POLICY FOR AMATEUR

Title: Policy for Amateur 

Author: Fernando Savater

Year of publication: 1992

Editorial: Ariel

The ancient Greeks called idiotés to anybody that did not implicate in politics. This word meant “isolated person, who has nothing to offer to the others”. In the same line, Aristotle affirmed that we are citizen animals, beings of a political nature.

It is true that we are sociable animals, but not instinctively and automatically sociable as ants or gazelles. Unlike these species, we do not obey blindly what they order to us. Humans can invent different forms of society, transform the society where they have grown up and, if it is necessary, we have the possibility to rebel and violate the established rules.

In this sense, Kant said that men are “non-socially sociable”, because our way of life does not only consist in obeying and repeating; we also have to rebel and invent.

But attention: Savater says that we do not have to rebel against society, but against a determinate society. We do not obey because we do not want to obey anything or anyone, but because we want better rules to obey, and leaders who rule with a more respectable authority.

Politics is merely the set of reasons to obey and reasons to revolt against (whom do we have to obey?, in which do we have to obey? , why do we have to obey?, when, why and how do we have to rebel?).

Our nature is the society. Biologically, we are products of the nature, but humanly we are products and producers of the society. This society is in our service, but we also have to put in its service. Each of the advantages which it offers to us (protection, entertainment, assistance, company, etc.) comes with limitations, instructions, requirements, laws and rules. That is, comes with impositions.

These are not always conventions, they are not immovable part of the reality, but they can be modified or abolish if there is a new agreement among men. Reason would be the capacity to establish conventions, that is, laws which do not come imposed by biology, but which we accept voluntarily.

In the Antiquity power’s legitimacy supported in religious reasons or in the tradition.

Like it happens between ants or bees, some of them were born to order, and the others were born to obey.

Later Greeks arrived-as Savater said-and all started to change: they invented the polis, the community in space anthropocentric where do not govern the necessity of the nature or God’s enigmatic choice, but govern men’s freedom. This means their capacity to think, discuss, choose and dismiss leaders, create problems and set out solutions.

The name by which we know today this Greek invention, the most revolutionary of the Human History from a political point of view, is democracy. All citizens (not all men, and this is one of the major limitations of the Athenian democracy) are politicians, that is, administrative of their polis.

Currently, in our democracies, political parties become practically impervious to criticism and control of citizens due to the closed electoral lists and Parliament voting discipline. As a result, citizens renounce to think about public matters and they lose interest in policy. To this situation it must be added the corruption that occurs between many politicians and discredits this profession, the essence of which should be -as Aristotle affirmed- pursue the common good.