I have long been puzzled by the phenomenon of my countrymen voluntarily aligning themselves with one or another political archetype despite the undeniable absurdity of each. I thought, "most people seem to be decent; most people identify as either liberal or conservative; neither ideology is decent. What gives?" Then I figured it out. People tend to form their beliefs about social issues based mostly upon their own extremely narrow experience, as opposed to thinking deeply and abstractly about them. For example, I know a person (we'll call him Hank) who seems to me to be a decent person. Hank has very conservative views. Pro-business, anti-labor, pro-military, anti-welfare, pro-gun, anti-immigrant, etc. etc. How could a guy like Hank love his children and yet harbor no compassion for minimum wage workers? The answer, I believe, is jaw-droppingly simple. Hank was born into a middle class family, raised with white American middle class values, went to college, worked hard, and now makes a comfortable living. As far as he can see, he has behaved according to the plan and it has worked. Amazing. He thinks that anyone who is struggling, ill, making minimum wage, or in any other way not succeeding, it is because they deviated from the plan. The plan works! If you haven't arrived, it's because you did it wrong. Your fault, your problem. It is inconceivable (or at least unconceived) by Hank that a person could work hard and that the vicissitudes of fate may not reward her. In this way Hank does not feel fortunate for what he has. He feels justified. This only exacerbates the problem, because while he's calling the welfare recipients lazy, they're becoming rabidly resentful of his class, ungrateful for their good fortune.
For the other side of the coin, I'll invent an imaginary character. I'll name her Sophie. Sophie grew up in a working class family, watched her parents struggle to make ends meet for the entirety of her childhood, witnessed some injustice that she interpreted as oppression by the wealthy, grew up, and now she works for Hank. Sophie's dad has recently lost his job through no fault of his own (as far as Sophie knows), and is now reliant on unemployment benefits. In Sophie's eyes, Hank is lucky to have his job, her dad is unlucky to have lost his, and all she hears at work is Hank railing against the greediness and laziness of the unemployed. It seems natural for Sophie to form pro-labor/anti-business sentiments based on her perceptions of her long-suffering father and undeservedly fortunate boss.
If my hypothesis about this is correct, then I suppose that should be received as equal parts good and bad news. Good because it should be very simple to demonstrate to a person that the narrowness and paltry experience of their personal life cannot be relied upon as sufficient evidence when formulating social and political beliefs. Bad because it means that humans are even less prone to careful and critical thinking than I had previously believed.
Maybe we deserve a completely fucked-up, dysfunctional government which attracts ethically vapid megalomaniacs like flies to shit.
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