/lit/ - Literature

>NOOO IM NOT A GERMAN NOOOO I HAVE POLISH BLOOD AHHH IM DYNAMITE I HAVE CHAOS IN ME AHHHH SAVE ME UBERMAN
neetsh...easy on the overcoming

>>17460235
The more I read the more I find the idea of having ''''''political opinions''''''' some kind of gigantic larp. You can argue the pros and cons of some position, or of some period or regime in history, but you can only speculate as to the true causes of historical conditions, and many of these causes had nothing to do with human agency but were the result of technological changes or large scale social processes. The idea of having a)a really strong opinion about the ideal state of society and b)the unbelievably delusional belief that your having this opinion is going to impact the world in some meaningful fashion, I mean it's just completely ridiculous. You can point out obviously fucked up political situations if you want and get mad about them, there are always a bunch of these going on, but it doesn't matter if you do this or not, whether you die tonight or not is not going to impact what happens in society in general.

The whole psychological apparatus that we have devoted to politics is clearly evolved for tribal hunter-gatherer situations where voicing our opinions and acting in various ways actually does impact the politics of the tribe. When we apply these tribal instincts to modern politics with its 100s of millions of people and hugely complex stratified systems, we are like cats attacking ourselves in a mirror, we are misfiring on a fundamental level to a situation we did not evolve for. The only possible application of these tribal political instincts are in the small scale situations of your family, your group of friends, an institution you belong to of a few dozen to hundred people, there within that context, you do make a difference in these political games, but this does not then ripple out to the larger civilizational issues. I can't believe how many people I see make an argument of the form 'if only everyone did x', eg. when discussing voting, or a revolution or whatever. If you are talking to 20 people in a tribe of 100, then saying that actually has a causal impact. If you are a random prole in the USA saying that has a totally negligible impact, you cannot reach enough people for it to matter, so the 'if only' is senseless, there is no 'if only', because everyone will not do it if you do and if you talk about it. Even if you're Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin you can't actually just create that sort of large scale coordinated behavior simply by saying stuff, it does not scale up like that.

The way information and belief work at these scales is complex and even the most powerful elements in this equation- financial interests, the press, the education system, etc. are not merely individual agents carrying out political impulses like they would in a tribal setting. They do have an more influence on what happens, but the mechanism is still entirely different and they mostly can only act such as to reinforce the existing power structures that benefit them, they are cogs too mostly.