Lifeboat Scenerios And Caricature's Of The "Culture War"

 

Lifeboat scenarios can be good for helping people to determine and  argue philosophical positions, but they can also warp our sense of  reality and free will.  This is essentially the mental exercise  of determining whether you or not you would kill the passengers that you  shared a lifeboat with out of necessity if you were trapped at sea and  fighting over food. This argument takes many different forms for the  same question: Would you hurt someone for your own benefit in an extreme situation?

 These types of questions seek to correlate an extreme, dangerous and  unlikely example with situations in everyday life which are much easier  to manage, forcing us to assume that we would make the same decision in  both scenarios.  What this also does, is forces us to assume the  worst in others, especially when we spend so much our time having  philosophical debates with faceless strangers online, instead of seeing  the human being the position and considering what the true motivations  for their beliefs are. 

For example, when communists hear that  someone is capitalist, they start talking about a dystopian future where  Lex Luther owns all the roads and bosses pay workers 2 cents an hour to  repair radioactive robots. 

Likewise, when a capitalist  encounters a communist, they automatically think that the person will  declare them an absentee landlord and be squatting in their house the  next time they go to work, plotting the establishment of Stalinist  gulags and a repeat of Mao's "great leap forward" democide.  

In  reality, people on both sides generally come to their positions because  they want better for the world, they just have different ideas about how  to get there.  This can be applied to so many different  polarities, and it one of the many reasons people so often find  themselves talking past one another.

 People who are attached to party politics and the "culture war"  rarely actually argue directly with one another, if they did, they might  be able to work something out.  Instead, what they do, is  imagine the person they are talking to is a caricature comprised of  every belief they oppose. 

Some of this might simply be a fault of the  human psyche, but I think that certain "thought leaders" and media  personalities have helped exacerbate this problem, by selectively  covering the most cartoonish examples of  their political rivals, and making a business out of singling out and  humiliating people on a particular end of the political aisle. 

 Most of the extreme lefties and righties who get around the clock news  coverage, combined make up a very tiny segment of the population. When  your average righty or lefty is having a debate, they aren't really  debating the person in front of them, they are debating the mental  projection of the "other" that they have gathered from the most extreme  examples that their brains collected from the media they consume.