I studied Political Psychology in grad school, and my dissertation posed the question, “Why do we hold the political beliefs we do?”
You might think the answer is, “Because they’re true.” But you would be mistaken. Our beliefs are mainly about rallying support for the various factions and interest groups bound up with our political coalitions. Truth is beside the point. Whatever makes the country better is beside the point. Our politics is essentially no different than the politics of other social animals: we form complicated alliances to compete for power, status, and resources. The main difference between us and other animals is that our alliances are bigger and more complicated, comprising “strange bedfellows” like the alliance between devout Christians and wealthy businesspeople in the Republican Party (an alliance that is uncommon in other countries). If you want the full argument for this position, see my recent academic paper on the topic. If you want the general gist, see this post.
Just as seeing how the sausage gets made turns you off to sausage, seeing how our political beliefs get made turned me off to politics. It was a troubling experience. As someone who cares deeply about seeing through bullshit and believing true things (or who likes to think he does), I find it difficult to be a political person. Since ideologies are designed for rallying tribes, the odds of them accurately describing reality are low.
If you’re a member of “elite”, highly educated circles like I am, you are pretty much obligated to care a lot about politics, and to nod your head in agreement whenever people engage in partisan rants. In fact, you are obligated to join in on the ranting. It is a social ritual as old as our species: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and ranting against shared enemies has become the easiest way of making friends. Easier than talking about our passions, tastes, experiences, and curiosities. Easier than trying to understand how the world works, or why our species is so peculiar. Easier than talking about our families. Easier than almost anything.
So I have found myself increasingly alienated by our culture’s growing obsession with politics, despite the fact that people like me are in the majority. For example, did you know that roughly one in three people didn’t vote in the last presidential election, and that in prior years, it was closer to one in two? And that’s just for presidential elections—turnout is much lower for state and local elections. Besides, even among the people who do occasionally vote, a wealth of research shows that most of them don’t know much, or care much, about politics—they’re basically apolitical. But you never hear from these people on the internet, on podcasts, or on television. They don’t write books (that I’ve read). They don’t have substacks (that I’m aware of). They obviously don’t run for office. So it seems as if they don’t exist. But they are there, living among us. They deliver our packages, serve our food, fly our planes, fix our cars, and babysit our children. They’re not silent, because silence is deliberate. They are the Quiet Majority.
I used to be ashamed of my lack of interest in politics. Elite culture had convinced me I was a bad person for it. I felt guilty. I would try to force myself to keep up with political current events and manipulate myself into feeling as outraged as the people around me. I’d yell at myself: “David! Feel outraged!”. It didn’t work. I couldn’t feel anything about politics except despondency at the tragedy of the human condition. I flailed around for alternative political tribes to join but couldn’t find one that wasn’t overflowing with bullshit. I eventually settled on a vague sympathy for anarchy—the quixotic dream of a society without politics. Maybe if we could just stop competing for control over the monopoly of violence, or simply lose interest in controlling people with violence at all, and just live and let live, with a thousand different societies, businesses, communes, clubs, nonprofits, security companies, and arbitration firms, precisely tailored to the idiosyncratic needs of their members, with people free to join or leave whichever one they wanted, the world would be a better place. Less conflict, more diversity, better incentives, more effective and affordable security, fairer and speedier trials, less war, less crime, more options, more vibrancy, and more hope for the best societies to prevail against the worst ones, not through conquest, but through the freedom of voluntary association. The human species has lived without governments for roughly 99% of its history on this planet. Legislatures, nation-states, and militaries are recent innovations. Our minds are ill-equipped to deal with them. Perhaps it is time to return to our natural state, as members of small, nomadic bands, freely merging together and splitting apart as needed.
Is this bullshit? Probably. But it’s the best rationalization I could come up with for convincing myself that I wasn’t a bad person for ignoring politics.
But I have since come up with a better rationalization, and it comes from the wonderful and aptly titled book Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics, by Christopher Freiman. At the heart of the book is a powerful and underappreciated insight: politics is not the only way, or even the best way, to make the world a better place. Our culture has been working tirelessly to convince us of the opposite: that there is no nonpolitical way of being a good person. Ethics has been subsumed by politics. Curiosity has been subsumed by politics. The simple desire to learn a bit of evolutionary psychology has become a political statement. We can scarcely watch television without picking a side in the culture war.
To say this book is a breath of fresh air is the understatement of the century. We have literally thousands of books, published every year, with the implicit message that we should care more about politics. Yet there is only one book, to my knowledge, that argues the opposite.
