Disclamer: This is a post about politics. I do not take any
political stance in this post with the exception that its bad to be a whack job.
I watched a video about an Alabaman rocket scientist who likes
recording AK-47s firing underwater in slow motion who just interviewed the
president. He made a video about doing the interview. In that video, he brought
up the fractured (polarized) nature of American politics today and described it
as a feedback loop with no negative signals. And that struck me as a deeper
truth. The video is embedded below.
We are all familiar with feedback loops. We use them every
day. For example, stand up and just stand there for a moment. The act of
standing involves a feedback loop. Your inner ear can sense when you’re leaning
forward or backward. Your brain gets the signal that you’re leaning too far one
way, and it signals your muscles to adjust. If they adjust too much, you end up
leaning too far the other way. You are so good at using feedback loops that you
don’t even have to think about it. You just do it. Like a boss… of not falling
on your face.
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| Not a boss |
Now, let’s call leaning forward a positive input and leaning
backward a negative input. Let’s imagine that your brain decides that it won’t accept
negative inputs. If you sway backward, you would continue in that direction
until you fell on your backside. Because feedback loops don’t work if you don’t
have competing signals forcing things to center.
Let’s move back to politics. Say you’re very Republican. If
you get all of your information from Fox News, you will only get information
that supports a conservative view point. This will, over time, tend to drive
you further toward the conservative view point. Or, say your Democrat. If you
get all of your information from MSNBC, the same process will happen in the
other direction.
I’ll say it a different way: If the only political
information you get only comes from sources that agree with you, you will only
reinforce your ideologies and move yourself further from center on the spectrum.
That’s shameless self-gratification. It feels good while you’re doing it, but
it does not have any lasting value. It does not make you a better person. It
does not enhance your understanding of the vastly complicated, interconnected,
messy thing we call life.
I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you fall
on. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or a Whateverian. All
sides of the political spectrum end at whack job if you go too far. America, we
need to avoid becoming a nation of whack jobs.
In order to go from political indoctrination to political
discourse, we need, as a culture, to learn to value the opinions of people we
disagree with. We need to be able to listen to them. We need to be able to
understand why they think what they think. Because the discourse is an
opportunity to learn. That process helps us better understand the world. It helps
us better understand our fellow man. It helps us empathize with other
intelligent people who hold different beliefs. And that makes us better people.
Smarter people. Less whack-job-y people.
The video below is of the President of the United States of
America being interviewed by three different Youtube personalities. I highly recommend
you watch it. If you disagree with President Obama’s viewpoints (and you likely disagree with at least a few), try to practice
what I talked about above. I think you’ll find that the process will be
edifying.
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