Politics and Its Stage

Politics presents itself as necessity, as the unavoidable mechanism by which human beings organize collective life, manage conflict, and move societies toward stability and progress. From childhood education onward, this assumption is rarely questioned; it is taught as historical inevitability rather than examined as a specific form of human behavior with a particular origin and trajectory. The language of politics is saturated with seriousness—governance, responsibility, order, security—yet the outcomes remain strikingly repetitive. Hunger persists, violence mutates rather than disappears, inequality deepens under new justifications, and entire populations remain exposed to preventable suffering. This persistence is often explained as complexity, human nature, or unfortunate imperfection, but such explanations function more as insulation than inquiry. If politics is genuinely a problem-solving mechanism, its historical performance is anomalous. If it is something else, then the question is not why it fails, but what it actually sustains. This essay treats politics not as a moral endeavor gone wrong, but as a stage—a structured performance that absorbs attention, energy, and belief while leaving fundamental human necessities unresolved. To see politics clearly requires stepping outside its promises and examining its operations as they are, not as they are described. What becomes visible then is not incompetence, but coherence of a different kind.

Historically, political organization arose from practical coordination rather than ideology. Small human groups required rules to distribute labor, respond to danger, and ensure survival, and in such contexts authority was situational and reversible. A skilled individual led a hunt, an elder mediated a conflict, a parent organized a household, and responsibility was immediate and personal. Decisions carried visible consequences, and authority dissolved when the situation ended. Nothing in this functional organization required abstraction, symbolism, or permanence. The rupture occurred with scale, when coordination exceeded direct perception and authority detached from immediate consequence. As villages became cities and cities became states, leadership transformed from activity into identity. Authority ceased to be something exercised temporarily and became something possessed. With this shift, responsibility grew indirect and justification became necessary. Rules were no longer transparent responses to necessity but instruments that required interpretation, enforcement, and defense. This was not a moral collapse but a structural one. Power emerged not merely as coordination, but as mediation between people and their own needs. Politics begins precisely at the point where life is no longer encountered directly.

Once power stabilizes, it demands continuity, hierarchy, and abstraction. Decisions are made about people who are not present, using language that replaces lived reality with metrics, categories, and strategic interests. Hunger becomes a statistic, homelessness a policy issue, death a collateral effect. The farther authority moves from consequence, the more narrative it requires to justify itself. This is where ideology enters—not as deception, but as necessity. Ideology provides coherence where contact is absent. It explains why suffering persists while authority remains legitimate. From this point forward, politics is no longer about solving problems but about managing them in ways that preserve the structure of power itself. Failure becomes tolerable, even useful, because it justifies continuation. Success, if it were complete, would dissolve the need for mediation altogether. Politics therefore cannot aim at resolution without negating itself. It must promise improvement while ensuring incompletion.

Modern political institutions exemplify this dynamic with remarkable consistency. Organizations such as the United Nations, the G20, the BRICS, and the African Union are publicly framed as mechanisms of cooperation, peace, and global responsibility. They convene summits, issue declarations, and negotiate frameworks intended to address the most urgent problems facing humanity. Yet their material priorities tell a different story. While these institutions debate development goals and humanitarian principles, military spending continues to rise globally, arms industries flourish, and preventable suffering remains structurally untouched. The contradiction is not hidden; it is normalized. Meetings about peace coexist seamlessly with investments in war. Declarations about equality coexist with economic systems that concentrate wealth at unprecedented levels. The stage is carefully maintained, because the performance itself is the function.

The resources required to eliminate basic human deprivation already exist. Food production exceeds global nutritional needs, technological capacity allows rapid housing construction, and logistical systems can distribute goods across continents. The persistence of hunger, homelessness, and lack of medical care is therefore not a technical problem. It is a political one, meaning it is sustained by structures that prioritize sovereignty, competition, and power over direct human necessity. When institutions gather to discuss famine while respecting trade barriers, national interests, and market stability, the outcome is predetermined. The conversation absorbs urgency while action is deferred. Complexity becomes an alibi. The stage fills with language, and the audience is invited to believe that something is happening. Meanwhile, the conditions that generate suffering remain intact, because dismantling them would dismantle the authority of those managing the discussion.

Democracy is often presented as the corrective to these failures, the mechanism through which power is returned to the people and accountability is ensured. Yet democracy, as practiced, does not dissolve power; it redistributes its legitimacy. Representation does not eliminate hierarchy; it stabilizes it. Elections provide periodic consent, not continuous participation. Once elected, political actors operate at a remove from those they represent, shielded by legal complexity and institutional inertia. Accountability becomes symbolic, diffused across committees, procedures, and time. Even where elections are free of overt fraud, outcomes are shaped by propaganda, economic pressure, identity narratives, and fear. The process appears participatory while decision-making remains insulated. Democracy does not empower cooperation; it ritualizes division. Parties institutionalize opposition, ensuring perpetual conflict within controlled boundaries. Debate replaces resolution, and disagreement becomes the system’s proof of vitality.

Ambition is not an accidental feature of this structure; it is its selection mechanism. Political systems reward those willing to compete for status, visibility, and control, and such competition requires comparison and exclusion. Ambition and compassion cannot coexist at scale because compassion collapses hierarchy, while ambition depends on it. This is not a moral judgment but a structural incompatibility. A person who responds directly to suffering undermines the need for mediation, strategy, and delay. Politics therefore elevates individuals capable of abstraction, emotional distance, and narrative management. Those who see problems directly rarely rise within such systems, not because they lack intelligence, but because their perception destabilizes the machinery. The system selects against them by design.

Power does not merely tolerate inequality; it requires it. A world without structural insecurity would leave nothing to govern, nothing to manage, nothing to justify authority. This is why suffering is addressed rhetorically but preserved materially. Wars are managed rather than ended, poverty is measured rather than eliminated, and crises are declared permanent. The existence of a political class depends on the persistence of problems that require mediation. Grand buildings, summits, and ceremonies are not superficial excesses; they are material affirmations of separation. They signal that decision-makers inhabit a different reality from those whose lives are affected by their decisions. This separation is not incidental; it is the foundation of power.

Political research and academic discourse often obscure this reality by translating visible contradictions into technical problems. Endless studies analyze inequality, conflict, and governance while the underlying structure remains unquestioned. When inquiry replaces action in contexts where action is possible, knowledge becomes complicity. The hunger of a child does not require further conceptual refinement. The homelessness of millions does not require another framework. The insistence on research in the face of obvious necessity functions as delay with credentials. Complexity protects the system by exhausting attention and diffusing responsibility. The more elaborate the explanation, the harder it becomes to say simply that something is wrong and must stop.

At the global level, the language of sovereignty further entrenches this dynamic. Nations are treated as moral units whose interests justify violence, exploitation, and neglect beyond their borders. The idea that some lives are the responsibility of one state and others are externalizes compassion. It allows institutions to speak of universal values while acting locally and strategically. The result is a fragmented world where cooperation is conditional and solidarity is symbolic. Organizations like the United Nations exist precisely to manage this fragmentation, not to dissolve it. Their role is to prevent conflict from destabilizing the system, not to eliminate the causes of conflict altogether.

The notion of progress plays a crucial role in sustaining belief in this arrangement. Political systems present themselves as evolving, becoming more humane, more rational, more inclusive over time. Yet the form of suffering changes without disappearing. Violence becomes bureaucratic, exploitation becomes systemic, and inequality becomes normalized through markets rather than monarchies. Progress is measured internally, by the refinement of institutions, not externally, by the elimination of harm. This allows societies to feel advanced while reproducing the same structural failures under new names. The promise of future improvement substitutes for present resolution.

Equality, like freedom and democracy, survives primarily as language. It exists because division is treated as fundamental. If human beings were encountered directly rather than through categories of race, nation, class, and ideology, equality would be unnecessary. It is asserted precisely because separation is normalized. Making equality factual would collapse the hierarchies that sustain power, so it remains rhetorical. The same is true of compassion when invoked politically. Calls for compassion are future-oriented, aspirational, and therefore safely detached from present reality. They allow speakers to avoid confronting what they are actually doing.

Compassion, in this context, must be understood with precision. It is not an emotion, not empathy, not moral concern, and not historical guilt. Emotion arises from distance—I feel something about you. Compassion eliminates that distance entirely. It is an understanding that emerges only when there is direct contact with fact. This understanding cannot arise without seeing society as it actually operates and oneself as part of that operation. Without such understanding, calls for compassion are propaganda, not actuality. One cannot plan to be compassionate, cultivate it, or institutionalize it. Any attempt to do so belongs to becoming, to a future that avoids the present.

Compassion eradicates the need for power because it eradicates abstraction. Where suffering is seen directly, mediation becomes unnecessary. Where mediation ends, politics ends. This is why compassion cannot be generated by political systems; it would dissolve the very conditions that allow them to exist. The end of politics would not come through reform, revolution, or ideology, but through the end of separation that makes power meaningful. This is not a proposal or a program. It is an observation.