All-Pervasive Politics As Lazy, Fallacious, and Dangerous
Cookie-cutter judgments of fellow Americans will result in tyranny -- if they haven't already
The social evolution in which politics intrudes on almost every aspect of American life is continuing on a successful path that remains unchallenged, unnoticed.
There was a time in the 1960s when everyday acts like intercommunication, cultural choices, religious interactions, practice of law and medicine, and business customs were not subject to daily political considerations for what may be called the “average” citizen of the United States.
Politics slowly became all-pervasive and while it may be called a social experiment because it reflects a changing society under the influence of forces such as visual media and government manipulation, the degree to which the “average” US resident has readily accepted the introduction of politics into most facets of life is quite remarkable. It might also be called dangerous.
Previous societies have, of course, experienced such invasive political overtones, but the US may be the first free-and-open society to have allowed conscious politically-tinged discernment even in such mundane or everyday choices as what we eat and what we allow ourselves to hear and see.
In the 1960s, and before, it was envisioned that there would come a time when “machines” would improve the quality of life so much that humans would have 4-day workweeks and plenty of time for cultural diversion such as reading books and enjoying family, leisure time activities and health.
For some today, though, even expressions of free time have found an immense immersion in political topics, with groups that enjoy politics as a form of entertainment, community engagement, benign gossip, and overwhelming personal commitment that can even appear as an overarching belief system (in some ways mimicking a religious commitment).
Information and news, the first elements of history in some cases, are delivered and received through political lenses. Life-shaping decisions in business policies are seen and realized through political prisms, often forced by government incentives that themselves qualify as social experiments. And the choosing of friends, colleagues, and enemies are increasingly based on political bias that reaches deeply into cultural and perceptual concepts.
The biases, though, are also increasingly profiled so that decisions (or are they simple judgments?) about friendships ignore subtleties that are likely more important than the profile itself.
For example, the highly politicized individual will assume that because one is neutral on the highly-charged subject of President Donald Trump, than that someone must be one of his followers, because matters surrounding him are so fraught with emotion that a neutral stance is abhorrent.
In a similar example, supporters of President Trump will express the same emotionally-charged point of view by assuming one’s neutrality is a sign of disapproval (or worse).
These proclivities reject the importance of nuance in beliefs, tending toward the old-fashioned judgment, echoed by President George W. Bush after 9/11, that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
Or as the old workers’ union adage from 100 years ago rang — as a forced personal and immediate political reckoning — “which side are you on?”
That forced need to choose sides is antithetical to the common, rather idealized notion of the discerning independent American, who decides actions based on knowledge, understanding of law and truth, and most of all the details of actions — is it worth it? What will become of it? Who do the actions help?
This used to be called “common sense” or common knowledge, but these and other terms are being redefined, even as we speak, at the behest of gaining partisan favor for whomever the political rulers might be.
Such redefining of familiar and routine understanding of American life can neither be called “progressive” nor “conservative” when it’s primarily advantageous for those who lead the political system while obscring understanding for Americans overall.
When the essence of everyday life becomes politically infused, the exigencies of daily life make it easier to judge people and situations and then move on, as opposed to simply taking the moment to ask someone the essential question “why?”
You’re for centralized government? Why?
You’re against abortion? Why?
You believe one certain man was our best president ever? Why?
And as an increasingly complicated and opaque society expands the demands on our time just to get through the day, we rely more on the lazy human shortcut called judgment rather than thought.
Add to this a breakdown in human communication and societal stresses, and it becomes easy to rationalize rather than think, much less take time to empathize or even sympathize.
It’s too easy to just dismiss people based on a preset profile of people’s politics, too easy not only because it’s not fair and it severely limits proverbial public debate but perhaps most importantly because it indicates how political decisions have permeated our logic.
For example, if you know a woman who describes herself as “pro-life,” that now-loaded phrase translates to “anti-abortion” in the minds of some, and therefore that woman must be MAGA.
That is a gross leap of logic that borders on fallacious belief, where cognitive bias based on lack of information leads to erroneous conclusions the majority of times.
Yet the more deeply one believes in politically profiling others, the more one categorizes people, again a lazy and self-centered approach to understanding reality.
The ones most likely to apply black-and-white approaches to human interaction are the losers in the game of understanding reality.
And indeed, the black-and-white approach to life and politics was anathema to the liberal view of American society. In the 1960s, there was a viewpoint that the Klan saw the world in black-and-white, free from the realities of delicate distinctions.
The world is made up of many colors and cultures, yet a cultural stereotype of politically unwavering Americans is becoming the antithesis of the individualist that helped build culture over hundreds of years.
Allowing politics to pervade our society has divided us like never before because each segment of our culture includes an array of different points of view. You can’t draw a a Mason-Dixon line and conclude that most on either side believe a certain way, unlike the Civil War.
And this political profiling leads to lazy assumptions about others that are likely not true, yet confront us on a daily basis. And it allows the profiler to assume not only a moral high ground but also a simplistic and inelastic acceptance or dismissal of others based on politics without assessing character.
The philosophy behind this stereotyping of other human beings, almost immediately and foremost, is “which side are you on?”
Never mind nuance. Never mind the reality faced by individuals that make up their personal choices or beliefs. Never mind the traditional human courtesy of allowing others their personal approach, which some used to call “tolerance,” or perhaps “civic virtue.”
Unconcerned about the cynical irony, for some today the concept of tolerance requires a lack of tolerance for those who are judged to be intolerant. Or not tolerant enough.
We are experimenting socially with a dangerously-pervasive politics that threatens our families, friends, colleagues and even our civil society as it slowly poisons us while we stand in verdict of others as caricatures or comrades, friends or fools.
It’s the drowning of civic virtue and uncritical reliance upon prefabricated notions of politics that can easily lead to disconnect from a quickly-changing reality.
There is a dogmatism built into our now-pervasive politics that is poison to logic, and the hubris and humiliation that results is becoming standardized in a way that is not only dehumanizing but is becoming tyrannical in its implicit authority and cultural arrogance.
There is no real authority in politics itself as there is in law or physics, no central truth that fully justifies its overarching preeminence in culture, only the changing viewpoints, judgments, platforms and manipulations of human beings, who ideally learn and grow with each experience and each realization of facts and information.
The single organism of the body politic is torn apart by the venom of conformity politics.
Minds that are hardened against the minutiae of reality and the context of information are subject to a collision with high reality.
Was it the philosopher Carl Jung who said, “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge”?
Now. Add to all this the complications of artificial intelligence as the rising heat of data convection wafts through our frozen-political-perspectives society.
That venom will be thickened as human beings search it for confirmation of pre-existing beliefs, keeping in mind that belief itself requires a leap of faith to at least some extent.
The human mind tends to form opinions and approaches to information that are often quickly set in stone. It may be that the human minds is under great challenge as the world around it changes at an ever-more-dizzying pace. That might help explain why so many of us are hardening, unchanging in our approaches to life as change overwhelms, as it seems like the bombardment of information is getting harder to assimilate.
But assimilate new facts and information we will, in order to survive.
If only because refusal to understand new facts and, perhaps, truths can only lead to an ignorance that is easily solved by tyranny.
Not the kind of “Trump is Hitler” or “Obama was a communist” tyranny — the kind of authoritarianism America has never seen before.
BTW, I have never, nor will I ever, allow artificial intelligence to write for me.