The Greek "politika" meant the affairs of the polis, and the polis wasn't just a government. It was the totality of civic life: economic exchange, cultural meaning, social identity, and binding rules all operating within a single community. When Aristotle wrote that humans are "zoon politikon," political animals, he meant that humans are creatures who can only fully exist within the coordinated life of a community. The political wasn't a department of life. It was the whole of shared life, described from the angle of how it holds together. Politics, in its original sense, is the study of the total sum of human interaction. The polis was the laboratory where every dimension of coordination happened simultaneously. Economics, culture, identity, law, all were aspects of a single integrated community life. The word "politics" named that integrated whole. Over roughly two and a half millennia, "politics" contracted. The Roman inheritance emphasized law and administration. Medieval Christianity separated spiritual from temporal authority, shrinking the political domain. The Enlightenment separated economic life from political life, treating markets as operating by their own laws independent of civic decisions. The industrial era separated labor relations, cultural production, and social organization into distinct spheres, each with its own vocabulary and institutions. By the time we reach the modern usage, "politics" means something close to the opposite of its origin. It now refers primarily to electoral competition, legislative procedure, and governmental power, which is perhaps the narrowest possible slice of what the Greeks intended. The rest of what the polis contained got distributed across separate disciplines: economics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, political science. Each discipline developed its own vocabulary, its own axes of analysis, its own specialists. The integrated whole fractured into fragments. Bitcoin began the process of reintegration, bringing everything back on to the same stage to interact and recognize that we are part of a whole. In ancient Greek, the word "idiotis," the root of our word "idiot," meant a private person: someone who withdrew from civic participation and attended only to personal affairs. The idiotis was considered foolish precisely because refusing to engage with the collective coordination of the polis was, in their view, a failure to understand what humans are. Private life without political life was incomplete life. In the same way, treating the different fractures of our civic life as belonging in silos, secluded from each other because of how we perceive them, is completely idiotic.