Emotions in politics
2023-02-18
What’s the big argument in the campaign trails nowadays? “We are the rational ones.”
What the fuck does that mean? Is it even a political statement? I sure do hope your party is capable of chosing someone that isn’t crazy as candidate. God, I’m glad you are telling me that1.
But wouldn’t that exactly be what someone insane would say?
Wait a second? Isn’t this an accusation? Why would someone call themselves “rational”?2 Isn’t it just accusing the opposition of madness?
appart, of course, if they themselves are crazy.
Telling your opposition is mad means you can just ignore them. And in fact, you can ignore – not just the opposition – but even your electorate. Because, if you are not voting for me, you are crazy, so why even listen to you? You don’t make sense.
Now hear me up. Call me crazy, but I’ll tell you something about things that happens beyond the event horizon of history, things that happened, like, more than 15 years ago. Things you need to – oh deary – read more than two Wikipedia paragraphs (something like 3 or 4) to learn about.
That thing is called: “Policy”. Where’s that thing gone? Oh yeah, about five decades of politicians being elected and doing the opposite of what they fucking wrote in their program.
Can’t a politician promise more than a sanity certificate?3 If the best they’ve got is that they aren’t crazy, I might as well do the job myself. Anyway, why are politicians just name calling each others?4 Why is the opposition always “irrational”?
Of note: they even fail at that.
The politicians, not the people. Human beings not paid to work on policy are actually listening to each other.
Maybe the self-described “rational ones5” think of “rational” as “uses logical thinking” as opposed to “emotion”. All those political opponents that see sea of migrants invading our pristine landscapes, the jealous left that has a grudge against rich people, the sentimental left that let themselves be blinded by the misery of the world, harff, all those spoilsports regulators that stops innovation! The state stealing almost all my earnings!
As a Computer Scientist, I can’t represent myself what a Rational is, nor do I accept “ones” without “zeros”.
You see, even if everyone call themselves “rational” their fundamental drive is purely emotional.
And it can’t be any other way.
What makes us do anything? Emotions! Literally nothing else drives a human being! If you want to go somewhere, it’s because you feel like it, there isn’t really a way to explain it beyond that, everything ends at the gut feeling, the fundamental quantum of sentiment. So why are all those politicians saying they are rational? Are they aimless? Really I think it’s more an accusation, they see the other parties driven by emotions they do not share, and just go “that’s irrational”, without even thinking half a second about their own motivations.
But humans are the rational animal, aren’t they? In any case, policy driven by pure gut feel seems like an awful idea. So surely politics are not (or at least should not be) purely driven by emotions.
Yeah, emotions should be the kickstarter of politics, the sparkle that lights the fire. A starting point. Or rather, an end point. Since the only way, as a human, to have a goal, is to feel like it, we should use emotions to learn what we want.
Then, we can use pure cold mathematics, experience-based deduction, inference, deduction, anything to reach what we want.
But we should always be informed (but not driven) by our emotions. A political system that suppresses emotions is terrifying. It forgets the value of humans, and as a result endangers humans.
Never forget why you are doing things.