SMART PEOPLE TALK TO THEMSELVES BUT POLITICS IS THE ART OF THE MUNDANE Talking h

SMART PEOPLE TALK TO THEMSELVES BUT POLITICS IS THE ART OF THE MUNDANE

Talking heads and bloggers abound. But we talk mostly to ourselves in order to construct arguments that can be successfully employed by our faction leaders, which can then be articulated by our faction members, in oder to maintain their conviction in support of onslaughts from our competing factions.

Our political preferences are inherited, and we largely seek to confirm them. And it’s important because only the undecideds determine elections, and we must keep our factions motivated in order to give the undecideds the confidence to vote for our side versus the other.

But if you attend state and local level political gatherings. And listen to average party discourse, there are one or two important initiatives, but most of the members argue along ideological lines using the tired mantras that we silly scribblers have produced over the past election cycle, if not the past generation, precisely for their use. Human beings can rarely articulate their own feelings and ideas. We give them the tools to do so. And it’s either gratifying or horrifying how procedural the process is, from ideological manufacture of memes, to the tactical employment of them in daily life.

Average voters are something else altogether different from faction members. They vote ideologically or pragmatically. But they still get their information from near neighbors who have collected and sorted through these memes. And in the end, they seem to vote almost exclusively for who they think will win, or their subjective evaluation of the current state of affairs, versus who’s policy that they agree with.

And those that we cannot convince with arguments we convince by saturation bombing with advertising in the vague hope to tilt the 15% of people who are not entirely committed to one side or the other. People need a means of choosing from the impossible and incomprehensible and we try to give them one.

I would much prefer economic democracy, where we used the web to allocate our tax dollars to what we prefer, rather than relied upon politicians and bureaucrats, elected according to ideology, using memes that we produced for the purpose of swaying the 15% of people who simply don’t care one way or another.