On politics and our self-defeating beliefs

Why you should stop nodding in agreement with your tribe

We are being played. Our personal emotions and instinctive reactions have been weaponized against us by the political class.

Politics is in poor shape in 2021, even if America is in pretty good shape — considering the sandstorm she has just been through. Our political landscape is distorted by social media and digital news media colluding to create a social disease (please watch The Social Dilemma if you haven’t already). We have succumbed to dumb groupthink on both ends of the spectrum, and we have become binary simpletons trying to assess a complex multidimensional array of forces interacting in our reality. We can’t do anything good from our current stupid state — we have to change who we are before we can crawl to a new normal — a healthy and sane population and a functioning government that serves the people. Neither the red nor the blue party can get us there.

Let’s take a look at ourselves as individuals and how we engage with this tribalism that is American politics and the digital media that reports it to us.

We are all addicts. Dopamine addiction drives us to click on news sources we trust, and to read stories we think will give us a message we agree with. Our brain will like what it sees and…