Quite a few pieces I’ve written counsel limiting, minimizing, or outright abandoning politics. Politics makes us poorer, and less free. It makes us worse people. And it’s inhuman. But what is politics? How is it different from all the other ways we interact and make group decisions? One way to look at politics is as the act of several people coming together to make a decision collectively, in such a way that not everyone gets everything he wants. If we go with that definition, then politics is an unavoidable (and often desireable) part of living in a community. In which case, we’d want to keep politics around because community matters deeply. So much so, in fact, that