The End of Politics

Politics must be for the common good. That is its supreme end. Any vitiation from this goal is a dangerous luxury, which no society can afford or should tolerate. Any society that countenances the corruption of the political process in service to ends quite alien to the common good, is heading to anomie.

Politics is the art and process of selecting the aristocracy empowered to regulate individual excess, and promote common good, in a social set up. Aristocracy here is defined though narrowly as the leadership of the best elements. This is because every political contest is a pretense in the art of giving the best qualified person the opportunity of leading on the merits of his qualification. That is the ideal. What happens in fact is another matter altogether. It is the agency designed to seek ways of amassing and allocating collective power to a few. These are to use it to modulate our egoistic tendencies and lubricate the tangents of friction, which gregariousness imposes on human existence. It is the ordnance of reason in the regulation and organization of social conduct and comportment. Aristotle declared it a congenital vocation of the human species. He canonized man a political animal.
Politics most times constructs ethics, though ethics should transcend politics. It regulates behaviours and choices geared towards rescuing the human species from the habitual propensity to self-destruct. It does this by creating systems of order and organization based on the authority of laws; and the social subscription to those laws through commands and obedience. Politics in the views of Thomas Hobbes renders the clime fertile for the germination of development and progress. Human nature abhors solipsistic individualism. And politic happens to be the referee between individual excess and the demands of the common good. It rescues the individual from the black-holes of solipsistic self-digestion, where mutually inclusive cannibalism (Homo homini lupus) holds sway; and spares the society a lot of expense in frayed nerves and dead bodies.

In this instance, it becomes a force of good. This is when politics is configured to the authority of laws, or when the law is empowered to sit supreme over caprice. In this instance, it becomes the lubricant and force of order, which minimizes social friction and smoothens the interactions imposed on us by our gregarious natures, as social beings. It dampens the rough excesses and the fierce urgency and imperative of our genes to survive us. To this end, it imposes limits on license. It allows what conduces to the common good and forbids the obverse. Rousseau’s observation that man is born free, but everywhere in chains may not be amenable to this interpretation. He did not tell us whether those chains represent an ontological necessity or a social accident, since absolute freedom happens to exist nowhere.
Whenever politics aids the emergence and sustenance of primitive will to power resident in the corroded bowels of our primeval nature, monsters are created. Vaulting ambition; the obscene exclusivity of elitism and narrow insularities; consolidated and isolated pockets of debauched power schemes; as well as the amphictyonies and micro-empires of greed are enabled and empowered. And the prime objective of these is to maintain some perpetual and unhealthy stranglehold on power for the benefit of the gods guarding the pantheons of their avarice. This was the hallmark of feudalism and any shade of tyranny or totalitarianism.