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How Politics Brings Out the Worst In Us

Tyler Durden's picture




 

Submitted by Max Borders via The Foundation for Economic Education,

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
– Guy Duborg

Have you seen The Best of Enemies? It’s a documentary about the famous 1968 debates between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal. The whole thing culminates in a moment where — after heated exchange — Buckley, taking Vidal’s bait, explodes,

Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in ... And when you root for the soldiers of your own country to be brutally killed, you ... I'll sock you in the goddam face and you'll stay plastered.

And there it was. The dandies of the left and right reduced to ad hominem, almost coming to blows. Nielsen loved it. And politics as prime-time blood sport became an American pastime.

Ironically, the very next evening I watched Chasing Tyson, a documentary following the career of Evander Holyfield, which culminates in the big fight where Tyson bites Holyfield’s ear. Twice.

Two nights in a row. Two documentaries, with two men squaring off. Each ends in someone spitting blood and probably regretting it. For Tyson and Holyfield, the wounds have all healed. They each moved on. They forgave. And each respects what the other was able to achieve in his career. But Buckley and Vidal died with the poison of personal and political animus still in their spleens.

This is happening to all of us.

As the political parade passes, the spectacle plays itself out on television and social media. Those who gather choose their sides of the avenue. In so choosing, they self-segregate. Tribal affiliations are on display. It’s a natural human tendency, with deep roots in our evolutionary past.

According to Sharon Begley, writing about the Kurzban-Cosmides-Tooby jersey experiment in which team colors seem to overcome racial biases,

[Kurzban’s] basketball-jersey experiment and others that have confirmed its results suggest that humans do have brain circuits for classifying people — but according to whether they are likely to be an ally or an enemy.

Politics brings out the worst in us by tapping into those tribal tendencies. Sure, trading barbs is better than trading bullets. We all know really nice people who participate in stinging or acrimonious exchanges online. Maybe we do it ourselves.

Here’s a nice headline you might have shared: “5 Scientific Studies That Prove Republicans Are Stupid.”

Or how about: “Yes, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.”

Here we have someone calling hundreds of millions of people stupid or crazy. Never mind that the country can’t be so easily divided into two teams. It’s a two party system. So in that good old democratic operating system (DOS) you have two choices of app, which means two choices of tribe.

I wondered if anybody else ever saw things like I do, from this lonely distance. I found this from the Cato Institute’s Trevor Burrus:

Like any other game, the rules create the attitudes and strategies of the players. Throw two brothers into the Colosseum for a gladiatorial fight to the death, and brotherly sentiment will quickly evaporate. Throw siblings, neighbors, or friends into a political world that increasingly controls our deepest values, and love and care are quickly traded for resentment.

 

But it gets even worse. The first-past-the-post rules of our democratic politics turn a continuum of possibilities into binary choices and thus imposes black-and-white thinking onto a world made mostly of grays. Teams (politicians), cheerleaders (pundits), and fans (voters) galvanize around an artificially schismatic world view.

 

And then our biases take over. Now that we’ve invented a problem — “which group of 50 percent +1 will control education for everyone?” — imposed a binary solution — “we will teach either creation or evolution” — and invented teams to rally around those solutions — “are you a science denier or a science supporter?” — our tribal and self-serving brains go to work assuring us that we are on the side of righteousness and truth.

 

The shrillest and most dogmatic pundits and politicians become the most popular, feeding our sense of righteousness like southern Baptist preachers.

This could have been yet another of those articles which I end with a call for reasoned discourse or more tolerance. Plenty of those articles have been written, and they don’t do much good. Our tribal brain burns hotter than any intellectual plea for tolerance. 

Instead, I just want to point out what’s really going on: Politics sucks and democracy is overrated.

Politics — especially elections — creates a system that brings out the worst in people. It poisons relationships. It pulls us in as spectators who stand agog at a completely inauthentic show of national politics (over which we have virtually no power). We end up mostly ignoring the local issues over which we could have considerably more influence. As a consequence, an entire nation falls under a particular kind of spell.

As Jeffrey Tucker writes,

We are encouraged to believe that we are running the system. So we flatter ourselves that our opinions matter. After all, it is we the voters who are in charge of building the regime under which we live. But look deeper and you discover a truth that is both terrifying and glorious: the building of the great society can’t be outsourced. It is up to you and me.

The only people to whom our opinions matter are the pollsters with their robocalls and their wet index fingers held aloft, and the media who hold up mirrors so distorted we can barely recognize ourselves.

People are different. They are going to have differences of opinions, they’ll hold different values, and run in different circles. But we expect that our opinions, values and circles should extend to a nation of 350 million people; by brute force if necessary. And until they do we’ll just get on Facebook and sock them in the face until they stay plastered.

On Election Day, the team with the red jerseys will pull on their side of the rope. The team with the blue jerseys will pull on their side of the rope. In the end, both will end up in the mud — because they’ve been standing in it all along.

 

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Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:17 | 6980508 Hapte
Hapte's picture

Politricks

(and hoes)

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:32 | 6980549 Bilderberg Member
Bilderberg Member's picture

There's always been Kings, Queens, Presidents and Dictators since the beginning....

So who is Obama?

http://www.raptureready.com/soap2/ungurean78.html

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:19 | 6980674 Escrava Isaura
Escrava Isaura's picture

 

 

How Politics Brings Out the Worst In Us

May I add two more dogmas: Religion and Economics.

 

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:30 | 6980695 DownWithYogaPants
DownWithYogaPants's picture

I watched the documentary about Buckley and Vidal.  I have to say Buckley was a likeable character and Vidal was strictly narcissistic and thus of course profoundly unhappy.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:21 | 6980513 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

Fear not. We are many. They are few. The Constitution is for you and me.
This land is for you and me.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:39 | 6980728 crossroaddemon
crossroaddemon's picture

Ain't you just cute. They are the few with world-class military hardwae and we are the untrained many with hunting rifles. Good luck with that shit.

The constitution gives other men power over me. It's an evil document. Fuck the constitution.

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 02:43 | 6981010 Secret Weapon
Secret Weapon's picture

We had all the hardware in Nam and they were rice farmers.  How did that turn out?

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:22 | 6980517 PoasterToaster
PoasterToaster's picture

Politics is the exercise of force against other people.  Why is it surprising that it pisses everyone off?

This fantasy that we all consent to whatever happens to us as a result of politicking is one of the major lynchpins of the slave system that needs to be pulled.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:26 | 6980531 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

Tell it, brother/sister,
The money power and their pet slaves in DC will use us, get us all killed.
We trusted. They failed. They are money whores.
Defy. Do not comply.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:26 | 6980533 insanelysane
insanelysane's picture

It's sad that many Americans believe that one of the people running for President is actually the answer to all of their problems.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:28 | 6980536 ebworthen
ebworthen's picture

Politics is the distraction.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:32 | 6980542 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

For joy, go to youtube Woody Guthrie This Land is Your Land, and see his guitar: 'kill the fascists'.
It does not have to be their physical death, but it must surely be to end them.
End the Fed.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:31 | 6980544 Normalcy Bias
Normalcy Bias's picture

Divide and Conquer, bitches...

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:15 | 6980558 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

Step away from the gun unless you intend to pull the trigger.
Never be the target of someone who is not afraid to die, while lowly snivelling cowardly moneychangers move you.

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 07:49 | 6981194 Normalcy Bias
Normalcy Bias's picture

What you talkin' bout Willis?

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:32 | 6980551 LetThemEatRand
LetThemEatRand's picture

We are governed by unelected oligarchs who control both parties.  This article misses that important point.  Politics is just a divide and conquer methodology designed to keep the population distracted and divided.  

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:39 | 6980565 Atomizer
Atomizer's picture

Ask House Speaker Paul Ryan. Busy month.

Speaker Paul Ryan | Speaker.gov

Ask him this...see his extraordinary reply. 

Your Children Will...

 

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:00 | 6980611 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

Atomizer.
Always with us. Good.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:39 | 6980690 Atomizer
Atomizer's picture

Absolutely. You need to promote your profile. 17 weeks is a cold cup of coffee around here. I support you. Educational posts will aid you to develop credibility.

Word of the wise. Our country is going into the toilet. I see a shift in understanding. Thank God!  

We love the United States of America. So do you. 

Edit: May your knowledge excel within the fightclub. Good group of people. 

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:40 | 6980731 crossroaddemon
crossroaddemon's picture

You love a political entity that places others in power over you? Seriously?

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:07 | 6980577 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

Journos are 'educated fools', paid to ask. Who listens?
Mencken, smart boy. But useless. He was for money, not values. Clever chimp.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:44 | 6980579 Insurrexion
Insurrexion's picture

"Politics is the spectacle of choice to prevent the masses from executing the political. That is, until the tide of revolution washes over them all."

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:45 | 6980588 Barnaby
Barnaby's picture

Whoa. Tribal? What is this, The Bell Curve?

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 22:52 | 6980592 V for ...
V for ...'s picture

An amusing discussion among worldly journos and academics.
Two in a room. Both will argue.
The world is a contest of ideas :-)
We live another day.

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:18 | 6980667 Fuku Ben
Fuku Ben's picture

Politics is not a 2 party system. It is a 1 party farce. Same stuff, different day, different century, different faces, same results.

Let the unwashed masses eat ballots, then bailouts, then bullets. Power and money consolidated, the rest remain in slavery forever, rinse and repeat.

Happy New Year everybody! Expanded Europe & US city warning list from the bottom link below. 1 city already cancelled earlier today.

NYC, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna, Rome, Paris, Bordeaux, Rennes, Lyon, Marseille, Brussels CANCELED, Lisbon, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Madrid

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-23/what-fresh-horror-awaits-econom...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-30/terrorists-win-brussels-mayor-c...

Wed, 12/30/2015 - 23:18 | 6980672 joego1
joego1's picture

Wait until I get loose of these fuckers and things get back to normal.

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 00:01 | 6980778 Element
Element's picture

 

 

"Politics — especially elections — creates a system that brings out the worst in people. It poisons relationships. It pulls us in as spectators who stand agog at a completely inauthentic show of national politics (over which we have virtually no power). We end up mostly ignoring the local issues over which we could have considerably more influence. As a consequence, an entire nation falls under a particular kind of spell."

 

No matter what words you follow, you end up under a "kind of spell" and more or less act a bit dippy.

It isn't just politics. Politics is just a symptom of the fact that words represent purely imaginary constructs, and most of them don't even have a factual or physical expression of a real 'thing', which the symbols and their interpretations contrive to fully represent, with a pure abstraction.

The "kind of spell" is that we mutually allow such abstractions to represent and define some 'thing', as actual.

The word-concept interplay, no matter how well intended, no matter how carefully constructed, no matter how well thought through, no matter how rational and sensible, does that to a mind, anyway, over time (repetitions), and it does not take long for most. A few minutes and several repetitions can be enough.

Politics is pure abstraction but to 'control' another pure abstraction in our mutual mental matrix called 'money', and every child knows that household crazy arguments and conflicts generally come back to the interaction of such pure abstractions. As we 'desire' (another stimulated abstraction) to want 'more', because we are told to, from every direction. And desire is the novocaine bathed dagger blade created by our imagination, as it was stimulated by advertisements, continually feeding us abstract tailored images and the sounds and sights of better times via better stuff. 

Don't be evil.

And politics is just the struggle to be the controller of all such mental "spells".

-----

I wrote this here two years ago:

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-12-20/one-world-leader-still-e...

"The root meaning of government:
 
To 'govern' comes from the Latin root 'goberno' which literally translates into English as "to pilot", or "to manage", or "to control", and 'ment' comes from the Latin word 'mentis' (from which words like mental are derived), which means 'mind'.
 
So government is a mechanism created and dedicated to pilot and control the minds of citizens.
 
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guberno#Latin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mens#Latin
 
Hence we get highly educated human drones, people who do not act for themselves, but are effectively indirectly remotely controlled and piloted by an exterior organizational infrastructure, dedicated to the control and direction of human minds. But clearly it isn't just the state, public or private education process that turns people into unwitting (i.e. witless) drones. Government particularly does not like independent minds to operate. Government, by implication claims and asserts that your mind is the government's defacto drone, its territory, its domain, and its right to 'fix' a misbehaving 'drone' mind, and to tweak it to perform in the compliant and desired ways, to amplify the correct thoughts, and suppress the undesired thoughts. Thus a form of effective mind-control is more or less achieved, in most people. Some are more resistant to being told or suggested what to think, and how to act, and more worryingly may insist on "thinking for themselves" (which is really most annoying), and those "undesirables" are usually suppressed, oppressed, house-arrest, imprisoned, exiled, or just shot."

-----

It's the role of politics to always have us fall under a "kind of spell", and the result is always more or less crazy.

And even if you create your own preferred word-concept abstractions to operate by, the result is still the same, the only difference is you created your own "kind of spell".

Otherwise known as "thinking for yourself".

Yeah, well, that's a start, yes, but it's still fundamentally the very same mechanism.

You can't win with symbols as 'words', representing 'things' imagined, they are always evoking a "kind of spell", and hopelessly unrepresentative in that role even when they do refer to actual physical observable 'objects' of objective thoughts. Thoughts are just constructs of what the word was inadequately defined to represent. And most of the 'objects' of objective thought have no material reality.

So yeah, even clear rational objective "thinking for yourself", is innately also the undermining of the object mind, that leads to responses that are more or less bonkers, when viewed in other contexts through a different filter of objective realities - none of which are real.

The whole thing is a mutually agreed, or disagreed, illusion, and being compelled rationally to 'think' that any part of it, "really matters", which is all politicians push on the mind, is an implicit sentence to be under the "kind of spell" of the moment.

It only can happen because we don't explicitly see and fully realize that abstract imagination is being misused to present us a mutual reality, that has no reality.

We actively consent to mutually create a melange of "spells", a conglomeration of nonsense which doesn't exist outside our skull, and we call it "thinking", and it is "inevitable" for "intelligent people", to always use abstractions, to "communicate ideas".

And thus humans are not what we think we are, and have mutually and automatically cut ourselves off from ever encountering what a human being actually is, and instead are left responding to the detritus of the past unreal 'spells', with more unreal 'spells'.

We took the easy path of imagination as words and are infatuated with wild fantasies of the spell controllers.

For they are demonstrably the more intelligent erudite thinkers and more articulate and sophisticated orators. Add a tan, reserved bling, well cut suit, some faint long ago faded sex appeal, and you have a world "Leader" (preferably with a lot of loot in its pocket, as it makes the other spells seem more compelling and acceptable).

The imaginer-mind is a marvelous expanse of endless ad-hoc nothing that mentally is always taken to be particularly remarkable and extraordinary somethings.

 

Fortunately we aren't any of that.

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 00:04 | 6980784 Atomizer
Atomizer's picture

Santa didn't bring me my M134 minigun. Moral of story, that gun can shoot more rounds per a second than these central planning parasites dictating global control exist. You have to love the tracer round ammo. 

M134 Minigun in action

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 01:02 | 6980826 Atomizer
Atomizer's picture

Amazon is struggling to tandem two drones to drop delivery in my back yard. Something about weight restrictions for package delivery for the M134 Christmas gift. 

/sarc

The Amazon drone quad formation poses a national security concern. A good wind shear might take out one drone quad propeller and become a dominio effect to remaining two drone freight delivery droids. The whole flight of destruction becomes a national media scare. ISIL is restricting deliveries. Geico (Grandpa Buffett) decides to increase drone insurance costs.

He begins to pass along the drone insurance increase to his Choo Choo trains in case a drone should come within a mile of transporting goods, services, ISIS, Mexican cartel guns to nearby shipping ports. 

Cannot capture any video footage during transportation. I can assure you Grandpa's manifest shipping logs are clean. He never needs a backup copy to cover the electronic inputs. He uses lifelock to backup any sensitive manifest with a million dollar insurance policy for identity theft. 

Grandpa is a smart man. 

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 01:53 | 6980974 Bopper09
Bopper09's picture

I remember back when I thought voting mattered.  Until I realized that if it did, they'd make it illegal.  'They' pull the strings and use 'politics' as a distraction for the people that aren't distracted by sports or celebrities.

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 10:01 | 6981397 Ghordius
Ghordius's picture

you have it the wrong way round, imho. voting matters... and that's why you get all the distraction. in order to prevent you to ask why you get only two options, for example

as a reminder, recently there was a ZH article on elections in Spain. 10 parties won and got seats in parliament. ten parties. and some... did not

success and failure go together, both in capitalism and politics

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 03:11 | 6981037 JLM
JLM's picture

feeding our sense of righteousness like southern Baptist preachers

 

Whaat baptist church did this guy go to?? lol

Thu, 12/31/2015 - 09:53 | 6981373 OneTinTrooper
OneTinTrooper's picture

I stopped believing all the bullshit years ago.  Politics doesn't bring the worst out of me.  It brings nothing out of me.  Just get the fuck off my lawn before I let the dog out.  You fuckers can't have my mind and you certainly can't have my soul.

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