I would say that I am meta-interested in politics; ie, I am interested in the fact that people are interested in politics, and the ways they are. However, I like to position myself as an outsider as much as possible. For one thing, following it is too darn painful. Just because I said (meta-)politics is (meta-)interesting does not mean I find it endlessly interesting all the time, and that I am willing to sacrifice my mental health for every nugget of information I can acquire. It's one of many hobbies, not a sacred quest.
I really think American politics have digressed into co-dependencies very much trapped in the cycle of abuse. If that is too extreme, then consider this argument, that the dynamics of a movement work best (in terms of recruitment, fundraising, influence for leaders) when they don't achieve results. The movement can get close, it can look like it's very close to winning, and the stakes should be raised to existential dimensions, but the invisible hand will find a way for the true believers to be left unsatisfied. And then it's on to the next round of gathering resources for the next fight. When you can think of examples of this for both parties, you have started down the path to meta-politics. Remove enough garbage from your information diet, and you might one day find that you are only meta-interested.
II)
To get over the parts of politics that disgust me, I have taken the prudent course of action and stopping posting on Twitter. I went one step further, and deleted several years of tweets, ported things of particular value over to this blog. Results here, and here, and here.
I have a tweet thread I want to develop a little more. It started with this Wrath of Gnon post:
“Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created.” Roger Scruton pic.twitter.com/CE2Ex5j1sw— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) April 11, 2016
As I said, I have deleted my responses on the twitter platform. But here is what I wrote in response:
Certainly worth turning over in one's mind. We need spaces where this is true, even if not political.
I wonder what a properly constituted Venn diagram of this and the sentiment "don't break my shit" would look like. . . or really "don't break MY shit."I cannot locate the video where I heard David Heinemeier Hansson say that "don't break my shit. I have nice shit" is the core of all conservatism, but I do believe in credit where it's due when possible.
My addition is to emphasize the "MY." After all, every strand of conservatism I can think of has been perfectly fine with other people's stuff getting broken. That is the creative destruction that has been at the heart of the American Way.
For my taste, conservatism can be respectable when it shifts to "don't break our stuff," but realize that 1) this is often merely a rhetorical ploy 2) while communities can create value, it does not follow that outsiders can access that value. Furthermore, the shift to protecting "our stuff" is not all that effective rhetoric to audiences trained to be individualists and consumers. In modern times it has been more effective for the political right to define what freaks they say should not belong than it has been to give a concrete articulation of what is sacred -- institutions, rituals, places -- irrespective of who would defile them. And yes, I am accusing conservatives of being relativists, nearly absolute relativists [1].
Another interesting thing about "don't break my shit" is once you establish it as your goal, you can never achieve it once and for all. It is not a S.M.A.R.T goal, and thus your purveyor of fear and indignation can always dangle some enemy in front of you as a threat to what is yours. And thus you can always be captured in a mass group.
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[1] The issue of abortion is the biggest exception I can think of. From A Thing of Things article:
Pro-life advocacy is similar to effective altruism in many ways: its advocates believe that they’re fighting against an ongoing moral atrocity and it involves expanding the circle of concern.I can only say that I wish those animated about the issue were as interested in being pro-life after birth. And I don't mean that flippantly. I would like to see an expansion of community goods in the United States, and religious conviction seems to be one of the only ways to get there. Modernity is a disaster for ethics and psychological well-being.
