Why politics get so polarized
As I mentioned in my last post, peoples political attitudes can be roughly divided into two major fields. A tribal, collectivist view and an individualistic view. Two views who are incomprehensible to each other, and therefore tend to fight. I call this fight “Chimpanzees vs Orangutans”.
Chimpanzee people view their world as being made up of tribes. They identify with their tribe and feel they need their tribe for protection and for identification. They are nothing without their tribe. Therefore, the will defend this tribe no matter what the tribe does. The world becomes a question of “us against them”. A fight for survival between the good tribe and everybody else.
Since no sane person (and very few insane persons) believes he is evil they also must believe that their tribe is good. Their tribe can do nothing wrong. And as a result, the other tribes tribes must be evil. Because if they were good apes, they would be in the Good Tribe, right? And since they are evil, you can’t listen to what they say. Because all that they say are evil spin and tricks to make you believe their lies.
This all means that in politics dominated by the collectivist world view of chimpanzees each group will first dig down deep trenches where they define up a certain set of policies as the incarnation of Good in a way to justify and strengthen the belief in the tribe. The trenches should be so deep that none of the “evil propaganda” from the world around should be able to penetrate the defences.
Then, it’s time to attack the opponents. This is done by slinging as much mud as possible on your opponents and hoping that it sticks. It usually does. You may wonder why they don’t use arguments? Well, two reasons. First of all, they often do use arguments, but because they don’t listen to the opponents, they don’t know what they actually stand for, so they make up really evil or stupid straw men and use those arguments. But of course, if you use what would have been valid arguments against a communist against a liberal, that isn’t an argument any more, but mudslinging. Secondly, in a Good against Evil world the Good part can reasonably do whatever they want. They are Good, remember. So lies and mudslinging is Good if it comes from the Good apes.
The opponents that get mud heaved on them of course react by digging their own trenches and slinging mud back. The chimp tribes in big trenches and the individualistic orangutans in smaller trenches, and generally start slinging mud back. Each tribe just sees this as proof that they were right from the start, the other groups are evil, since they are slinging mud on the Good tribes. The fact that they usually started it themselves is of no importance. “We” are protecting the world. “They” are egoistic mud throwing assholes.
Some of the more idealistic and naive orangutans them will stand in the middle of the battlefield without digging a trench and try to argue with the mud until they drown. But most orangutans will either dig their own trench, or be forced into one of the chimpanzee trenches by the relentless torrent of mud. And once you are down in a trench, it’s easier to stay there than get out of it, especially since the trench is designed too keep any argument out.
Nobody can win a mud war. All that happens is that people get tired and hurt and disillusioned, and that usually results in the sides retreating. Making the battlefield more and more polarized, and the opponents harder and harder to hit with arguments. In the end it becomes impossible to convince anybody of anything. Everybody is in a trench so deep that nothing can reach them, neither mud, nor facts or logic. No amount of reasoning and arguments will help. And so everybody ends up in their little closed in trench, ignorant of what others believe, and what other options there are.
And then, reasonable politics becomes impossible, and you end up with the politicians who can make the most people believe he is in their tribe, and political parties whose politics are a random, incoherent mess of policies picked up only because the other side didn’t pick them up first.
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Chimpanzees vs Orangutans
I’ve discovered that much of the political sphere seems to consist of two types of people who have widely differing attitudes to the world, so different that they generally don’t understand each other. This is made extra confusing by the fact that although they speak completely different languages, they use the same words.
The first group is people who see themselves primarily as part of a group. They look at themselves at having a position in the world primarily by their position in the group. Their status is mostly a matter of their perceived status within this group. Their world view is fundamentally hierarchical. For the context of this blog, I will call these people Chimpanzees, as chimps are a type of monkey who lives in big hierarchical groups.
The second group of people are those who seem themselves primarily as individuals. They don’t have a strong identification with a particular group, and hence see their status mainly as compared to their neighbours. Their world is fundamentally made up of loads of other apes doing what is their own business. I’ll call these Orangutans, as orangutans are apes who live individually and have a territory that are theirs.
Now, these two “species” of the human ape have great trouble understanding each other, and their differing world view is what makes much of politics difficult. The absolute main reason for this is the view of identity.
A chimpanzees main identity comes from his group, his tribe. If you do not belong to a tribe, you have no identity, and hence you are no one. Because of this, a chimp can not imagine anybody not wanting to have a tribe. If you are tribeless, it is because you have been thrown out of your tribe, and failed to find another tribe that will take you on. This is a fate worse than death and chimps will image the tribeless as a poor lonely person who will most likely starve to death unless given food and shelter by others.
An orangutan, on the other hand, will find his identity in his individuality. Unless you can stand by yourself and take care of yourself, you are not an individual, and have no identity. And of course, if you base your identity in a membership of a tribe, you have no individuality and hence, you are no one.
It’s quite obvious that chimpanzees and orangutans will never understand each other unless they recognize their differences. But, we are, after all, only storytelling apes, and as that we aren’t very smart. And we do have a tendency to think that everybody else are just like us, so understanding between chimpanzees and orangutans is highly unlikely. And I think it’s important to recognize these differences if you want to understand what happens in politics and why politics is such a horrid monkey business.
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A long debate that has been going on since Darwin is what exactly makes us humans different from apes. The answer, increasingly, seems to be “Not very much”. And the more I look at how people behave when it comes to politics, the answer seems to become more close to “Nothing at all”.
As humans we tell stories. Some call humanity “The Storytelling Ape”, and this seems like a good description. And I will here on his blog tell more stories, by possibly over stretching this metaphor a bit. It’s going to be a story about two types of storytelling apes, chimpanzees and orangutans, and how humanity are split into either or. And it will be a story, because it will not be perfect. My description of how orangutans and chimpanzees behave is not exactly how they behave in real life, first of all. And the rest of the story will be simplified. Most people probably are chimpanzees in some cases and orangutans in other situations, but I will pretend like they are not.
So, I will use slightly incorrect metaphors and simplifications, because if I didn’t the story would be incomprehensible, and the point of the story is to make something complicated comprehensible, by using slightly incorrect metaphors and simplifications. So now you know.
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Hey hey, we’re the monkeys!
This is going to be a blog about why politics really is just aping around. Watch this space and prepare to be very, very offended.
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