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."
If I were evil, I would have people repeat Epiphany's slogan and they would think they were practicing dutiful nonconformity while actually their brain was thinking "Go Eliezer" all the time...
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