Tips on politics.
One should vote for politicians whose views and policies most closely represent one’s own views.
Confederate monuments and flags are symbols that memorialized racism. Sadly, they actually help forget the larger historical context and ugliness of Slavery in the US. As filmmaker and documentarian Ken Burns correctly points out, they are representations of myths, not facts. Myths that we should definitely not cherish.
The family and social strata you are born into is sheer luck in this universe. Sometimes it pays to recognize and appreciate this.
We run into people with pathological personalities in all walks of life, but they seem to be overrepresented particularly in position of power such as in business management and in politics. These self-absorbed individuals, with personalities that lack social self-awareness, can sometimes, in really bad cases, also be malignant narcissists. If you are lucky, your interaction with them will only be one of annoyance due to their every-day contrarianism and anti-social vehavior. There are, however, extreme cases where they can make your life a living hell, so it is good to learn how to deal with these pathological personalities.
First of all, make sure you are not being a bit too sensitive yourself, and you are judging them a bit too hastly. Try talking to them once, maybe twice, and if that doesn’t work, try asking a colleague for advice on how to deal with them. If you find your initial assesment is correct, because other colleagues can confirm it, then you are definitely dealing with prime asshole personality.
Report them to your employer’s Human Resources department, but if that doesn’t work, because remember, these people cannot control who they are, and getting upset at them is a waste of time, then it may be best to quit that job. These individuals can destroy a company, but they can cause more damage to you and the lives of others around.
For many reasons, too many of us tend to idolize these bad personalities, which compounds the problem. Many times this collective adoration raises them to top leadership positions within society.
Donald Trump is, unfortunately, a perfect example of a very prominent person with a pathological personality. What makes Trump’s case so insidious is that he seems to be manipulating a sizeable segment of American voters.
Since making a prescence in American politics Trump seems to have awakened and enbolden some hidden anxieties in the psyche of many Americans, and they seem to share the same general views and concerns (some valid, some not so valid):
On the other hand, non-Trump supporters listen to all these concerns and see how incredibly outlandish and unhinged they seem. Many, quite understandably, wonder if the United States will even be able to survive the Trump cult of personality. Political pundits from Left and Center are constantly trying to better understand this phenomenom, and ponder how it will end. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist, describes in this Scientific American interview the two major emotional drives that ties Trump and his followers: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis.
Narcissistic symbiosis: Fefers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence, while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.
Shared psychosis: When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals.
The treatment is of course, the removal of exposure, but some important notes to keep in mind if you must interact with a die-hard Trump supporter:
Are social medial architectures destroying civil and rational political discussions?
YouTube has an “Up Next” list of videos to watch on the right side of the screen. It is driven by a computer algorithm that is designed to make you click on more and more similar videos, to make you stay online forever, so the company can continue serving you advertisements.
Note that these algorithms are not design by evil engineers. Those engineers are just writing software to make the company money, so basic economic incentives here.
But YouTube is not the only one: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and in fact, almost all social social media and modern “news” services follow the same business model. And, lest we forget, Cable TV news does exactly the same by hosting 24x7 news channels.
The implication for everyday politics is quite scary. We are essentially radicalizing viewers to have extreme and exagerated views about daily events, and most times people don’t even notice this. This sort of brain-washing can happen to any person, unless the individual is careful to pay close attention to this digital persuasion problem and makes a conscious effort to realize all this.
At the extreme end of this problem things can get even worse when it afflicts people with certain personality disorders. Luckily most people do not fall under this category.
It is pricesely because of these algorithms that real “fake news” can go viral. For example, this is how the Pizzagate conspiracy theory got started and went viral.
We all follow social media and watch TV all the time, but the reality is that these algorithms could potentially lead to the gradual breakdown of civil society. Could it gradually erode reasonable and civilize discussions in politics (see for instance this TED Talk).
Is this crazy hype or should we be worried? Should we start to address this problem?
Why seem to keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to analyzing politics. Why not just start off from the shoulders of giants? The psychologist Steve Pinker is one of those giants, and in his book The Blank Slate he talks about the two poles of the political spectrum. The sociological tradition and the economic (social contract) tradition, or The Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision, that as Pinker points out were originally formed by yet another important intellectual, Thomas Sowell.
Sowell originally called these the Constrained and Unconstrained visions, and these are of course the classic Right and Left poles in the political spectrum that we’ve all come to know, love, argue and debate.
I haven’t read Sowell very well, but from reading his Wikipedia entry and watching some of his YouTube videos my, current take is that his views are largely correct, but that perhaps they are a bit partial to his Libertarian persuation to the Tragic Vision itself. As with many other rational Libertarian thinkers, I feel that his own conservatism may be driven by a lack of appreciation for the immediate need of many Liberal policies. I disagree with Sowell’s take that either vision is just as likely to cause as much harm as the other. The level of harm each vision can engender is random and particular to history, not to the visions themselves. This opinion may be premature on my part.
Many individuals who identify as politically centrist encounter difficulty when interacting with conservatives, often due to the significant right-leaning stance of the conservative counterparts. This observation suggests a notable rightward shift in the conservative spectrum. Despite this, those holding centrist views assert their position as one based on reason and compassion, leaning slightly leftward. They strive to ground their political perspectives in a rational understanding of human nature, acknowledging the provisional nature of scientific knowledge. If one were to encapsulate their political stance into a single term, “balance” would aptly capture its essence.
These political poles should really be named Reason and Compassion. And a more prudent stance is a hybrid one, with historical timeliness playing a key role in any expediency. We should always follow Reason in helping us establish a just and effective government, but it should always be tempered by an understanding of human nature and the importance of compassion and empathy in governance.