Emotional Payoffs Over Information

Very few are immune...

In my last couple of posts, I spoke about an issue that can be very emotional and politically charged. I also spoke about movements being hijacked to accomplish things that the originators of the movement never intended. A lot of people tend to think that this is behavior that affects one side or the other, especially when it comes to the tribalism of politics.

This post is not about politics per se. I don’t discuss them with many people, and I will tell you why. Because it is almost never—and especially in today’s environment—a productive conversation. People adhere to their politics like religion and will not fact-check, critically think, or see beyond the emotion. I have no interest in engaging in that conversation.

Politics is a waste of time. Everyone screams from the rooftops that their side is right, most people don’t even know what their side thinks. To me, the government is there to run things quietly and out of my way. It should be in the background, and I am sick to death of hearing about it from people that do not seem to know how to read and research things for themselves, but instead jump on bandwagons to begin screaming nonsense that is not at all grounded in reality.

Politics is the paintbrush that is creating the masterpiece of idiots that the world is made up with. It is a nice primer however in seeing how ignorant and easily led people are. So, useful there.

People are generally uneducated about these sorts of things, and reactionary. Not a great combination. All it comes down to is people screaming that their party is right. There was a great quote from a senator:

We have two political parties in this country right now that are really really exhausted. When you give the American people the choice, do you think of yourself more as Democrat or more as a Republican, when you don’t give them a “none of the above option” 46% of the public interrupts to say, “I don’t want anything to do with either of those parties.”

It’s about 29% Dem, 25% Republican. And then when you drill down into inside that 54% who will even answer the question, then main reason people identify with one party is because they are more against the other party, not because they think their party is for stuff they think to going to solve the challenges of five to ten years out.

~Senator Ben Sasse

They don’t identify with their party because they agree with it, they identify with it because it has become identity politics. It’s past understanding why people are mad, just that they are.

Ninety percent of the time when I speak to someone about something that they are upset about politics, they don’t actually understand the policy that has them up in arms. They don’t understand it because they don’t bother reading it. I hardly see how people can come to a position of absolute fury about something that they genuinely have no idea what it means, how it affects them if at all, and why the person or people made the choices about said policies that they did.

I see this in news stories all the time. It’s mind-numbing the number of supposedly reputable major news sources that have been outright caught either editing out crucial information to spin stories, or making them up when it suits them. People just believe what they hear. In politics, court cases, and police investigations.

Truth has nothing to do with it any longer. It’s about virtue signaling, riling people up for no reason, redefining words, and using them improperly to suit an absolutely contrary narrative. The world has no interest in knowledge it seems. Instead, they want to react. They want to have something to be upset about, to cry about, to compete in the oppression Olympics with, and yes, I do get absolutely sick to death hearing about it.

Now, you might think, oh, she’s talking about this party or that party.

NOPE.

No party is immune to people that have no idea what they are talking about. A lot of people do not pay attention and they only repeat talking points. It’s annoying to listen to them because it is clear they have no clue about what is actually going on. There is this refusal to actually do the work that should come before an opinion is formed. Instead, it is this adherence to whatever someone says about it. This behavior is everywhere and it’s amazing how many people think that they’re right, that everyone else is wrong, but they genuinely do not know what is actually happening.

I have conversations with people when I have to. As I mentioned, there are few that I actually willingly discuss politics with. Every once in a while I find myself having to have a discussion about a political topic with a talking point person and find myself at a loss of how to even begin with their incorrect notions. Let me be clear, they might agree with my position on something but they have absolutely no idea why they agree with me. It feels good to them, so they do. Often times their conclusions are based on incorrect or poorly fleshed-out information, but that doesn’t matter to them.

They also don’t think that it should matter to me. They agree with me, so why is it a problem that they don’t actually understand the issue? Remember the last two posts about the right-to-die debate? I didn’t understand the issue, but I thought that I did. Adriana McGee probably thought that while I was well-meaning, that I was also an uninformed idiot because I was.

When it comes to having discussions with people that disagree with me I welcome those conversations so long as they are informed and know what they are talking about, but so often they come out of the gate with something that is so egregiously incorrect that it would be like having a tier twelve psychopathy conversation with a person that is convinced that Love Fraud was written about their ex. The amount of time and effort required to have that conversation is probably not worth the outcome. The other person is emotionally invested in their position and will not be changing their mind.

People have a tendency to assume that their side is the informed side and the other side is full of idiots that have somehow managed to construct full sentences of speech without knowing a single thing. A great deal of their positions will be emotional, not logical. It feels good to be a part of the group and they have all the group’s PowerPoint positions preloaded, can’t hear a contrary argument, and can’t support their own with actual facts, but rather what they were told to say by people that have very little interest in honesty.

If you don’t know what you are talking about, shut up, sit down, read, critically think, arrive at an intelligent opinion, and stop acting like you are emotionally sunburned all the time. Knowledge isn’t out to get you, it’s your friend. Get to know it, and it will help you. Outrage is not your friend. Kick it out of your life, calm down, and breathe a little bit. Don’t assume that the people that are telling you what to think have any interest in you thinking for yourself. They want you to agree. If you agree without understanding then you are simply following.

If this were Quora I could rightly assume that both sides of the fence will immediately point their finger at those they oppose and believe that it is them I am speaking about. It isn’t. It is human behavior that I am speaking about, and human behavior that is being manipulated by people that have very different goals from your own. However, as this group tends to be rather reasonable I think that they will be able to see that my arguments are not meant to be aimed at anyone in particular except for the one in our mirror.