The writer Ambrose Bierce (1911, 258) once defined politics as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.” Even Alexis de Tocqueville (2004 [1848], 202) supported this interpretation in writing that a politician “first tries to identify his own interests and find out what similar interests might be joined with this. He then casts about to discover whether there might not by chance exist some doctrine or principle around which this new association might be organized, so that it may present itself to the world and gain ready acceptance.”
True for politics and so much of corporate life also
