The Slippery Slope of Over-politicization

It creates an economy of exploitation and misincentives

My definition of politics is very different from most people’s.

Politics, to me, is: anything that has nothing to do with me. It’s an attempt to explain the goings-on in the world that I have not experienced first hand.

Logically, then, any political question cannot have a universal right answer, because people make their judgments based on their own perceptions, and no two people’s perceptions are the same.

This definition, although exceedingly simple, hits all the marks. It explains 1) why most people cannot have political discussions without get triggered or angry (no facts, only feelings); 2) why each political party believes they are right (if the right answer so obvious, everyone would join one side), and 3) why all the most contentious political issues involve individuals’ freedom to do one thing or another (a person who was raised in a household without guns can’t see why anyone else should feel the need to own guns).

This definition also allows us to understand all the problems with our country in one fell swoop. The problem with our country does not lie in one party or another being evil, but instead, the country as a whole putting too much emphasis on politics. The more time we spend trying to find answers to questions with no answers, the less time we have to spend on solvable problems. The more we try to argue our political standpoints, the more we create conflict with each other, and ostracize people with opposing views. The polarization and ideological division in our country becomes self-evident.

The only solution to political issues is: drop the politics. Focus on things that directly affect you, and stop trying to impose your worldview on others.

Ironically, much of what I’m saying would be considered politically incorrect among America’s ‘woke’ crowd. If you don’t speak out, you’re part of the problem, they’d probably tell me.

But then I’d be speaking out for fear of being ostracized, and not because I truly believe in what I’m saying. If you feel compelled to speak out on every issue, I’d suggest you ask yourself whether or not you are doing the same thing.

Politics has come to such an extreme in our country that a person of either party can exist in their ideological bubble without ever having to be confronted with the reality that reality does not exist in their bubble.

If there are 300 million people in this country, and if half of them are republicans, and the other half democrats, then no wonder we feel no need to empathize with the opposing party. Even if half of them are independent (the real number is much less), then there are still 75 million people supporting us in our views.

But does having people agree with you mean your views are right?

Over-politicization also comes with a slippery-slope of other side-effects which further tear our country apart.

It allows people to exploit our political positions for their own gain. When we have a view on something which has no quantifiable indicators of “goodness”, then people who use money as their metric for “goodness” can exploit our opinions for their own profit motives.

Marketing teams of big companies are geniuses because they always tap into the trendy political position of the day to make you think they are supporting your cause, when really all they want is your business.

But that sounds almost harmless. Sure, it’s bad to exploit people for money, but they could be a chance they really believe in that good cause, so it can’t hurt to give them our business, right?

Very wrong. Why?

A basic regulating factor of any society is its economy. The economy, over the long term, should reward those who create value, and act as an incentive to do good, to contribute. If functional, it should function as that qualitative metric for “goodness” over the long term.

Anyone who believes in karma, let alone the judicial system, should have no problem believing that a rich person who consistently does bad things — exploits people, scams people, harms people — will eventually lose his or her fortune.

So by making our decisions based on politics, on a countrywide scale, we are nullifying that natural regulatory law that is the economy, and artificially propping up a system where exploitation is totally okay, and will not be penalized. We are essentially bypassing the effect of karma in regulating the good and bad of the world.

And that’s even more dangerous when you consider that we are not the only country on this planet. That store of negative karma, instead of serving justice on a small scale a million times, will some day hit us over the head with one huge disaster, most likely crippling our entire nation. This has happened before. Does the 2008 financial crisis ring a bell? Lots of small acts of exploitation didn’t get served justice, and so the system ended up crashing down with the weight of all that negative karma built up over the years.

I’m not talking wishy-washy nonsense here; it’s actually very logical: do bad things and people should stop giving you business, otherwise they are contributing to a dysfunctional system, and are then partially responsible for the upkeep of that system; basically a stock market of misguided intentions. As the value of this misguided market rises (the more people buy into it), the more potential it has to crash. Soon, the entire country is one huge karma deficit, waiting to be redeemed.

Let’s not get to that point. Stop politicizing everything. Make decisions for yourself, and not because your party told you to.