Partisanship is Bad for You

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Partisanship is Bad For You

Originally posted on vsplanet.com

Though my critique is aimed at the phenomenon of party politics–and faction-ism in general–and not at one particular party, when I bring up this topic I inevitably get replies that assure me some people absolutely can’t understand my point–and to a degree, for reasons I totally get, don’t want to understand it, because to understand it means to acknowledge that one huge group and/or another whom they have spent years developing a special hatred for are normal people just like them. That reality is so disruptive to their worldview that it has to be flagged as nonsense lest the person have to challenge their own assumptions about a whole huge bunch of other things. 

Our brains hate it when we try to correct it with new learning. Our brain is the world’s most remarkable pattern-repetition device, and having to build new neural pathways–re-evaluating “priors” in order to contextualize novel input is hard work it tries to avoid whenever it can. This all happens subconsciously, which doesn’t mean we can’t develop an awareness of it happening.  

If social media is any indicator, what a lot of people expect when they think of "discussing politics" is rarely a thoughtful conversation on politics in the typical sense, and most likely the disorganized mass of parallel monologues we are all familiar with, which litter these platforms and are mislabeled as "debates", but are usually just pointless personal attacks disguised as good faith arguments on how one party or the other is trying to destroy democracy as we know it.

*produces tiny violin and begins to play, softly* 

Humans love to sort ourselves into groups, and we love to hate on people in other groups. We need to view those others with mistrust and disdain. We develop strawman-style assessments of the members of those other groups that boil down to those people being "less than" those in our own group(s). It's gross. It's intellectually lazy, it's dangerous, and it's totally natural behavior. We all do it. It's in our DNA.

Yes. You, too. 

Voluminous volumes of examples of lazy and unhelpful social behavior are available at your fingertips on the digital social cesspool formerly known as Twitter. If you fancy yourself a student of politics and love to debate policy (Translation: you love to insult and degrade people you’ll never meet because it makes your gonads tingle), you’ll have no trouble finding your tribe. Just type either #Resist or #MAGA into your feed search and you’re off and running. You can get on some lists and follow trains and before you know it, you’ll be basking in a soft red or blue aura, comforted by the company of thousands of mutual followers who really get you.

Here’s the rub; such tents, as they are often described, particularly in the partisan political sense, are a lousy place–probably the worst place, in my assessment–to practice critical thinking, if that’s something you’re into. 

At this juncture, and at the slight risk of derailing the main point, I will say that for reasons that should be pretty observable, religions fall right into the same construct–siloed echo chambers where the essential egotistical subconscious fear of being ostracized from the group–unless the impulse is consciously fought hard and constantly–will naturally give way to adopting the opinions and beliefs of the group, regardless if you had a contradictory belief going in. Your brain is remarkably good at changing beliefs without much evidence required, and in fact will actually conveniently forget you even held the other belief. It’s a real thing and it’s called Belief Change Bias. Don’t take my word for it, look it up. Study the evidence. See what you think. 

Now, many people will swear they can be both a critical thinker and a political partisan. I won’t say it’s impossible, but I’d bet whatever money is in my bank account right now that the overwhelming majority of people who say they are both are not, and the particular thing they are not is a critical thinker. 

One bit of evidence to support my albeit informal assessment here is easy to find, if I can use Twitter as a statistical population. You’ll find plenty of examples there of both red and blue account owners who will state as if it were scientific fact that followers of the [insert other party name here] party are incapable of critical thinking. Either the person has a loose definition of critical thinking, or their partisanship is overruling their critical thinking facilities for the life-saving purpose of preventing their brain from literally exploding.

For the purpose of this analysis, let’s consider the terminology “common sense” as a substitute for “critical thinking”. Though they are different things–critical thinking being more of a rigorous methodology used to identify and root out cognitive bias in our assessments and logical fallacies in our arguments in order to arrive at more sound conclusions, and common sense being some fact that is so obviously true that no sane “average” person could possibly disagree, neither of them can withstand the pressure to adopt the beliefs of a group.

To avoid making a textbook out of this essay, I’ll just mention that there has been plenty of research on these phenomena, and that one theory that holds quite a bit of scientific water asserts that group membership, being such an important motivation–so died-in-the-proverbial-wool of the homo-sapiens brain, is intimately connected to individual identity. In other words, in a very real sense, a person believes they are the group, and the group is them. Ergo, any attack on the group is an attack on their own identity, and to protect the group’s identity, no countermeasure is off-limits, including the denial of observable truths. 

As illogical as all of this certainly seems–because it usually is, the reason we fall for it anyway is that it is literally a part of the brain’s fight-or-flight response. That’s right. The same instinct that might have saved our ancestors from being mauled by a saber-tooth tiger is the thing that makes people (Yes. You, too.) believe, or disbelieve a thing, despite all available evidence that exists to dispute that thing.

The reason this phenomenon is so troubling to me, and why I feel it’s fundamentally threatening to the existence of humankind (Pretty bleak, right? And more than a tad bit hyperbolic. I know, I know…) extends to some connected concepts that I’d like to discuss further but might confuse and not reinforce the primary point here, so I’ll leave them alone, for now. 

But in closing I will hopefully tempt your curiosity with this teaser; The war that threatens to destroy our society isn’t about political policy, exactly. It’s not about race, or sexuality, or so-called human rights, it’s about power, and it’s always been about power, and in our time, power equates to property, pure and simple. Play that out however it works for you, but I think if you put in the time, you’ll end up at many of the same conclusions. 

Will the final paragraph be a “call to action”, you may be wondering. The answer is hell yes. But I’m going to leave it to the real critical thinkers in the group to interpret my meaning. If you have a social media bio that says anything like “All MAGA will be blocked!” or “Liberalism is a mental disorder”, and you actively seek to quarantine yourself from other humans for the sake of preserving, presumably, their humanity as well as your own, then you are part of the problem. You are a traitor fighting on the wrong side of the war against humanity. 

Comments welcome. Challenge me! I love to learn, and every disagreement is a rich well of opportunity to consider a new perspective, for which I am always grateful.