I'm not especially convinced that the two are entirely separate. It feels to me that they sprout from the same source, more or less. I suppose it depends on whe

I'm not especially convinced that the two are entirely separate. It feels to me that they sprout from the same source, more or less. I suppose it depends on where you want to draw a line around a very fuzzy word ("politics"). My intent in bringing up the issue originally was that when you have larger groups of people interacting, you get larger-scale patterns of communication. People form groups and sub-groups; people give support to groups based on trust of that group or one of its representatives, rather than getting to know everyone individually; higher-level conglomerations of ideals form because tracking every issue in detail is too much, etc. There's a lot of gunk that comes along with that. But it is not all bad, or destructive. It can even be _con_structive. I think that generally applies to institutional politics as well as national/world politics.