For quite some time, it has nagged me when I heard people expressing an interest to get into politics.<\/p>\n
I have also\u00a0read within governmental\u00a0reporting the quotation, disparagingly uttered, “He’s just playing politics.”<\/p>\n
It seems to me given these two ideas, that there is no place for politics in government, and that the more proper term for governing is “governing,” not “politics.”\u00a0 That is,\u00a0given these ideas, politics is not governing<\/em>.<\/p>\n So what does the word “politics” mean?\u00a0 What does it refer to?\u00a0 I’ve been trying to pay attention to its use for a few years now, and it seems to me what the word “politics” denotes is the taking of sides<\/em>.<\/p>\n What would political language be then?\u00a0 Political language would be language that expresses a side<\/em>.\u00a0 It is biased language.\u00a0 It is partial language.<\/p>\n Government, though, is presumably impartial, at least relative to the constitution on which it is founded.\u00a0 Its language would probably be of the impartial sort–what we might call impartial language.<\/p>\n I moan when I hear\u00a0people want\u00a0to get into politics, as if this is a noble endeavor.\u00a0 They seem to me to be saying, “nobly,” they want to get into a field wherein it is more important to take a side than to govern.\u00a0 It is this side-taking that often seems to stall the governing process.\u00a0 That is, government comes to a halt (so to speak) while governors (like congresspeople, et al.) fight for their side.<\/p>\n And worse when politics > governing<\/em>.\u00a0 That is, when the goals swap, when politics becomes more important than governing, government gets a bit screwed up.\u00a0 I see this akin to when teachers forward the business\u00a0notion that profit > service<\/em>.\u00a0 They say things like “Business is about making money.”\u00a0 This is a short-sighted expression.\u00a0 Business is about service to some community, and by design,\u00a0profit is an aid for the delivery of service.\u00a0 When profit becomes the more important goal, the goal of service suffers, especially in the choice between profit and service.\u00a0 So the community suffers in the pursuit of profit.<\/p>\n And\u00a0similarly the community suffers in the pursuit of politics.\u00a0 When governing is more about aligning with perspectives than doing something about issues, the issues become more problematic.\u00a0 At least in theory.<\/p>\n Thoughts?\u00a0 Reply below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For quite some time, it has nagged me when I heard people expressing an interest to get into politics. I have also\u00a0read within governmental\u00a0reporting the quotation, disparagingly uttered, “He’s just playing politics.” It seems to me given these two ideas, that there is no place for politics in government, and that the more proper term […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[100,97,98,99,96,102,101,62],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-business","tag-government","tag-partiality","tag-political-language","tag-politics","tag-profit","tag-service","tag-values"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":754,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}