Thread:Zillafire101/@comment-5496489-20151027142437/@comment-25309944-20151129204324

@Ecoraptor You make an excellent point about differences in mentality, and it's one of the biggest problems (in my opinion) which plagues political science today. In this case, it's not between alien civilizations but different cultures who think about the role of the community, the individual, and authority in very different ways from western-style societies where Political Philosophy was born. One of my focuses of study is how Political Science often tries to generalize and make universal purely western impulses, to the detriment of its interactions to which those rules simply do not apply.

At the same time, one of the dominating factors that dictates the behavior of states (and other actors ranging from the corporation to large non-state entities) in the international system is a sense of 'rational, relativistic self-interest. Rational, because they will almost always look to enhance and maintain their standing among other states. Relativistic, because states will define their interests very differently given their culture, history, mindset, ideas about legitimacy and dignity, etc. In other words, a state will act in accordance to its own idea of what constitutes its interests and seek to maximize its standing in those categories relative to other states.

To more directly answer your point, the objective of political science is to be non-cultural. From the beginning, the first European political scientists attempted to establish what they referred to as "Natural Law," essentially the tendencies that humans are likely to follow once you strip away differences in law, customs, religion, and culture. This set of commonsense laws, some natural law theorists like Hugo Grotius argued, should serve as the basis for interactions between states, because these laws of self-interest and preservation underpin every human society, not just Catholic monarchies. This, eventually, became the foundation for international law.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but this is what I usually mean by the "laws of politics." I operate a human fiction so I can use the elaborate set of laws that are pertinent to humans and that is what Knight_Alien and I disagreed on on IRC a few days ago. However, I am well aware that everyone else is operating alien civilisations, and that the same mindsets don't apply :) Thus, the only things that can apply are reductive rules of self-interest, security, perception, legitimacy, and consistency.