Politics is increasingly fascinating to me. As someone who tends to live by the rules of what is true rather than what seems nice, politics is a very peculiar grey area where suddenly, the ability to land on an absolute simply breaks down.
There is no other area like it. In the arts, there is nothing but subjectivity, but that is exactly the point here. Nobody is arguing that the Mona Lisa is factually the third greatest painting in history. When people say these emphatic statements, we understand that this is mostly passion speaking, or at most, speaking from data of others' opinions.
Religion is demonstrably false, yet we add 'faith' into the mix and suddenly being false is irrelevant and they can continue reaping their tax-free benefits.
Politics, on the other hand, insists that is is a fact-based, practically scientific endeavor, only ruined by the dishonesty of corrupt officials and if only we could elect this one perfect individual that I happen to support, everything will follow the truths out there and immediately transform into a utopia. Fact.
Yet, even if you had truth-designed machines running the political world, totally incapable of anything other than objective facts, it still creates a totally divided set of opinions in which everyone is 100% sure their views are right and the other is not only wrong but evil.
Fascinating.
It's likely because unlike pure science, politics is a rather conscious element in all of our daily lives, and with any individual living a slightly different life to the person next to them comes a hugely different set of values on what we define as 'good' and 'evil', 'right' and 'wrong'.
On the whole, we humans have been improving the world, at least in the direction we on the whole agree with what is considered an 'improvement'. Some may disagree, and those who do not follow the global consensus are typically seen as evil.
Slaves are still being bought and sold in Africa and the Middle East. Fascists (actual ones, not Trump supporters) are still out there - I taught music to one of them here in China who in turn learnt of this from a community of fascists online based in Norway.
These are things we generally all agree across the world are 'bad', yet here we are in a world where countless humans consider them a genuine good.
It's easy to consider them brain-damaged or brainwashed, but that's too easy and it drives them away from public discourse, which actually protects their ideas as they get more and more support through other means. It's far better to think about why and how we as a species can view things so completely differently.
The reality, it seems, is that we actually don't. It's an illusion. Perspective.
In England, we recently had elections that was largely a battle between the left and the right; Labour and Conservatives. As I sat in the middle doing my best to break down the fake news on either side, I realised that people were barely fighting over political ideologies at all, but over one party's ability to lie or not.
The left insisted that their leader was nothing but the most honest, homely grandfather-type person looking out for 'the many not the few', the purest, most altruistic endeavor that would not only save the country from the horrible state it was in, but the world - A dystopia created by the right with their obsessive desire to steal everyone's money and hand it to the elite billionaires who in turn lock it all in a giant safe for thousands of years, cackling on a golden throne the whole time.
The right insisted that the lies from their own leader were really quite meaningless and they just wanted to focus on the here and now, letting each individual have the freedom they deserve, allowing the country to flourish without the influence of tyranny, while the left were utter communists out to take everyone's money, put it in a tax pot in which 90% goes to the Labour leader himself and 10% gets thrown into the sea. This naturally leads to a Venezuela-type economic collapse but at this point, the rich political elite can just fly off to another wealthy country and repeat the process.
Then you look at their policies both sides are arguing for:
- Fight climate change
- More money on health services
- More rights/less discrimination for minorities and women
- Stronger economy
- Stronger military
- Better international trade
- Better education
- Better public services
- More opportunities
And pretty much every other grand buzz-phrase you can think of. both parties were practically in agreement with each other on most issues!
Yet the country has for years been more divided than ever before. Why? Well, the other team is OBVIOUSLY lying, of course. Don't trust them, trust me.
Each party has enough dirt on them to prove that they are not to be trusted - welcome to politics, yet neither will acknowledge that they are anything less than perfect. Even now, with Labour having suffered the greatest defeat in living memory, the narrative was 'we won the argument, but it didn't translate into votes'.
Moments later it was 'democracy is broken and it should be done this way instead'. Everything in between came after that, from the entire country is brainwashed except us, to the entire country is just inherently racist and evil.
People refuse to see that both sides actually have a lot - but not all - in common. In fact, this is such a blasphemous idea that those who consider themselves 'centrist' are suddenly 'apologists' or 'weak'. Being centrist is just not acceptable.
The bigger picture
What about more extreme differences than simple nationwide parties? The US has a very diverse culture as the UK does, but they all typically agree on what is 'good' if you zoom out a bit, so the trajectory towards greater nations is generally a bipartisan one.
What about North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia? Are these countries not evil?
Living in China for so many years it gets increasingly more difficult for me to justify anything they ever do, but there is a long history to consider and that's not really possible for any one human to fully digest. One large factor for China is that it has been the victim for basically thousands of years. Most points in history involve the Chinese being massacred, even when they were a burgeoning, technological powerhouse of the time.
All it took were the Mongols to come along and that was that. Later came the Japanese, the Russians, the British, the French, and well, other Chinese.
Britain, in contrast, hasn't suffered a proper invasion in a thousand years, and the US hasn't even existed more than like 30 years or whatever.
China's approach to its existence has until recently been a very protectionist one. Why forcefully control regions that wish to be autonomous? Well, Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia are huge buffer zones militarily, with the Himalayas acting as an impenetrable wall, and Inner Mongolia as a vast, empty wasteland reaching thousands of miles. Give those up and the US will be freely stumbling around barely 5km from Beijing.
With this kind of mindset ingrained into the political scenery, you can, slowly, start to see that, even though we see things as intensely evil, there is an actual root to this conclusion, from thousands of years gone by, that can be seen as justifiable - just not by our own standards from our own experiences culturally and historically.
You can, if you have the knowledge, apply the same method of thought to North Korea, Saudi Arabia and beyond. Suddenly you start to realize that your idea of 'evil' is really just a result of your upbringing in your current political climate.
We're all the same
We know, from science and history, that we are all capable of what we currently see as evil. People in China are totally happy to put mice into a shallow pool of boiling water and watch it slowly burn to death, uploading it on social media for fun. Well, guess what? American teenagers recently, joyfully, uploaded footage of them putting their own cat in a microwave, in which its blood rapidly boils and expands and... well, yeah. Gross.
The Mongol Empire were known for their brutality, once when defeating a town, slaughtering all men, and building wooden floors atop the women and children where they would park their horses and tents and party all night as the women and children slowly suffocated and got crushed.
The Mongols rarely saw anybody who did not support them as human, they had not developed a moral compass in the same way we do today. Their killing was casual, not evil. That is to say, they were not cackling with evil intent planned in a dark cave full of bats. They just did it because it was no big deal.
In the same vein, we literally slaughter billions upon billions of animals every year after they've grown up in their own feces and each others' infectious filth, caged so tight that their skin looks like balloons poking out of the metal gratings for 5 years until the day they finally get a baseball bat to the head or however they do it these days.
The Muslims among us prefer Halal meat and insist its the best way. Non-muslims on the other hand just see a cow being strung upside down and slit at the throat while it slowly chokes on its own blood until kindly delivered on your kebab.
But hey, we're ok with it. This is nothing less than casual mass genocide on a daily basis for decades, all over the world. We don't typically see ourselves as evil for enabling this, though because they are dumb animals. It's FINE.
Well, the Chinese and Europeans were dumb animals to the Mongols too.
Quick reminder: Mongols, Chinese and Europeans were and are in fact all humans.
We are all capable of evil. Don't forget that. Whoever reads this, under the right circumstances, you could find yourself 5 years from now casually skinning the scalps off of some minority before dumping their limp corpses into a mass grave.
I say that because it actually happened in Nazi Germany. The regular, every day, blue-collar workers were capable of unimaginable things. This was only a single lifetime ago. The interviews of those men decades later is heartbreaking, as they fail to grasp how they could possibly have ended up doing such things.
So what does all this mean? Well, the next time you end up in a political debate and you are certain your opponent is utterly retarded and you are righteous and pure, remember they could be wearing your hair before your next child is born.
Wait, that's not what I was trying to point out... I mean, remember you guys are not actually very different. It's our experiences that shape our views, and no political view can be absolute no matter how strongly we believe otherwise. There is always a different road to go down that arrives at a totally different conclusion based on the same premise you all started off from.
Take a step back and realize you're all just trying to make the world a better place, then work on those things you have in common. You'll find there's actually quite a lot to discuss.