Politics

It is strange that your character can be seen through the prism of your politics.  In theory, politics is about differing visions of how to accomplish generally shared ends, such as national defense, or the generalization of prosperity.  In theory, politics reflects differing understandings of the mechanisms of economics and government, such that people ought to adopt roughly the tone as to the best route to take from Point A to Point B, and ought to spend their time looking at maps, evaluating traffic patterns at various times, and reaching conclusions they can share.  This would be rational, if the only goal was the accomplishment of concrete ends.

But what must be understood is that the political is the personal, which is to say people adopt their self understandings in many cases THROUGH their political understandings.  You are compassionate BECAUSE you self identify as a Liberal.  To reject your politics, therefore, is both to reject you as a person, and to reject compassion as a desirable character trait.  When politics are personalized to that extent, rational discussion is impossible. 

I have experienced hatred many times, from people who would have been just fine with me in absolutely every other respect, had I not forced them through my political commitments to cast me from their midst.  You see NICE people, informed people, benign people, who will more or less start hissing at you the moment you reveal yourself as not one of them.  The more strongly they believe that their politics expresses their empathy, the more strongly they will reject empathy in their interaction with you.

The reality is that politics, like economics, is a realm of abstraction.  It can only be done properly by people emotionally uncommitted to a specific path, in a spirit of goal-oriented, feedback-oriented engineering.  When you are building a car, you know whether or not it works.  You take it out on the road.  Politics, particularly as expressed through related economic ideas, ought to be the same.  The sole focus should be on OUTCOMES and not methods.

But people get emotionally attached to the identity that conformity to specific methods gives them, which means that to reject those methods–the methods of Leftism that, as one example, have resulted recently in Detroit’s own police force declaring it an area beyond their ability to control–is to reject ONESELF.  You cannot make someone more defensive and hence more angry than by attacking their sense of self.

When I get hated–which has happened often–it is because people perceive me as attacking them personally.  Their whole sense of self depends upon their unquestioning membership in a tribe which provides them with social support and validation, and which rejects outcome oriented abstraction, in favor of strategies solely calculated to seizing power, and renewing efforts to implement policies that have already failed many times.

Such people are compulsive because they have to be, because they otherwise don’t know who they are.  That is why I have often said there is a thin line between Sybaritic Leftism, and Cultural Sadeism.  One bleeds into the other.

I was listening to Supertramp this morning, the “Logical Song”, and heard with renewed ears the refrain “Please tell me who I am”.

Do you think anyone who has been told who they are wants to be told they got the wrong answer?