NOTE: I found this in my archives. It was first published in December, 2016.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over time is that no matter what I want the world to be, it usually ends up being something else completely.
I am by no means an idealist, but I have seen enough to know that life can be pretty amazing. And why wouldn’t I want life to be amazing all the time?
Unfortunately, it didn’t take the entirety of my 40 years to understand that things aren’t always going to be great. I learned very early on that the world isn’t always what we want it to be.
What did take me nearly 40 years to understand is that it’s how we react to this inconvenient truth that has a profound impact on our happiness and emotional well being.
We have to choose whether we allow ourselves to accept reality and find opportunities for enjoyment within it, or try to escape from it in the hopes of finding an alternative reality that better suits us.
In this age of political polarization and the raging dumpster fire known as social media, it has become painfully clear to me that most of us choose to either ignore reality completely, or worse we accept the comforting lies that allow us to reshape reality to fit neatly into the narratives we so desperately want to believe are true.
While this behavior is by no means constrained to a political context, the most prevalent manifestation of this way of thinking stems from our reaction to political events, or more dishearteningly, the growing trend of politicizing just about everything.
I remember going through a total political transformation after September 11. Perhaps it wasn’t a transformation per se, as I was only 25 and was by no means politically active at that point in my life, but I had a political awakening.
Prior to this point in my life, I voted reliably Democratic. I voted for Bill Clinton the first time I was eligible to vote for president. I voted for Al Gore in 2000 because I couldn’t stand the thought of George W. Bush as President of the United States.
But September 11 changed me profoundly in many ways, not the least of which was a shift in my political views from slightly left of center to slightly right of center.
The magnitude of that day made me question everything, and while embracing the non-social tenets of conservatism may have been partly to fill a void, I spent a great deal of time reading, researching and philosophizing about political ideologies.
More importantly though, I listened. I listened to friends, I listened to strangers, I listened to everyone. No idea was off the table. It was a tremendous thought exercise regardless of whether the outcome was a popular one or not.
While we didn’t have Twitter at the time, the 24-hour news cycle was well established by 2001. I found myself fixated to Fox News. I would check the Drudge Report about 20 times a day just to see if Matt Drudge had posted links to any stories worthy of his trademark headline “siren” image.
For several years, as we invaded Afghanistan and ultimately Iraq, I just couldn’t get enough of the endorphin rush that came with “breaking news.” I soon found myself replacing the conversations that I used to have about sports and music with political debates.
The political discussions that I had in pubs across the U.S. and abroad were - with rare exception - fun. They were invigorating. They were mostly intelligent. 15 years ago people were open to sharing and listening to ideas from across the political spectrum.
I learned a lot from these discussions. Most notable was that despite the pain and confusion that I still felt from 9/11, and despite taking a relative hard line on certain issues as a knee-jerk reaction to the terrorist attacks, I could see all sides of a matter. Hell, I would even argue both sides of an issue just to further my understanding of it.
But over time, as networks like Fox News and MSNBC further entrenched themselves behind political lines drawn in the sand, the stimulation of learning the “why” behind the politics of the people I would meet both at home and during my travels started to dissipate.
Talking politics wasn’t fun anymore. It started to become repetitive at best, toxic and divisive at worst. At some point we all started shouting over each other just like the major networks were starting to do.
As blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity grew in celebrity, along with their counterparts on competing networks, the discourse devolved into one of intolerance for any view that did not align neatly with the one being sold by the talking heads.
I didn’t get it at first, but then I started to notice that the same phrases were being repeated over and over. And the wording of these phrases was different from network to network. Context and reason were nowhere to be found.
Looking back, what I was witnessing was the birth of what I now see as the bane of the civilized world’s existence - talking points.
Critical Thinking is Dead. Long Live Critical Thinking.
Today the sprawling yet thoughtful political debates of the 2000’s are nothing but a distant memory.
Now we have talking points, networks tripping over themselves to breathlessly break news before the competition, and social media “hot takes” from every amateur pundit on the planet.
With politics permeating every aspect of our lives, critical thinking is on life support. Nobody hears rational arguments anymore. We just pick out talking points and repeat them incessantly, with growing vitriol.
We only hear what fits neatly into our predefined narratives. We try desperately to turn the most convenient talking points into self fulfilling prophecies.
It’s far worse on social media, where even the most benign mention of anything remotely political is met with attacks from swarms of humans and armies of bots looking to collectively shout down any view not in complete alignment with their own.
Although the death of critical thinking is in itself disheartening, what’s truly frightening is our growing propensity to regurgitate messaging from sources who probably don’t have our best interests in mind when they craft and disseminate talking points.
We'll believe anyone without questioning as long as their narrative matches our world view. This leaves us vulnerable to having our strings pulled by politicians, corporations, and individuals who have a vested interest in stirring the collective pot to further their own agendas.
Without the ability or desire to question the “why” behind what we believe or are led to believe, we risk becoming drones controlled by those who have learned to exploit this collective mindlessness and manufactured anger.
It’s All Just Two Sides of the Same Coin
Eventually the political environment became too much for me to handle. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to hear what people with differing viewpoints had to say, it was that the way they were making their points was starting to frustrate me to no end.
The lack of any semblance of logic or critical thought led to boring and droll conversations. At some point it felt like nearly everyone became an expert overnight, yet they couldn’t articulate their viewpoints in a in a remotely intelligible fashion.
Constructing and defending rational arguments was replaced with insults and snark. If you don’t agree 100% with someone’s packaged talking point-driven argument, you are “dumb” and nothing you say could possibly register in their elitist mind.
How is it that we believe that every issue can be neatly broken down into a dichotomy, where you either side with the Republican talking point or the Democratic talking point? And if someone doesn’t agree absolutely with your talking point, they’re obviously less intelligent than you?
It was this Ignorance coupled with arrogance that made me decide that this was a game I was no longer interested in playing.
If September 11 brought upon a political awakening for me, the 2016 election cycle triggered a political reawakening. I found that the more political the world was becoming, the more I found myself detaching from politics completely.
Long before the insane GOP primary season, which was a spectacle where Donald Trump took on a field of a dozen-and-a-half contenders of varying degrees of unlikability, my political views moved back away from the right and planted themselves firmly in the center…the center of nothing.
I had become a “small-L” libertarian, taking a mostly laissez-faire view of most issues. I wanted to drop out of the political discussion altogether, for no other reason than it had become impossible to have any political viewpoint without being attacked for it by someone, somewhere.
I no longer wanted to invest emotionally in something that would provide little to no return on the investment. I didn’t have the energy to be outraged anymore. Instead I turned inward to contemplate my place in this new politically charged world.
Somewhat ironically in hindsight, despite my growing belief that the vast majority of human beings had lost the ability to think for themselves, my contemplations led me to embrace personal politics that were firmly planted in the belief that individuals can make better decisions for themselves than any government could.
I found myself supporting candidates based on their ability to articulate logical arguments and back them up with evidence - which was essentially a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of politicians.
And as if I needed anymore convincing that thinking for ourselves is such an important foundational principle, I was presented with the opportunity to work on a presidential campaign during the primaries with a candidate that I was mostly aligned with philosophically and intellectually.
Seeing how the sausage got made in Washington convinced me of the risks of group thought and debating in an echo chamber.
The name of the game is boiling fundamentally complex issues into messaging that is easily digestible by the lowest common denominator and then stoking enough fear and anger to build a large enough collective to push an agenda that rarely resembles what is being sold to the constituency.
Most of us had our minds made up from the outset, the election was just about whipping enough of the base into a frenzy to get them off Facebook long enough to actually vote.
At the end of the day, we just need to wake up to the fact that our ideal world doesn’t exist. We’re stuck with the one we have, and we’re stuck with each other.
We’re never going to get everything we want, progress will only come from a common understanding of the issues we face and a willingness to accept viewpoints that we may not be comfortable with…not by a revolving door of opportunist politicians.
We have to start listening to what is being said, not what we want to have said. But since this is a message that will ultimately fall on deaf ears, I will enjoy my state of detachment and only invest myself in ideas that I can understand and support on a deep and meaningful level.
Everything else is just noise.
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