What We Get Wrong About Politics

Over the last year or so I've become a bit... overwhelmed (not quite the word I need, but a better one escapes me) by political content online. Mostly on YouTube, and mostly American, which gives me pause to question whether or not "The Algorithm" simply thinks that that is all that I want to see, but this is not a post about the data-pocalypse that we're currently living through. This post, is about Blind Spots. I might do a post on that some other time. I might not. We'll see.

So... Blind Spots.

What is a Blind Spot? Anatomically speaking, it refers to a physical part of your eye that is literally blind. You can find your blind spot by drawing a dot on a blank page, holding the page in front of you and, while staring straight ahead, moving the page around your field of vision. There is a position where the dot disappears, usually somewhere in the periphery. That's your blind spot. Tadaah, you saw the space that you cannot see. Isn't that neat? (This will become relevant soon... I hope)

More generally, the term Blind Spot is what it says on the tin. Anyone who has gone through the process of getting a driver's licence will recall the term being used in reference to the space behind the car on either side that the mirrors in the middle and on the sides (rear-view and wings in common parlance) collectively miss. Checking your blind spot while driving involve craning your neck around to make sure that something isn't there and it only takes one instance of failure in such a check to have a nasty and/or embarrassing mishap.

Now I'll make this relevant to the post.

With the above in mind, what I mean when I say Blind Spot, specifically when I'm talking about politics, is this:

Politics is about issues. The creation, dissemination, discussion and resolution of issues. Issues typically involve things that affect groups. Groups, in turn create, disseminate, discuss and resolve issues. That affect groups. An issue, here, is usually a decision (or set of decisions) that one group enacts that affects, in some way, an other group (the space is not a typo)... This is a handy, if somewhat limited, overview of political cycles and political discourse.

So where is the blind spot. Have you spotted it? It's there in that last paragraph, and if you have noticed what is missing, then you are probably a good driver who knows how important it is to check before changing lanes.

The Blind Spot up there is something you need to look for, especially when you don't see it.

So, for those who are metaphorically scratching their heads because the thinking is making them itch, ask yourself this: What was missing in that paragraph about politics? Or, more to the point, what did I leave out of that paragraph, that should have been there, but you couldn't have noticed its absence, because your brain inferred its existence. What is the dot that should be there, that your brain knows must be there, but you can't see it? What is the Blind Spot?

Take a minute to consider all the implications before reading on.

For those ahead of the curve, here's a video to think about while the rest of my imaginary audience catches up.

So, back to the question... Where/what is the Blind Spot? Politically speaking.

In a word: People.

Obviously.

Now, if I've done this post well, you should be feeling that strange confusion, like when there's a thought hanging out in the corner of your mind that is sitting just out of reach and (although you can't see or hear it) that you know is laughing at you. This is usually where people start formulating things to type in the comment section in the hopes of making that feeling go away.

This is also the point (hopefully) that I start making sense.

So, when I say 'People' as the one-word answer to the question of Political Blind Spots, I'm being deliberately obtuse.

Politics is something people, and (as far as we know) only human people, engage in. Which is why, in that paragraph way up there, I could leave the word people out of it entirely, and know with 99 percent certainty, that folks reading that paragraph wouldn't notice that I made no mention of people whatsoever. Also, I was fairly confident that when I used the word 'groups', that folks would assume I was talking about 'groups of people'... And that, is why it is the Political Blind Spot. Think about that paragraph again, but this time, with as few assumptions as possible. Suddenly it makes both more, and less, sense. Politics can be reduced to such a cycle, but only if you expand every noun to its widest possible interpretation, which, when you think about it, is not much use to the actual business of living in the 21st century.

This is what we get wrong about politics... We assume that we know what's going on. We hear pundits and analysts and shoutymen on YouTube talking about, "The US", "The Media", "The Alt-Right", "The UN", "Russia", etc. etc. and believe that both we, and they, know what we mean by those terms.

But we don't... And, over the past year, I've begun to believe that this Blind Spot is collective. Nobody knows. Nobody can know.

Perhaps that last statement was a little too sweeping. Here's the precise version:

A) The United States of America is what? Well, the most accurate description would be - The 350+ million humans who live within the boundaries recognized by all the other humans on Earth as the territory controlled by the Federal Government of the United States of America. But let's be honest with ourselves here - that is not what we're thinking of when we say "The US" in political conversation. For most folks, "The US" is a nebulous amalgam of Stars, Stripes, Dollars, Presidents and Explosions. In fact, I would go as far as to say that to most folks "The US" conjures a very different picture in the mind than say, "Americans". This little cognitive bias can be seen quite elegantly in that there video where everybody is talking about these 'the US' and 'North Korea' as if they're... well... two dudes with weird names.

B) This practice of reducing vast swathes of human beings is so widespread and so deeply entrenched in our discussions of how the world works and how it came to work this way that even this blog post has done it several times, over and over and over again. What this does ensures that while my point is being made, I'm really not doing a very good job of Unblinding the Blind Spot. Because:

C) There are literal billions of human lives being lived every second, and our human brains can only track a few hundred at a time with any reliable accuracy. There is so much happening all the time that we have to condense and distill everything in order to even try making sense of it all.

And that is why People are the Blind Spot of Politics.

I've already been typing for way longer than I planned to when I started this post, but I have one last point to add before I nomad the fuck outta here for the next while.

Here is What We Get Wrong About Politics:

We forget that it's all just people trying to keep their lives going. Just people, each one of them squeezed or plucked from a womb, smacked in the face by the cold hard realities of a world they didn't build, thrust into that world with a powerful need to eats, shits and fucks as comfortably as they can, and each with a brain that, at least half the time, is working without thinking. No politician knows how their plans will work out, because no politician can possibly know all that their plan involves, because their plan will always involve other people, each with their own plan.

Does this mean we're fucked?

Probably.

But being fucked tends to make more people, who do more fucking.

Fucking people since before we were people.

Fuck.

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Peace, Love and a Little Madness

Nomad.