Politics makes us worse because "politics is the mindkiller," as intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it. "Evolutionary psychology produces strange echoes in time," he writes, "as adaptations continue to execute long after they cease to maximize fitness." We gorge ourselves sick on sugar and fat, and we indulge our tribal hard-wiring by picking a political "team" and denouncing the "enemy."
But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of "individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them," Yudkowsky writes.
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Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."
Comments at that kind of site tend to be not worth reading, in general. You get too many people who just make one remark and leave, so you have a lot of random blathering instead of ongoing conversations.
Original at Washington Examiner
http://washingtonexaminer.com/down-with-politics/article/2508882#.UGSscI0iYZm
Repost at Reason.com
http://reason.com/archive/2012/09/25/why-politics-are-bad-for-us