I know this isn't that relevant to your post, but I kind of think the evo-psych explanation for why people care about politics is really stupid.
Do you mean that this particular evo-psych explanation is really stupid? That I can understand, since it does include burdensome details and questionable, overly simple specific claims. But in general people's political instincts being explainable by evo-psych seems to be among the most obvious and least controversial applications.
Here's a better explanation:
- In America, if you do not vote, you're considered a bad person.
People in countries that are not the USA have similar political instincts to those in the USA. This includes countries like Australia where people are motivated to vote by legal obligation instead of shame and countries that aren't democracies at all so voting doesn't come into it. This explanation is not better. It is a specific explanation for a phenomenon that is more general. Even apart from this it strikes me as an implausible just so story.
Or here's another one: when something is on the news a lot, people will care about it even if it doesn't affect them at all and isn't really inherently interesting (the royal wedding, the Casey Anthony trial, celebrity gossip).
This strongly suggests to me that the bias towards spending time on politics has an evolutionary psychology cause. Interest in gossip about high status figures, shaming and criticising targets, calling for punishment, advocating policies for the distribution of resources and privileges and advocating people or groups as deserving of allegiance. It's all part of the monkey social hierarchy game.
Related to: Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Logical Rudeness
Politics is sometimes hard to discuss. Partly since most of us seem to unconsciously take political matters with the same degree of seriousness as our forefathers used to, because we use the same mode of thought as they used to. Back then, a bad political choice or alliance, could mean death, while the normal cost today in a democratic society might be ridicule for having supported the losing team or position.
Nevertheless, politics should be taken seriously. Bad politics means that it'll take longer for us humans to reach world peace, an end to hunger and disease, and favourable conditions so that no one will create an unfriendly AI. Therefore, discussing politics is vital so that, someday, some collective actions could be performed to alter the political course for the better.
But what should that collective action be? - what should the new course(s) be? - and who should do it? - and what does "for the better" imply? To engage in politics one needs to be able to give some (implicit or explicit) answers to these questions. This can be done, and in so doing one has constructed a political ideology - which might be similar to existing ideologies or it might be different.
A political ideology might be constructed in various ways. In this and a few more posts I will propose one way of doing that. These posts might be seen as a tutorial in constructing a political ideology. In these posts I will not suggest an answer to what the best political system should be, nor will I follow my own instructions. But if one should follow these instructions I believe that one can answer the questions mentioned above.
Political ideologies might be constructed in various other ways. The one I discuss in my following posts is based on two principles: (1) that one should not propose an answer until one has thought about the question extensively, and (2) that one should consider the most important questions first.
Before writing the next post, here are the points I will discuss in each of them - I will write the posts as an instruction manual so I'll address you, dear reader, through them out:
Next post "The Domain of Politics"