Engaging in politics habituates and rewires the brain to value agreement and signaling. It weakens the ability to reason independently and clearly.
Naval Ravikant, on Twitter this week
Politics is, indeed, notoriously something that kills minds, and is not actually even a very interesting thing to contemplate. In a well-ordered polity, the average man would no more have an opinion about politics than he does about the content of dental amalgam.
Politics is a waste of scarce mental resources. Literally anything else we might spend our time doing would be time better spent: arts, sciences, coding, business or even intelligent conversation. There is just one problem, though, with the idea that we should spend our time and intellect on arts, science, coding, business, and conversation, and just forget about politics.
We can’t.
If we pursue the arts, we may produce some epic work with great insight into the human condition, only to be told that we’re terrible people for not putting more minority women into “The Red Badge of Courage”. (And even if we fend off such carping by somehow shoehorning Black women into, say “The Forty-Seven Ronin”, it will somehow never be enough.)
If we follow the sciences (assuming we can even get in the door in the first place) it will be no better. We’ll find ourselves fired for honest debate, and driven into penury for disagreement. If we choose to apply the sciences outside of the academy, perhaps we can push back the boundaries of space flight only to find ourselves vilified for the clothes we wear.
Coding! Surely that pursuit of high-minded nerds will be a refuge! Surely coding will be immune to politics? Surely we won’t be banned, blacklisted or fired over something as silly as politics? Right?
And forget all about business, since even attempting to bring science and reason into it will increasingly lay one open to being accused of the inexpiable crime of “discrimination”.
While as for the art of conversation – has Justine landed yet? (I’d ask Pax Dickinson or Clark Hat that question, but they both seem to have been disappeared from Twitter, in a manner not even remotely reminiscent of Soviet citizens in the Great Terror.)
This is the predicament that we find ourselves in: we have no choice but to engage in the grim joust of politics, because whatever at all we choose to do, politics will hunt us down. And so like John Adams before us, we must study politics and war so that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy (and arts, sciences, coding, business and even conversation).
This is the future you chose, leftists. And may God forgive you; because we won’t.
Cuardach 