Politics are an infuriating venture. People hate the process, the people and the institutions that govern them. According to Gallup, 83% of the American public disapproves of the way Congress is handling its job. According to Pew Research Polling, only 19% of the country trusts the government most of the time, with 74% saying that politicians put their own interest ahead of the country’s and 55% saying that ordinary Americans are better equipped to run the government. We all hate politicians and politics alike. The process is simultaneously infuriating and perplexing. We often do not fully understand what is happening or why; all that we can conceive of the process is that it is of slow, backwards insipid nature. Political conversations are held in sound bites, ideologies are turned into doctrines of hate and the entire world seems to be crumbling around us. Politics seem to represent the worst of humanity, the ugliness, the bitterness and the hatred. So why should an individual care? Why should we not simply throw our hands up and walk away from the smoldering mess that is the modern political landscape? In order to understand the answer, one must first understand the process.

Imagine you are trying to coordinate dinner with ten of your friends. Will this be easy? You must decide where you are going to eat, what you are going to eat and what time everyone is available. This is a difficult process. Various group texts must be formed, ideas are suggested and some are shot down, schedules are changed, until finally, plans are made. Each person has different tastes, meaning that choosing a restaurant is difficult. Everyone has different schedules, meaning that picking the time and date will be a nightmare to coordinate. In addition, each member of the group will be coming from different parts of town, so deciding where to meet will cause deep running factions among the group depending on their section of town. Before long, factions and alliances have spread and fractured the group along a complex and tangled set of alliances and animosities. Now, just imagine trying to coordinate this same venture with 200 people, or 1,000, or one million. If this multitude of problems exists on a micro level, how will they play out on a macro level? Now, instead of dinner, you are trying to coordinate every aspect of societal life from food to transportation to shelter to work to healthcare to a complex set of innumerable factors that serve to influence and divide the society you are trying to coordinate. These decisions become nearly impossible to handle with faction and alliances arising at every single avenue imaginable. This is politics.

Political scientists define politics as "who gets what, when, and how." The ancient Greeks defined Politia as "the organization, the city, or the way of life," yet politics is a messy process.

Macro-level decision processes are complicated and infuriating. By necessity, not everyone can be satisfied by the process; in fact, a great deal of people’s full desires within the political realm are never realized. This creates factions, factions create parties and parties divide individuals and groups of individuals along lines on personal interest. This is what we have seen played out daily in our newspapers, on our TV and on our social media. This adversarial political process is nasty and exasperating. It is all too easy to dismiss a group of people with a set of ideals that do not agree with your own as stupid, ignorant or idiotic without fully understanding the desires and the circumstances of that person. Politics become so bogged down in the bickering, the name-calling and the shouting that no one is able to see past the rhetoric and explore the position of the other.

I will not attempt to defend this version of politics; I will only look to assert that we are plagued by an inaccurate framing of what politics are. We see the bad and the ugly because that is what is presented to us on the nightly news. Searching for anything beyond this is something we simply do not have time to do. Political scientists have a term for this called rational ignorance. This is the idea that on the continuum of our daily cost-benefit analysis, we are unable to justify the time it would take to truly be informed and understand what is happening in our world. This is a completely understandable position to be in. There is a lot of information out there and very little time to understand it.

However, I believe that this understanding is fundamentally vital to the preservation of our world. The ancient Greeks believed so too. In fact, the term “idiot” is derived from the Greek word “idiōtēs,” meaning a person who is concerned with only private matters, not public. I am not saying that if you are not informed, you are an idiot; that is not what I mean by this, and I do not believe it is what the Greek meant either. The Greeks believed that it was fundamentally necessary for the survival of their "way of life" for people to be active and informed citizens. They believed this so much that they had to mark political inactivity as a socially deviant behavior and therefore idiotic.

I believe fundamentally that it is important to look past sound bites and anger and to try and understand the processes and origins of divide within our society. That is what I personally will look to do in this platform. I hope to investigate a wide range of topics, diving deep past the surface in order to obtain some type of understanding that is more full and complete than can be derived from a nightly news cast. I hope you will join me as I attempt to break down my own ignorance and misconceptions about the world in hope that the Greeks will no longer be able to labels us as idiots.