Liberal democracy is a system of government, or, more accurately, a view of society, that claims that social life, of itself, has no substantial existence. This is to say that the only real entity in a society is the individual, defined usually as a self-interested bundle of desires motored by something called the will. Therefore, politics becomes a matter of those self-interested and self-willed units forming groups that represent their specific desires, and the governing structure weighing the public support of each group of desiring individuals, that is, to what extent those desires are shared by larger elements in the population. Public policy, then, in the pure form of this view, is the result of the larger group predominating, having more influence or succeeding in convincing the state that their desires are most worthy of favor.