Everything is political these days. Or so the current sentiment of public discourse feels like. Science is not immune, neither is philanthropy, and the feeling is so widespread that the meta-observation of “everything has always been political” is mainstream enough to be on Lifehacker. Why is that?

First, what is political? In this context, I take “political” to mean anything to do with explicit governance, i.e. government behavior. Some things are intrinsically political, but many are not. When people say that something is political, often what they are actually doing is viewing the issue with a political lens, examining how the government can help. So when it seems that “everything is political”, what is really happening is that more people are viewing increasingly more issues with the political lens, seeking political solutions.

I don’t think that it has always been like this, and in North America at least, we are definitely seeing this as a shift. I think a key reason for this shift is that people have lost the hope of being able to do things without the government. The size and power of our governments have increased over time, arguably inevitably, since any non-trivial system has the tendency to expand fill the known universe¹. As a result of how all-encompassing governments have become, the other forces that can drive large scale change, such as cultural evolution, pale in comparison (both in scope and timeliness). So we increasingly forget that they even exist, and instead learned to always look for direct government intervention.

No doubt large scale government solutions are very enticing. They have the allure of being immediate, clear-cut, and certain (new law passed, action A is banned nation-wide), while simultaneously absolves ourselves of any personal failures when they fail (we can complain about how the new law didn’t help, which is the government’s fault). But I can’t help but wonder what a world would look like, where the people still believed that societal-scale coordinated action is possible without resorting to politics. I think this is perhaps one of the most attractive things about the localism movement. Within a localist society, political power is dispersed, individual’s own actions carry more weight, and it is much easier to coordinate the group, since it’s a lot smaller.

The question of whether “everything being political” is good or bad is very complex to answer. Perhaps more fundamentally it boils down to the pros and cons of bigger, more centralized governments vs. smaller, local governments. Can we have things be less political in a world with large governments? I don’t think so, at least not easily/naturally. I think this sentiment in our society today is almost a necessary consequence of the increasing centralization of power in politics.