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Are you interested in politics?

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Some people say they are not interested.

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But if you think about it, you will realize that politics affects us all.

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Politics is about how we organize our social coexistence.

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For example, about how we make the rules that determine what can be done and what cannot be done.

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So if you don't take part in those decisions, someone will make them for you.

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The importance of politics was quite clear for Aristotle 2,500 years ago.

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He thought that human beings are social animals, or as he said, political animals,

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because we cannot live alone.

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No human being could survive alone.

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We need other people to survive, to learn a language, to learn a culture,

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and to become part of a community.

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In order to fulfill our needs, our mental and material needs, we need other people.

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So human beings are really social.

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Then this means that politics is an essential aspect of our way of life.

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Aristotle thought that human beings are different to animals because we can think and we can speak.

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Something that is possible because we have a language, which is something that other animals don't have.

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Language, for Aristotle, had a purpose.

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He thought that our ability to think and to speak had the purpose of helping us discover together, using dialogue, what is just and what is fair.

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So, for Aristotle, language and thought had a mission, which is to help us to achieve happiness.

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For Aristotle, the objective of human life is to be happy.

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So this is an ethical dimension of his thought.

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He thought that ethics was based on the individual pursuit of happiness.

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But this is also true for politics.

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For Aristotle, the objective of a society is to make it possible for their citizens to achieve global happiness, collective happiness.

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this means that according to Aristotle ethics and politics are just the same

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thing they both try to achieve the same objective happiness ethics tries to

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achieve individual happiness politics tries to achieve collective happiness

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but after all they both try to obtain the same goal so for Aristotle ethics

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and politics were basically the same