 Before anything, politics is firstly about people. Politics is a deeply human and personal phenomenon. Political questions about human rights, racism, justice, crime or freedom are very fundamental questions that cannot be approached in a superficial manner, but require some understanding of their socio-cultural foundations. If we want to try and get a grasp on the true complexity of political systems, we will need to be holistic in our understanding by incorporating all relevant parameters and to do this we need to start from the beginning and the beginning in this case is human culture and society. Political systems do not exist independently in the abstract, they emerge out of and sit on top of social systems. Everything that happens within the political system will ultimately derive and be contingent upon the nature of the underlying socio-cultural system. To understand political systems is to firstly understand how deeply personal they can be to the lived experience of diverse people. In society and culture people share a sense of themselves with others and in politics they share control over that combined self. All political institutions derive from some lived experience of a group of people. As such in political analysis we are inextricably dealing with people's way of seeing the world and their values, what we call culture. In order not to lapse into naive assumptions about such things, it is necessary to make explicit and have some understanding of the basic structures and dynamics of socio-cultural systems. For studying politics without reference to their supporting culture would be like studying fish without regard for water. We might be able to build up a detailed description of the fish's internal anatomy but we would never properly understand the fish without talking about it in the context of its environment. Likewise we cannot fully understand political systems without reference to their supporting context. If we want to trace the roots of some political phenomena back to its origins it will invariably be in that society's culture. As culture is an inherently complex and holistic subject this makes politics itself an inherently complex subject. Sosio-cultural systems are a set of component parts fitting loosely together to form a coherent whole. The term is used to give a holistic approach to looking at both the non-material cultural constructs such as faith, value systems, epistemology etc. and the social structures such as political organizations, civil organizations, educational systems etc. and how the two interact. The term helps to communicate the inextricable linkage between the two and how socio-political structures and dynamics can only be fully contextualized in relation to their cultural system. In asking what is culture or where does culture come from we can answer that it comes from the human condition. To be a rock, to be a tree or a cat is to be under a certain condition. Likewise to be a human is to be under a certain condition. Every person has a body, every person has emotions, every person formulates ideas and has desires. This condition is called the human condition. It is the state that all people are born into and none have any choice in this. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger described it, human existence is like being thrown into the world. It is this thing that we call the human condition that people get thrown into. This human condition we experience subjectively but it is common to all humans. We will all have the subjective experience in our lives at some time of death, of aging, of awe, of happiness, of hope. We all have to feed ourselves etc. These are things that we will all experience in a very personal subjective way that is different. However, irrespective of these differences we will all experience them, they are part of the condition of being human. All of culture is weaved out of the subjective experience of the human condition. Cultures are first and foremost about the lived experience of people, making them inherently subjective in nature. The term culture refers to a society's system of beliefs, values, behaviors and material objects that constitute people's way of life. Or in the words of the cultural anthropologist E. B. Tader, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. A culture comes from the individual's lived experience of reality but it is shared by a community, thus engenders two somewhat distinct aspects. Those processes that are subjective to the individual and those that are objective and shared by the community. In socio-cultural theory, culture is defined as being inter-personal or intrapersonal. Intrapersonal refers to the individual and their subjective experience, while inter-personal is objective in nature in that it deals with the exchange of the culture between people. Cultures may be understood as systems, where the term system refers to a set of interrelated elements that form a whole. The various parts of socio-cultural systems are interrelated and interdependent. When one part of society changes, other parts must change also. This means that an institution, such as the family, cannot be looked at in isolation from the broader political, economic or religious institutions of the society. Cultures are likewise more than the sum of their parts and in many ways non-reducible to them. Culture is a complex system of many interacting beliefs, conceptual structures, social arrangements, material processes and rituals that all interact within a temporal and spatial context. Sociocultural systems co-evolve over time and as a consequence, specific aspects are adapted to fit together and to create in some way a unified whole. Different aspects of the culture only really have meaning within the overall context. We can take artifacts of a culture like an Italian pizza, a Michael Jackson song or a Chinese character, but it is only in their context within the broader culture that they really have their proper significance. When you remove them from that context, they become an icon, a symbol of the real thing. The anthropologist Marvin Harris attempted to outline a universal structure of socio-cultural systems. He mentioned infrastructure, which is production and population. Structure, which is social and behavioural, like political organisations, corporations, casts. And a superstructure, which is values, concepts, beliefs and norms. A society's infrastructure is its most basic components in the sense that without it, physical survival is literally impossible. On their most basic material level, cultures constitute material artifacts, such as production, which refers to technology, raw materials, energy sources and demographics. All societies must live within the constraints of their natural environment and these physical constraints strongly shape a culture and society. The political economy consists of groups and technologies that perform the functions of regulating production, exchanging consumption within and between groups. It is upon this environmental infrastructural foundation that the remaining parts of the social system are based. The social structures refer to the actual patterns of interaction between people. Every society is composed of certain social institutions that maintain orderly relationships among its people and facilitate the coordination between them. Cultures form a coherent conception of reality for a given people, what we might call a worldview. In order to have a coherent worldview and thus a culture, a number of important conceptual elements must be defined. Conceptually, cultures are formed around an ontology, an epistemology, a teniology and an axiology. An ontology defines for the culture the basic categories of reality, that is to say how people should categorize their experience of reality and the things they encounter in the world. An epistemology defines for the culture what are valid processes of reasoning, it defines on what one can base one's beliefs on. An axiology is a value system, it defines for the culture what is of higher and lower value and from this derives naturally a teleology which is the purpose or direction that members of the culture should follow in striving for what that culture believes is of value. Beyond these factors of basic material means, social structures and conceptual frameworks, on their highest and most abstract level cultures engender and express the emotional dimension to the human condition. Through such cultural artifacts as music, painting, religious narrative, legends, films, novels, plays or clothing, people express their emotional states. We create cultural artifacts that express and engage people in the emotional processes that they go through. For example, a film is a cultural experience in that it consists of a set of signs and signals that are designed in a specific way to stimulate certain emotional experiences in the viewer as they go through the various highs and lows of the story experiencing different emotional states such as fear, hope, joy etc. Sociocultural systems are a set of interacting parts, material artifacts, social structures and roles, conceptual and emotional states that give rise to an overall way of being for a group of people. Like all systems they change over time and being complex they develop on the macro level through an evolutionary process. A culture being the product of an interaction between many parts means that no one gets to choose how it changes over time. This is typically decided by an evolutionary process. This process of evolution as it plays out in culture has long since been noted but in the 1960s the American sociologist Gerhard Lensky developed a macro level theory of sociocultural evolution that is broad in scope. Like his predecessor Herbert Spencer, Gerhard Lensky insisted that sociocultural evolution is but a special case of the general evolutionary process. Human populations Lensky tried to illustrate are subject to environmental and biological influences that are similar to ecosystems. Rather than relying on genetic change to adapt to changes in the external environment however, human populations have evolved culture. The development of cultures involves a cumulative process of change where some parts change while others remain limited in their change. Thus cumulative change is a process that combines elements of continuity with elements of change. Many parts of the system are preserved for extended periods while new parts are added and other parts either replaced or transformed. Whereas biological evolution depends upon the random cross mixing of DNA and relies on random genetic variation to successfully adapt. Sociocultural evolution depends upon symbol-based cultural information which is learned and can be transmitted across cultures. This means that it can be a far faster process. It also gives rise to inter-societal selection in which successful adaptations by individual societies become important factors in the competition between societies thus causing the extinction of many sociocultural systems over time and the convergence of those cultures that persist. Culture is typically defined in contrast to nature. That is to say that it is seen as a learned capability of humans as opposed to something that is biologically determined. The sociologist Marianne Bluth, like Linsky, emphasised this, positing that social learning is the mechanism by which successful sociocultural adaptations are acquired by individuals in other cultures in an endless process of cultural adaptation in response to changing technological, social and economic conditions. One of the most important distinctions that is often made in the process of cultural evolution is the distinction between pre-modern and modern societies as in many ways modern culture represents a radical departure from traditional sociocultural patterns of organisation. This process of modernity plays out on many different levels, having a systemic effect on the whole social, cultural and political dimensions of a society. Here we'll draw upon the work of some of the primary theorists on this process of sociocultural modernisation including Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and more recently Jürgen Habermas. Emile Durkheim introduced the idea of mechanical and organic solidarity as two paradigms that distinguished the structure of pre-modern and modern societies. In a society whose structure is defined by mechanical solidarity, its cohesion and integration comes from the homogeneity of its individuals. People feel connected through similar occupations, educational training, shared religion and lifestyle. Mechanical solidarity is seen to define sociocultural organisation within traditional and small scale societies. In more basic societies such as tribes or chieftains, solidarity is usually based on kinship ties of family networks. Traditional societies are often integrated around some religion or spiritual system that provides an overarching context and set of values to the community, creating cohesion within the community. In this respect religion often works as the binding glue for a community. Religions provide a narrative that interprets reality as a whole. They situate individuals within that reality and present a conception of what human flourishing is and thus how one should and should not live one's life. This provides a unifying cultural infrastructure for many pre-modern societies. What Durkheim would have called societies characterised by mechanical solidarity, where the sociocultural system is held together by their shared conception of reality and often their physical constraints within a particular geography among other factors. In contrast the structure of modern societies is defined by what Durkheim called organic solidarity, which comes from the interdependence that arises from specialisation of work and complementarities between people. To understand Durkheim's theory properly it is of value to understand how evolution works through a process involving stages of both differentiation and integration, that over time create greater complexity. Through differentiation new variants are formed but then selection is performed upon them based upon their contribution to the whole. For the whole system to operate successfully in its environment all the parts need to be reintegrated into a functioning whole for the system to persist over time, thus working to reintegrate the system. In this way we get an ongoing process of differentiation and integration. Through evolution systems become more complex meaning they come to have more differentiated parts but also they come to be more interconnected and interdependent within a whole. And this is the essence of Durkheim's theory. The organic solidarity found in modern sociocultural systems is a form of structure based upon the dependencies different individuals have upon each other in more advanced societies. Although individuals perform different tasks and often have different values and interests the order and very solidarity of society depends on their reliance on each other to perform their specific tasks. Organic here is referring to the interdependence of the component parts, thus social solidarity is maintained in more complex societies through the interdependence of its component parts. For example the baker makes bread that feeds the factory worker that produces tractors that enables the farmer to grow wheat that goes to making flour for the baker to bake bread. Modern societies are many complex networks of different units that are interdependent. This differentiation between the parts and their interconnections forms the basic structure to advance sociocultural systems. This is seen to be in contrast to the religious and physical commonalities that held pre-modern societies together. Modernity from this perspective then represents a certain level of sociocultural complexity that goes beyond that of traditional societies. On a purely cultural level modernity is equated to the rise of reason and rationality in displacing religious narrative as the foundations to a modern culture. Unifying religious narratives become displaced within modern societies by a much more complex and specialized form of conceptual system based on reason and scientific inquiry. With the scientific revolution the modern conception of the world became increasingly formulated based primarily on reason. Scientific inquiry came to search for abstract principles to derive the laws of nature based on logic and empirical data and this would over the course of centuries lead to a large body of knowledge that would form the heart of modern people's conception of the world around them. In a modern secular society truth, the nature of reality and the meaning of life are no longer given to the individual members through the revelation of prophets and scriptures. But through reason we see ourselves as discovering them and in so doing creating the fabric of our culture through the application of reason in a never ending process. This ongoing process of recreating culture is a key part of the dynamic nature of modern societies where nothing is certain or written in stone but all is to be discovered or created. Hand in hand with the rise of reason came rationality. Max Weber introduced the idea of rationalization to understand this process whereby rationality becomes a dominant cultural modality guiding our value systems and socio-cultural organizations. In sociology rationalization refers to the replacement of traditions, values and emotions as motives for behavior in society with rational reason-based calculated ones. For example the implementation of bureaucracies in government is a kind of rationalization as is the construction of motorways for mobility, supermarkets to obtain one's food or skyscrapers for work spaces. Rationalization refers to the process of replacing the current values, traditions and ideals of a society that motivate their current behaviors with thoughts and actions that are based upon reason and are instrumental in achieving their ends. And this process of rationalization is one of the primary elements to cultural modernization. The social theorist Jürgen Habermas argued that the modern era or enlightenment released several spheres of social life from their traditional normative cultural regulations to pursue their own internal logic as the regulation of these spheres would become increasingly internal. This is proven to be true of most spheres within a modern social system. Law, economy, government and education all become increasingly autonomous components within a complex whole. Political action was also released from tradition as it became democratic and rationalized. According to Habermas this is what modernity does and not just money and power but also to art and science and all other areas. Each of these spheres of life is set free from the older normative global cultural traditions to pursue its own internal logic. Finally it's important to note that cultures exist within some environments and are required to a greater or lesser extent to interact with other cultures. This invariably raises many questions about how they interoperate, how one cosmos of meaning and social relations can interact with another that may have a very different conception of the world. In our study of political systems we can be dealing with systems wherein people's vision of the world is so radically different that it is virtually irreconcilable. Invariably cultures have evolved over prolonged periods of time adapting to their local context to create an integrated conception of the world. Cultures are based upon value systems and they create rankings and social structures out of them. These ranking systems often conflict when different cultures come in contact. Each ascribes different values to things and this is a perennial challenge in creating political communities where all must find common ground. The social theorist Nicholas Lumen noted that sociocultural systems are self-reproducing, self-organizing, self-directing systems that are operationally closed. Essentially meaning that it is part of their function to selectively perceive their environment or construct it, meaning is an internal production of the system. Any impact on one cultural system by another has a meaning determined by the internal rules of that affected system. Any cultural system's internal representation of the world or its environment is constructed by itself for its internal reasons. The input is filtered and rewritten into the culture according to its internal logic. This holds for all sociocultural systems, large and small, an individual, a nation or a business. This also means we cannot evaluate a social system's representation of the world as true or false because we ourselves have no representation of reality that is not internally constructed by our own social system. The implications of this recognition for normative political theory are of course troubling to say the least. The political theorist Michael Walzer in his book Thick and Thin – Moral Argument at Home and Abroad argued that there are two levels of moral arguments, the thick and the thin. By thin he means the use of terms across multiple cultures, where the terms are independent of the particularities of the cultures of the people using them. But as a consequence, thin terms and arguments are vague. By the term thick he meant the level of discourse that presumes the full cultural particularities of the term. The term's meaning is depended upon and intertwined with a host of cultural practices and other cultural constructs. The point here is that there is a culturally relative level of political discourse, which is the thick and a universal, non-relative level, the thin. These both play roles in political discourse between groups and within groups. To apply and create social changes, one must invariably get to the thick level where there is cultural relativity, but thin standards can be used to communicate between different cultures. We can say and mean that something like equality is of value and this statement can have some foundations, but we must recognize what equality looks like practically in a given society may differ. We will have to adapt everything we say to a local culture. In the same way, that a word will mean different things to different people, it is required that we have some common understanding of it to enable effective interoperability. This is, to a certain extent, one of the challenges to a sociopolitical system to develop these systems of interoperability that enable collective coordination in a way that is balanced and a common language has to be built up to do that.