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7. POLITICSVersion 1.2 December 2013                                                      (Previous Version) Why bother with politics? don't politicians just lie and look after themselves? What effect can ordinary people have on national or, even more remotely, global political issues? Is anything useful to be gained from politics? Does it affect us? Why should we care? How should our politicians control business and the economy? Is it best to reduce regulation, eliminate red tape, free up the markets and have unbridled capitalism? Are modern democracies functional, or are they just lackeys for big business and the rich? Who must we rely on to maintain a liveable environment? What are the alternatives to national democracies – could they ever be effective? What are the roles of education, and what should we teach: cold hearted facts or values? Politics is practical action that involves working with communities. Differences of opinion between and within groups cause conflict. Politics is the art of resolving such conflicts peacefully. Our politics – our participation in community life – reflects what we know and what we value. Politics – seeking to influence others – is at work in every group of people: couples, friendship groups, families, work places, community and religious groups. Everyone has an agenda – what they want. Our focus in Part 7 is on politics in business, government, civil society and education, where politics has a major impact on our lives and dominates the world, for better or worse. We focus here on what drives us to support one party or another, not party politics or ideology. Our political choices are guided by the values we adopt following our philosophical analysis, and our conclusions about the nature of the world in science and history. How we express our values, how we communicate what we are striving for, is guided by our conclusions regarding religion and culture. We have done the theoretical and practical analysis, explored forms of expression, and worked out our personal values. Now it’s time to apply all this to the big world out there. So in this Part we summarise what we have learned in the other knowledge domains, but refrain from introducing new factual conclusions that should be covered in those domains. Here we focus on our responses to the facts we know, and our values, to generate reasonable guidelines. We look at politics under the following headings, to learn how we should behave in each area:
We need to defend and extend the development of local and global democracy. We need more informed, skeptical and active electorates. We need to promote truth, diversity, reality, life, love and beauty, and accept our global obligations to struggle for responsibility, equality and hope.
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