Amerika

At your average college campus, there are posters and people behind official-looking tables encouraging students to “get active in politics.”

You can see the same message being broadcast from the media and popular entertainment figures. It’s important that we all “get involved,” they say.

Of course, they don’t note what might be a necessary precursor to involvement, which is some knowledge of the subject matter and some prove ability to make decisions in it.

The result is that the people around us function as a giant distortion layer, with every person trying to “get involved” without a plan, thus either parroting existing dogma or “inventing” new dogma.

What is forgotten is that politics is like all reasoning an adaptation to reality.

We humans, with our giant brains, get into huge amounts of trouble when we start imagining that the conjurings of our brains are necessarily related to reality.

Thus we create political concepts, two opposing parties, issues, etc. without asking ourselves whether any of this is relevant other than to the social process of politics itself, namely cheering for our team and not their team.

Most people would be surprised to find that politics could be a source of its own dysfunction. However, all human endeavors have pitfalls which are, like optical illusions, areas where our minds and reality don’t quite match.

During the election season, the insanity ramps up as people treat the contest like a football game. They direct personal ire at the other candidate, who they want to prove is evil, stupid, bad, selfish, etc.

This mistakes the nature of evil however. Evil is not an external thing; it is the result of our mistaken decisions, like those optical illusions, except we act on them.

Very few people get up in the morning and say, “I intend to do evil today.”

Instead they do what they thing they ought to do, which is serve themselves. In the absence of a higher guiding principle, this is all they have, and en masse they have roughly the same effect as a swarm of locusts, a bloom of algae or a panicked mob.

When some political party is clearly on a bad path, we view their ideology as the cause. What if instead they as people were on a bad path, and the ideology just became a convenient vehicle?

Others spend their time looking for the mythological conspiracy that explains why humanity is off-course (and it is, if you look broadly enough at it). They find the NWO, The Jew^TM, the Bilderbergs, large corporations, any number of religions or cultures to blame.

This misses the point. If we were truly caught up in forces so polarized that they cannot control their impulse to destroy, then there would be no struggle. The battle would be won and us enslaved in a literal sense.

Instead, what we’re seeing is an ongoing process of the blind leading the blind. Unlike a bad single leader, however, in this case it is a giant mob of people who essentially unintentionally troll each other with bad information, bad logic, and unrealistic notions.

This enables each person to feel as if they have “done something” and “gotten involved,” but to what end they don’t know. This sheer chaos allows whoever or whatever might be in charge to continue doing what it does, unmolested.

Like all disciplines, politics has its gotchas. What seems obvious often isn’t, and what seems to be the lurking truth is often more deception. As we go into this election, what defeats us most is our sheer inability to reach any kind of rational conclusion.