Most people don’t make decisions based on reason. Rational arguments may sway some people, although that could be more a matter of people feeding their own egos by acting like they are swayed by reason when what they really care about is being perceived as rational. But spending too much time on rational arguments is a waste when people are more swayed by emotion, whether positive or negative, then fill in the reasoning later.
The truth is, most people operate heuristically rather than theoretically. From a cost-benefit analysis, making electoral decisions heuristically takes away the huge cognitive burden of being politically aware. And we’ve entered an era where a partisan voting heuristic is even more likely to lead people to the candidates they would have chosen anyways if they thought about politics as thoroughly as we do.
No, what you’re describing there is the other side of the addiction balance sheet. The pleasant “self esteem boost” you’re describing is essentially a dopamine hit (think about people on cocaine) and is supposed to come about because you’ve done something to improve your life, but instead here you’ve hijacked it to trigger on something that makes your life worse. Like your post amounts to “no you don’t understand what’s great about drugs, it’s that you get high”. I get that.
The problem is that human brains aren’t designed for global news, because back in the day if we lived in a tribe and our brains judged something to be important, we’d be galvanised into action. But with the politics news we live through, there’s basically nothing whatsoever we can do about any of it. The dichotomy between the importance the brain is placing on these issues and the inability to act ends up with the brain considering even knowing a lot about the issue to be a win, even though it doesn’t actually achieve anything concrete at all.
I’m enjoying this conversation on personal relationships with politics (I, too, find myself more miserable the more informed I become) so I’m really not trying to derail. Just want to point out that there is also a major collective action problem due to political hobbyism / people who only stay informed while not doing much else to make a difference. This is an incredibly hypocritical post since I am one of those people–other than donating money to occasional campaigns, I’m not exactly contributing to collective action either.
Right but this is conflating “not following obsessively” with “checking out” which is just a false dichotomy.
You can’t argue with a straight face that the amount of following politics to do is just you doing your duty as a citizen. You do it as a hobby. You do it for that feeling that you have more insight than others do. It’s the same reason Q followers do their thing, just not as poorly repurposed in this case. The argument about collective action is just the purest of rationalizations.
Its weird how polarized politics is as a profession. I can’t help but think there are all kinds of people in other professions who would be infinitely more principled and effective in politics than the people who are there currently. But they wouldn’t touch politics with a ten foot pole. Meantime, it seems a huge majority of those in politics can’t be pried away from it with a crowbar.
Is this a US phenomenon or is this everywhere? I couldn’t even name 5 Canadian politicians and the Canadian members don’t spend their days here bitching about their leaders. Maybe they just assume the Americans don’t care and that’s why it isn’t discussed.
This is basically twitter for me. I only look at my sports list 99% of the time now. I’m sure everyone has different triggers.
Unstuck feels more like hanging out with your retired buddies at Starbucks every morning - grumbling about politics, talking about your new garage* door or whatever.
I’m pretty sure my new obsession with walking all of LA stems from the new dopamine hit I’m getting from not being online 24/7, and getting lost in podcasts/audio books instead, while getting exercise.
*Where we park our cars. You probably call it a lorryloo or something.
I don’t know much about the Canadian media. Do they have a FOX News kind of cable presence? In the US, there’s the governing aspect, and the celebrity aspect, and it seems clear the celebrity aspect of the job is the bigger draw, especially for Republicans. I can’t believe celebrity is as big of a draw for Canadian politicians.
We don’t really have a Fox News but that’s not the difference.
Your election system is designed to do exactly what we see. You are basically always in the middle of an election. In Canada, we are in an election about 6 weeks every 4 to 5 years. During this time, politics dominates here too.
Indeed. There are other drastically different features that are probably influential as well. Restrictions on campaign donations make politics alot less “glamorous” here. And the parliamentary system kind of undermined the Great Leader dynamic.
Unless I misunderstand you this is complete bullshit from my extensive experience. The right was legit 100% convinced Trump was going to win in a landslide. Like they literally had ZERO doubt he would win. It probably saved us from them trying more insane shit on election day.
The thought of him losing didn’t even cross their mind. Honestly it fits perfectly into why it was so easy for them to say the election was stolen. I mean they would have anyways because dear leader told them, but also the fact that to them everything that matters to them pointed to massive landslide win, crowd sizes, pointed to another win. All the polls in 2016 showed Hillary crushing, and Repubs were banking on Trump crushing because of crowd size and enthusiasm. That same dynamic was in play here, and there was legit zero concern from them that he could lose.
To me it keeps me motivated to do absolutely as much as I can in 2022 to stop whats coming. If enough of us give everything we got maybe we can help people on the ground overcome the voter suppression and keep the house/expand the senate before we fall into one party minority rule.
