Society invented politics when clans agreed to form committees and co-manage fishing and gathering (roots and fruits) areas to avoid potential skirmishes among them (Lewis Henry Morgan 1877). It evolved with society to include (a) maintaining internal peace and order, (b) securing the community from external attack, (c) developing and maintaining economic enhancements such as transportation and power infrastructures, and (d) mainly resolving emerging conflicts in the evolution process of society. The latter is the primary function of politics or government, and economic enhancements are part of it. For example, when society transforms itself from barbarian tribal societies to a civilized one, the process was driven by emerging economic activities including agricultural production in excess of self-consumption, artisan, and trade. With new economic activities also come new social groups, i.e., farmers, artisans, and merchants. Both the new economic activities and social groups were outside the scope of existing tribal constitutions. Lack of laws governing new economic activities such as contracts and absence of legal protection for the new social groups require developing new laws which only government can develop and enforce. Government, by developing and enforcing laws, enhances economic productivity and ultimately societal transformations. This transformational role, not the fear of the state of nature, as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke argued, that serves as a justification for government.

Managing the use of scarce resources among competing parties within the society is still the core of political functions. In short, politics is a social science that citizens through their representative government make the best of their country’s scarce resources including the cumulated know how or tech and manage their relationship with the rest of the world to live well and happy. So, politics is critical both to individual citizens and society at large. Practiced democratically, politics would allow society to achieve peace and prosperity available resources including technical knowledge permit.

Unfortunately, politics is not well understood and hence not practiced for the purpose it was invented for in the first place. Inappropriate use of politics essentially leads to inappropriate citizen actions, fighting among themselves, for example, in lieu of inventing and producing. This means societies are constrained by political ignorance from achieving their potential.

The political ignorance is deeply rooted in history and strangulates all societies without exception. Socrates hated democracy because he believed that uninformed voters would hand over the political power to unscrupulous pseudo-politicians. Contemporary voters have proven Socrates correct when they time and again exhibit their disappointment with governments because they either do not vote in their best interests or do not expect in line with what is achievable or both. PEW Research Center conducted in 2018 an international (covering 27 countries) survey and found out that 58% of American respondents were not satisfied with democracy. Over 50% (median) of respondents in Italy, Spain, Tunisia, Greece, Mexico, and Brazil reported dissatisfaction with democracy. Most recent survey that covered 154 countries reported that dissatisfaction with democracy rose from 48% to 58% since mid-1990s.

There is an urgent need for clarity in the political space which requires (a) defining what politics is, (b) what democracy is, (c) how politics and democracy work together, (d) the role of citizens in defining goals and processes of politics, and (e) defining, developing and maintaining constitutional mechanisms. This requires unraveling the series of distortions instituted by pre-civilization tribes, monarchs, intellectuals, imperialists, and recently revised tribalism that coated over centuries the real politics and democracy.

The problem is certainly within the scope of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular, yet neither seems interested so far in addressing the issue and may not do so as far as they are agglutinated with their metaphysical outlook. My purpose is to introduce an inflection point in the political thought process so that citizens and would be politicians understand the simple meanings of politics and democracy for the purpose of operationalizing both to improve people’s lives.