In light of midterms, or really the midterm avalanche on social media from all sides, I feel like I can say some stuff that will just be forgotten in the inevitable refractory period of “take” fatigue.
Politics are as old as Cain, the world’s 3rd person.
The game and tactics evolve alongside our technologies and ideological fashions. I’ve never cared about politics despite it having these game-like qualities. I think my disinterest in it is related to why I also don’t consider myself a businessman.
In when quitting is ambitious, I said:
I don’t really see myself as a businessman. As someone who would spin something up just because they see an opportunity… I don’t care about solving a problem just because it exists. There are infinite problems, and I have one attention span. To a businessman, profit helps them filter. But more money than I actually need is not motivating enough to do work I don’t care about.
The bold bit sums up my apathy about politics. I vote. Otherwise I’m an NPC and don’t care to put the effort into not being an NPC in this realm of life.
So I’m not particularly informed about politics. I don’t follow news on it. The job is fundamentally about persuasion, but on matters that are always composed of challenging trade-offs. Like any sales gig, there’s no obligation to present those trade-offs in a way that weakens your case. I don’t find this offensive because I’m a grown-up. But I’m also not drawn to listening to motivated arguments any more than I care to listen to timeshare pitches.
Unless I’m strongly affected by a matter, I will not prioritize becoming sufficiently educated on the topic to the standard of competent debate with a worthy adversary. And if I’m not to that standard, who cares what I have to say beyond entertainment value anyway. [I’m not discounting entertainment value as frivolous…I enjoy hearing takes from people good at making them even if I suspect gaps in their knowledge.]
I’m restraining myself from giving advice on this because I can’t do it credibly. Maybe when you sit on the toilet poasting about what so-and-so said while your legs fall asleep makes a difference in the same way that voting makes a difference in aggregate, even though your singular vote makes no mathematical difference. I can only share what I think, and that is to be taken with you or left behind without prejudice as to what I would prefer.
So here are a smattering of thoughts that you will make what you want of:
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When I look at political discourse, I see games as well as their necessity. It is serious business. Life and death, joy and sorrow depend on it. I don’t hold my non-participation with pride just as I don’t justify not exercising as much as I should. I recognize that personal failings are themselves trades. Every choice has an opportunity cost.
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Much of our thinking is gerrymandered, not coherent. Your beliefs are darts that you then draw a bullseye around. I’m ok with this because it’s reality. But I warn you that to internalize it means many chains of logic you encounter, both earnest and propaganda, are not wrong because of how they stick together, but because they fundamentally don’t map to anyone’s reality. There is no normative. It’s just what’s allowed or what’s not. Which brings us to power…
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In the film Nuremberg, Russell Crowe, playing Nazi leader Hermann Göring, delivers this ditty during his interrogation: “You have your freedom and I am a prisoner because you’ve won and we lost. Not because you are morally superior!” The great tension society must balance is that he’s right, but to maintain order we must all aspire to prove him wrong, which we knowingly do in vain.
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You want what you want and only then do you retrofit coherence. A trader would notice this before a commentator because a trader’s greatest battles are with p/l. P/L is an agent of Reality over enough trials.
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The relationship of logic and conclusion is flipped everywhere where reality isn’t the judge. If you need a bridge to stand, you need logic. If you want to cut taxes, logic is a luxury, a tool at best. Remember, the conclusion was born before there was a logic to it, and it will survive once the logic has been refuted, rehabilitated, repackaged, and refuted again.
Anyway, this is what I think our nature is. It’s not evil, it’s just a neutral adaptation. It survives because it works. I don’t care about, nor recommend, your adoption of this perspective. For all I know, it’s a form of self-protection, while I tell myself thinking it comes from observation. Either way, it does explain why political disputes just sound like people arguing over their favorite color.
Figuratively. But you never know these days.