whole book) trying to convince your audience that they shouldn't be trying to persuade people. (Of course, that's not the whole of the point—it's that discovery should be a collaborative process, not a one-sided process of the 'right' imposing their worldview on the 'wrong'—but writing a Boston Review article, or, rather, a book from which a Boston Review article is excerpted, is a pretty one-sided process.)

09bjb 5y ago

The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve your mental schema of the world.

throwawaysea 5y ago
I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel that something they value is threatened by the other side's position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't matter existentially to them?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  People only have so much mental bandwidth. If you lived completely alone, and one day someone walked up and started talking to you, and it was the only person you'd seen that month, you might take hours to talk to that person. You might thoughtfully consider their position, even if you didn't agree with it. We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of space for ourselves in our own heads.
bamboo2 5y ago
Psychedelics.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games". But such techniques are merely tools without specific morality or ethics - never give the human a free pass on morality or ethics because only humans can make such decisions.

coding123 5y ago

I think the largest problem of persuasion right now is that no one (left or right) is willing to really try to understand what it is like in the shoes of the other. Until we get past that, we're just going to keep fighting. The only ones that see this are those that recently switched sides (aka usually moderates).

nonomaybeyes 5y ago
I don't think it's that symmetric. Generally it's the faction that holds the power that doesn't want to consider anything other than its own perspective. The lower factions understand the perspectives of the others perfectly well.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  In the current situation in the US, which faction holds the power? I would say neither clearly holds the power. The Senate is split 50-50. The conservatives hold the Supreme Court, and the liberals hold the House and the Presidency. And those have flipped in recent elections. So both sides are fighting as hard as they can, because they are this close to winning control. But "fighting as hard as you can" is not conducive to thoughtfully listening to the other side.
jfengel 5y ago
The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-do-not-as-i-say/?mtrref=undefined&gwh=7F86A6DD2A809C0106EC38EB7D3062C9&gwt=pay&assetType=PAYWALL https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall) Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg). Your statement is probably true, but it's as a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. If one side insists long enough that that the other side is literally evil, they won't be understood no matter how hard their opponents try. Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals. Instead, the response is usually to do the same thing even harder -- which works, because it generates enthusiastic support from the far right and grudging support from the center, while compromise bores everybody. It eventually resulted in Trump, whose primary skill is in being deliberately offensive. And it would have worked again, had a literal pandemic not intervened. He remains incredibly popular with the right -- not because he tries to understand liberals, but because he specifically rejects the notion that there's anything there to understand. This conclusion is repugnant, and I rejected it for a very long time. But it seems inescapable. And I have no idea what to recommend, because it seems clear that no amount of me trying harder to understand is going to help. I do believe, however, that additional calls for equivalence are detrimental. They deny the reality that the split is asymmetric, and therefore shunt us into lines of thought that will continue to prove ineffective.

gringoDan 5y ago

This reminds me of a Slate Star Codex post, Epistemic Learned Helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn... Essentially, this essay argues that sometimes it is rational to ignore attempts at persuasion altogether – there is always someone more adept than you at arguing their point, and since they are so convincing you are incapable of distinguishing the truth, so you fall back on your Bayesian prior.

aeneasmackenzie 5y ago
40K said it best: “An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded”.

smoldesu 5y ago

This article, for all of it's words, doesn't really justify it's thesis at all. In one hand, it declares that we all must put aside our differences to pursue lives of ethical piety, and in the other hand it demands that we cannot ask questions to get there. At no point along the essay does it seem that the author entertains a middle ground between the two, which frankly confuses me even more. And for all the Socrates-bashing they indulge in, they seemingly forget that the purpose of a Socratic Seminar is not to walk away feeling personally dejected, but mentally enlightened. If all you can take away from it is offense, then why bother learning anything in the first place? Persuasion is a two-way street. Rhetoric is not. If you dislike the way someone says something, then don't conflate that with the actual thing they're saying.

fluentmundo 5y ago
No idea where you got the notion that the author is Socrates-bashing or that the author “demands that we cannot ask questions.” The piece is so obviously a love letter to and defense of Socrates! You seem to have completely misread it. The author obviously thinks persuasion is “a two-way street,” that asking questions is good, and that Socratic dialogue leaves people more enlightened: it helps make their ignorance more precise.

ZoharAtkins 5y ago

I wrote a full length response to this article here. Basically, I think it raises two questions: 1) what does the socratic mode miss? 2) is it better to have a conversation between two socratic types, or does does socratic dialogue require one dupe? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-aspire-to-be-socratic https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-aspire...

mariodiana 5y ago

The lament in this essay is that we're not open to persuasion in our politics. How about considering that politics itself is the problem. A person of a more libertarian bent, like myself, would assert that it's the conflation of government and society, the political and the social, that's the problem. They are separate spheres of human activity. That same sort of person would tell you that politics is a method for conflict resolution, given the inescapable fact of force in human relations. Politics is about force. The social, by contrast precludes the use of force. Society is about cooperation. If you accept the above view, you try to reign in what politics applies to. But that is not at all what our politics is like today. Today, we try to do all sorts of things through the power of government. We inject force into aspects of society that should instead be left to cooperation. In fact, we go beyond that. We consider that use of force moral, since it's in the service of the pursuit of "utopia." I don't expect non-libertarians to agree. I just want to point out that no one should be shocked at all the fighting in the political sphere. Moreover, I would further assert that no one should kid himself or herself that "openness" or "persuasion" is the solution. Lastly, I would point out that when the question "how should government accomplish such-and-such" is posed to someone of libertarian bent, no amount of persuasion is possible, one way or the other. All arguments are superficial. At the bottom, they ignore the point that government shouldn't.

mcguire 5y ago
"Politics" in general is how groups of people make collective decisions. If you move that decision-making out of the realm of government, those decisions will still be made, and still be made by politics, but will typically not involve some of the affected.
- mariodiana 5y ago
  I emphatically do not accept your definition. Politics is the mechanism for controlling and administering force used to preserve the peaceful cooperation of human society. My whole point is that the political and the social has been conflated.