Politics Is Our Gossip, Honor Will Be Our Downfall

How social media filled the watercooler with kerosene

Gather round, Auntie Elvira has a story for ya, you’re never gonna believe this one:

Israel and its neighbors, particularly Palestine, have BEEN TO WAR BEFORE!! No, really, and some of it was even before most of us on here were born! https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflit_isra%C3%A9lo-palestinien

No way, can’t be. If Isreal and Palestine have gone to war, why is the earth still round and not covered in glass? How did my liberal mom and my conservative dad stop stabbing each other for long enough to make me?

I’m serious, Israel and its neighbors used to go at each other so often you only noticed when they weren’t, and yet random unconnected people from all over the world did not start no-contacting their relatives over their opinions about the conflict. No randos issuing self-deletion orders to other randos on the other side of the world. No, seriously.

Somehow, not every jackass and their brother without even a whiff of a history degree publicly declared fealty to two separate teams that, overnight, all know the real story of the Middle East.

Could it be because we had actual lives to gossip about, and we didn’t need to discuss Donald and Hillary and Barack and whoever had a sex scandal this week in order to feel like we had something to talk to each other about?

During the pandemic, we all turned into 15-year-old me: Complete shut-ins. But at least back then I was living with the characters in my books. Now we’re all living with a front-row seat to the antics of politicians and politics and leaders and warlords and all the scum of humanity, patterning our behaviors (Are we really? With this much exposure, we must be; and look, funnel plagiarism and other scummery is completely rampant) after what works for them, rather than for the ironically less-cardboardy characters in a Jane Austen novel.

I’m not sure why politics became the main grist for the mill of social media, but I have my suspicions: Any workplace used to have a water cooler to gossip around. Like it or not your coworkers are a tribe, and you have those kinds of interactions with them. We need those kinds of interactions, it would seem. But at a certain point, everyone’s free time at work got sucked up by sneaking off to the Internet, not to mention everyone who works from home, and all of a sudden our water cooler became the world.

But what were we going to follow in that world? The interest in the old world of office gossip faded as superstimuli filled our eyes: real people’s lives move slowly. BOOOOORING.

Was art ever a candidate for the subject of our Truman Show? I doubt it; art doesn’t have a logical temporal flow, and how would you coordinate people’s knowledge of it? There’s so much art in the world—how could you get the general conversation to revolve around that when someone’s always dipping back at random to Michelangelo?

But let’s be real, that’s a mere structural flaw; more to the point, fine art is not a superstimulus to most people, and the drama of the power plays in politics are much broader and easier to grasp.

Come to think of it, my god, we really shouldn’t be surprised that a pro-wrestling president was prophecied and came to pass. It’s a great metaphor for the broad, fickle brushstrokes of Good and Evil that paint our civic Punch and Judy show. Good job, Mike Judge.

I suppose another draw of politics that I’ll have to acknowledge, if I turn toward the cynical, is that young people are probably looking towards becoming a “politics expert” with a careerist eye, if not a very detailed view of history.

As I’ve said elsewhere, job prospects are so lame these days that being internet famous almost sounds like more of a reasonable goal than doing anything useful. Useful things are thankless.

Complaining about politics became one of several novel routes to Internet fame. There was so much wrong with politics on every scale that you didn’t need to be an expert to find a niche, if that was your thing—god help you.

Because the people who went this route professionally didn’t merely have to be good at talking over people, they had to be genuinely obsessed with the tug-of-war. And because of the way the world interacts with the individual psyche—particularly now that we’re all connected, god help us all—this is the kind of obsession that drives people insane.

You ever get way too invested in a sports team’s run for the pennant, only to come to in mid-March, exhausted and dehydrated, wondering how you became part of an angry mob? Politics nerds feel that every time there’s a CITY COUNCIL MEETING.

Polnerding is like being a sports fan, but with more serious apparent consequences than losing a few dollars on a bet or your honor to Dallas. I say apparent, because you don’t need to turn out to be RIGHT about whatever you were scared Trump or Biden was gonna do to everything; it’s all in the anticipation of the loss and ensuing disaster.

You need only playfully visualize your foreseen Armageddon vividly enough for every by-election to feel like a Superbowl playoff game, but if you don’t advance, you become a LITERAL serf.

Right or wrong, it eventually leads you to a place where you devote your life to figuring out whether Michelle Obama is a man or Donald Trump is really a dessicated version of Hitler’s brain that Dick Cheney revived in a laboratory and then transplanted it in all our memories of the 1980s, something about a game show something ASSISTANT!? WHERE THE HELL ARE MY SUPPLEMENTS?

I mean, it’s great they’re doing something they love; it’s the fans and influencers (infofluencers?) I’m more worried about. People who listen to about five minutes of politics news a day and then spend the rest of the day talking about it. This used to be nerd shit and now we all have an opinion. Even 20 years ago, even those of us who worked at frickin’ newspapers didn’t talk, think, or care as much about politics as 95 percent of social media users I see seem to do today.

And it wouldn’t be so bad if everybody were just jostling for attention, but unfortunately we are devolving back into an honor culture, with people more interested in the honor of their political side than with what the truth might be, or even the best course of action to help us all live better.

People aer more obsessed with getting revenge over the lawfare committed by the other team than with doing what is best for our civilizations. I can’t lie, it did feel good to see a few massive liars get their comeuppance from the Trump Administration.

But we are no longer dealing with a truth culture. Politics around the water cooler has turned us into a tribal honor culture. And you are not teaching the left that their behavior is wrong. You are teaching them to forget who started it.

And to make sure they get you all the next time.

Sorry if you’re as sick of me saying it as I am of screaming it into the wind, but human political animals seem to continually divide fifty-fifty into two opposing teams with two apparently biologically different ways of seeing the future, in the same way that people with and without Aspergers have different ways of seeing a social interaction that are hardwired biologically.

It’s inescapable, ever since we started having democracies, including the optimates and the populares in Rome, where they existed before the speakers of Latin had even figured out how to read and write, for the the gods’ sakes. We picked the most tribal way to organize our water cooler conversations that we could have possibly picked. Even if we decided to discuss nothing but gender, at least the two teams know they can’t survive if they genocide each other.

Which is also true of the left and the right, but try telling them that.

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