Have you ever had a conversation with a person who tries to bring up a political point they believe in that you end up dismantling only to be met with "Haha politics is fucking dumb anyway man it's all the same"?

I think we all have, so today i'm going to do a small breakdown of what the problem with political indifference is and how it affects people who don't actively engage in the game of politics.

Man is a political animal.

This goes way back to the time of Aristotle, that man is inherently a political animal because he has moral reasoning and the power of speech, we also are social beings that crave interaction and acceptance and in politics we find both, however times have definitely changed since the great philosophers days and so has humanity's interaction with politics.

Now the general public see politics as a monolithic structure that no man can pierce, but as we saw with the 2016 American election, the people can make all the difference.

We engage in politics every day, with our friends, our family, our work basically everything has a political structure to it so why do some people who even though they engage in it everyday decide to willfully ignore something that directly affects how they live their lives? well there is a couple of reasons.

• Disenfranchisement.
  It's incredibly easy to be disenfranchised with politics today, given how far the state reaches into peoples lives and how it can seemingly rule by decree.
• Anger
  Coming off the back of the biggest political event this year in the G20, people find themselves angry when they see what politics and political division can do to people, it's very understandable to people outside the political world to view these things with utter bewilderment.
• A culture of indifference
  During my time growing up and in my teen years politics just wasn't cool, to 15 year old's politics is only discussed about in certain circles and to people who are interested in it naturally, even at my age of 28 a wide swath of friends still can't stand talking about politics or even hearing about news in general.
• "It doesn't affect me and there's nothing i can do about it"
  This one is pretty common for people my age, it's not entirely indifference but more of a prolonged apathy towards the political structuring of society as a whole.

So why is it a problem?

You might be asking me "Why does someone not engaging in politics affect me" and that's a simple answer, because it does affect you and it affects the people who don't engage in politics.

Politics is no longer something you just see on the news and people do behind close doors in a different state, its a monstrous octopus with tentacles in literally every facet of every day life, political programming is nothing new but with the invention of the internet and the rapid expansion of "news" it is literally everywhere at all times.

The problem is, to the person involved in politics we can see it clearly and understand it's influence, to the uninitiated however many many times they can be programmed from young ages to swing a certain way without ever knowing and in most cases, thinking they have developed their opinions by themselves.

Now i'm not saying that every non political person in the world is somehow completely indoctrinated by it, but it does happen more than some of us like to admit.

Is it actually a serious problem though?

In a way it's not, and in a way it is, being mindful of politics and understanding how the world works is something that gives people a lot of clarity, it's also a gatekeeper against the government itself.

For example if the vast majority of people were politically indifferent what would there be to stop the state from reaching even further into our lives, how would we hear about it without 24 hour news channels and tens of thousands of websites and blogs? it would be an insidious creeping death upon those not in power and a one way ticket to complete control for those who were, this of course is akin to early monarchism when the kings and queens of the world ruled in absolutes.

So am i saying go out and physically drag someone to watch hours of political footage and research? of course not, but there are many people who should have at least a basic understanding of how intrinsic politics and man actually is and how much it actually affects them, even if they don't know it.

Ultimately though i feel this will continue to grow into more of a problem over time as political discourse gets exchanged for cultural programming and ostracism, colleges and education centers all over the world are the perfect example for this (looking at your berkley university) and without some level of involvement i fear that future generations won't actually care if they have a say or not in what happens in their world.