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Notes -
Politics is the Mind
KillerChangerYudowsky wrote an Politics is the Mind-Killer on less wrong back in 2007 on this topic. For an article with the supposed purpose of convincing people ... it kinda sucks at that goal.
To read it uncharitably:
Perhaps the biggest problem with the article is that there is a baked in assumption: that the purpose of the mind is for rationality. Once the mind has been touched by politics it is changed into an irrational thing, and thus it has been "killed" or deprived of its main purpose. This is exactly backwards. The mind was built for politics, language, and social games. Humans have taken this purpose built machine dedicated to politics and managed to make it do other things like math and rationality. And noticeably, these other things are very hard for most people to do. While politics is a mixture of fun, addicting, and often easy for even "idiots" to grasp.
The Drug of Politics
Switching gears, back to charitable. I've always loved the idea of "politics as the mind-killer". Because it so neatly fits my own experience. I was part of the Ron Paul rEVOLution in 2007. I remember sitting outside in 20 degree weather guarding a Ron Paul Blimp from anyone that might want to come by and cut the line, or hopefully just answering friendly people that had questions. I saw the phone survey polls that he wasn't anywhere close to winning the nomination, and I didn't ever really believe them, even when they were born out by the actual primary elections. I was filled with so much hope and copium. Him losing felt like a physical blow.
I came out of that experience like a drug user coming down from a haze. Why had I been so dumb and stupid? Why had I ignored good data? Why had I spent so much time arguing with people to try and convince them? Why did I think I was winning arguments instead of just exhausting the people around me?
The answer was available online in the same sorts of places I'd found Ron Paul. I'd been "mind-killed". I'd gotten very very high on the drug of politics, and I'd never had a strong hit before so I had no tolerance built up. All rationality had left me. So I swung hard in the opposite direction. I became the kind of abolitionist that was a recovering alcoholic. I berated and argued with people about politics being the mind-killer and did so far harder than I ever stubbed for Ron Paul. The irony was lost on me.
An Illusive middle truth
Over a decade later and I've mellowed a lot. I shake my head at the overly enthusiastic supporters of this or that politician. But I'm not gonna say anything to them. I'm not playing the part of a wide eyed DARE presenter yelling "never do it even once!" instead I'm now in the role of the "exhausted" participant that those young operatives get to "win" arguments with.
I don't know if either side is correct, I don't even feel certain that there is some kind of middle ground where a little bit of controlled politics is the way to go.
I'm only certain that politics changes us. Like going through puberty, seeing evil, having sex, your first child, or your first experience with death. You aren't the same afterwards. Once you've seen arguments as soldiers, or motives attached to every move its hard to go back. A conflict theory view of the world is pernicious and infectious, while mistake theory is fragile and hard to reassemble once broken. It places everyone in a prisoner's dilemma, where mistake theory is cooperating, and conflict theory is defecting.
I don't believe it with absolute certainty, but I am pretty sure that the changes wrought by politics are not for the best. Religion and philosophy have both sought to place some ground rules on politics and specifically how you treat other people. Because it is not hard to find examples throughout history of politics going far enough to get ugly and to turn into violence or war. This is a part of Yudowsky's article that is correct: politics is war by other means. But it is our attempt at a polite war, a war with rules and far less violence than actual war. Politics makes us worse, makes us uglier.
Scott has written of archipelego as utopia. It is noticeably a land that mostly tries to avoid politics altogether. The solution is not to argue over scarce resources, the solution is to infinitely subdivide an infinite pool of resources. This is where the necessity of politics becomes apparent. We don't live in that world of infinite resources. We have to figure out ways of subdividing finite resources. War and violence is the way of nature in figuring out the allocation of resources. Creatures eat each other to take another's resources. Politics is the human alternative. Our way of dividing scarce resources when we would otherwise use violence.
In that way politics is beautiful. It doesn't deserve the label of a mind killer. It was humanity's first triumph over nature, but it was such an early triumph that some of us mistake it as part of nature. However, I do not want to tear down the warning signs that so many have sought to erect. Politics will fundamentally change your mind. Most people who come down from the drug of politics don't have good things to say about it. Be ware of politics, but do not hate it.
Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not the (horrible) edited version.
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