When it comes to politics, there is a lot of emphasis amongst both politicos and the 'civilian' general public about how we fight. Universities such as this one teach courses in political science, or communications and media management; and the large-scale interest in works like Nicky Hager's Dirty Politics show a capacious interest in the way the political game is played.
But not a lot of talking is done about why we get involved and take an interest in politics. In large measure, I feel, this is because it's assumed that just about everyone who already is involved - or wants to be - has some sort of pre-existing burning-passion-overriding-reason for joining the melee in the first place.
This misses the point. Even the grandest inferno had to have some spark of inspiration to set it alight. And so too, with people incandescent with political fervor.
In many cases, the initial impetus isn't particularly hard to find. We all experience (or, at least, perceive) injustices of various kinds on a daily basis. When they affect you and yours personally, you might find yourself getting sufficiently irate about it to start campaigning on it - or yelling at various decision-makers until they finally start to listen.
Other people find themselves involved and embroiled because they enjoy the drama and the pageantry of it all. If you've ever watched House of Cards, you'll know what I'm talking about.
This also helps to explain the demesne-populations of many of the various parties' youth-wings and student union organizations. They're often the sort of kids who were bullied at high-school and are now enjoying living out power-fantasies - either over their fellow man (in however limited a capacity), or enthralling themselves at the thought of being able to do so in the big-leagues once they make it on their inexorable way to the top.
Even though that might sound callous and risible, there's certainly something to be said in favour for politics as a social pursuit. At least in my own experience, I've never really found the time nor excitement from video-games or television-series purely because the sense of achievement and enjoyment which others might derive from, say, leveling a WoW character or working one's way up an MMORPG guild/FPS clan's hierarchy seems rather dull in comparison to my life in politics. And after all - the difference between building up a base in a cellphone-based strategy game as compared to fostering a political support-base with your cellphone ... is that one of these things has some real-world contribution and significance, and lingers after you switch the phone off.
There's also something arguably quite cool about executing a stand-over operation of a Party president in a car-park while dressed like the Mafia - or any of the other at least vaguely cinematic things entailed by a career in active-service electoral entanglement.
But there's another, far more important side to political involvement.
Dharma. Duty. The sense that the responsibility for building a better world is on each of us and all of us, both as individuals and collectively.
Politics may once have purported to regard itself as the 'Sport of Kings and Emperors', but today it seems instead to be sliding toward a status as the semi-exclusive preserve of billionaire businessmen and armed-with-pretension focus groups.
Plato once said that the penalty for not getting involved in politics is being governed by your inferiors. As a denizen of David Seymour's Epsom electorate, I feel I'm living proof that ain't always the case. But the fact I was singlehandedly unable to prevent Seymour's election and ACT's re-entry into Parliament again misses the point. People such as me who actively get involved in our nation's politics make it every bit that much harder for idiots, liars and the broadly subcompetent to get away with misgoverning unmolested.
If they remain unchallenged - that's pretty much tantamount to an invitation to misrule.
This is why Elections in New Zealand - whether General or Local Body - are consciously marketed by the ruling elite as something other than exercises in crisis, or moments of profound transition. Because those sorts of moments stir up the passions of a people, and thus represent the danger of a change to the way things are by risk of inducing their involvement.
The idea is that if the stakes seem lower, we'll be less inclined to care - and therefore get out and vote or take an active interest in the political process between elections. That's dangerous, because nobody ever said there had to be an actual and tangible sense of crisis underway in order for crisis things to be happening.
Even leaving aside the big, climactic events like the full-blown assault on our economic sovereignty that was signed at SkyCity earlier this month, small and creeping changes which affect your life are taking place every day.
Sometimes - as with National's proposal to strip-mine the Great Barrier, or Labour's attempted imposition of tertiary fees in the 80s - these objectionable events boil over into simmering popular discontent, and the chartered course of the mighty ship of state is briefly, temporarily altered. On other occasions, as with the aforementioned TPPA signing, we aren't quite so lucky.
But even immediately unsuccessful protest-actions or outreach-exercises have tangible, rippling effects. What we do echoes out and is refracted - rather like the Hindu parable of Indra's Net - ultimately helping to shape and even become the future political terrain upon which we joust.
Sometimes, a dildo makes international headlines - or a dying cancer patient changes the tone and tenor of the cannabis law reform debate.
Everything that we do affects our environment. Even - and perhaps especially - nothing at all.
Politics is no different. Indeed, the great Hunter S. Thompson was of the opinion that politics, at its purest, is "the art of controlling your environment".
So if, like Frank Costello in The Departed, you "don't want to be a product of my environment" but instead "want my environment to be a product of me" ... then your choice is clear. There is simply no substitute for the profound power of exercising authorial choice over one's own existence. It is, after all, theoretically exactly why you're at university in the first place.
But even if you're ambivalent about that core question - and don't mind living in what's ultimately someone else's world - you've nevertheless a duty of care to try and improve the place. If not for others, then at least for yourself.
In any case, taking an interest - or getting more directly actively involved - in politics remains in my estimation one of the most engaging, enthralling, and enjoyable pastimes known to man. As we say in the industry, "we're the sort of people who spend Sunday afternoons plotting". Instead of 'watching the sportsball', we're out making the play.
And if all else fails ... we cast our minds back to Ronald Reagan:
"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world ..."
But us politicos don't have that problem.
