How much do politics really matter?
Mike Treder
2010-08-12 00:00:00

IEET Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio unleashed a nice rant against this kind of thinking last year. He said this:

Politics is part of a healthy society - it's what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It's not about partisanship, it's about power.

image 1And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space - they're symptoms of politics, not causes.

Calls to get rid of politics can therefore mean one of two things: getting rid of persistent relationships with other people; or getting rid of differential goals. Since I don't see too many of the folks who talk about escaping politics also talking about becoming lone isolationists, the only reasonable presumption is that they're really talking about eliminating disagreements.

It's the latest version of the notion that "a perfect world is one where everyone agrees with me." It rarely gets expressed like that, of course. It's more like...

After the Singularity, we'll be too smart to have politics..."¨

[Or] Once we develop strong (and friendly) AI, we'll let them make decisions for us, as they will be far smarter and wiser..."¨

[Or] In a post-scarcity, nanotech world, nobody will have politics because everyone will have what they need and want..."¨

[Or] Once we get off-world, politics will go away because you can always move away from someone you disagree with..."¨

[Or] After we can reengineer the brain, we can do away with conflict and disagreement...

No. Wrong. Bad technophile, no upload!

Politics means conflict, debate, and frustration. It also means choice. A world without politics is a world where disagreement is illegitimate. It's a world where your ability to choose your future - to make your future - has been taken away, whether you like it or not.


More recently, IEET Executive Director James Hughes reviewed the centuries-old conflict between "Enlightenment Liberalism and Enlightened Despotism" and compared that with its present-day counterpart, "Transhumanist Liberalism vs. Transhumanist Technocracy."

Hughes wrote:

Transhumanists are overwhelmingly and staunchly civil libertarian, defenders of juridical equality and individual rights. Most also believe democratic government to be superior to any of the extant alternatives.

But many are also suspicious of the capacity of ordinary people to make decisions that are truly in their own interests, individually or as polities. Some transhumanists explicitly argue that rather than try to win popular support for transhumanist values, far more can be accomplished by winning over powerful elites.


He described some transhumanists who are looking toward a "post-democratic minarchy," others who apparently would welcome a global totalitarian dictatorship by a purely unselfish friendly AI, and still others who seek "an escape from politics in all its forms" image 2through the establishment of anarchist utopias at sea, in outer space, or in cyberspace.

I'm sure just about all of us would like to escape politics, if possible - especially the ugly modern form with its heavy emphasis on money, media, and manipulation at the expense of actually serving the needs of the governed.

But is that really possible, or will it become possible in the future?

We'd like to know what you think. Do you agree that we'll be able to leave politics behind, relatively soon? Or is that just wishful thinking?

Please answer our new reader poll, which asks:

In the big picture of the future, how much do politics really matter?



Thanks for participating!