It's an idiotic question because it's hopelessly simplistic and forced her to quickly come up with a reasonable-sounding response. She managed to come back with something that not only kept her from offering me a too-honest "gotcha" quote, but also kept her from sounding disingenuous. The fact that she did so without also making me look like an idiot just showed her profound mastery as a politician.
Why I asked the question in the first place was not because I wanted to score points, but because it was a way of getting to something that journalists usually are afraid of asking about when dealing with important people. That is, "Why exactly do people do the things that they do?" And that is the import of my question, because it is a way of introducing more subtle and serious issues. I was thinking in particular about the decision of both the provincial and federal Tories to build their brand around sabotaging any attempt to prevent runaway climate change. And in that context, the question "are they evil?" really boils down to "are they aware of the existential threat to human civilization and yet consciously choose to oppose legislation to prevent runaway climate change simply because they think it will help them win the next election?" Similarly, the question "are they stupid?" is a shorthand for "are they so blinded by their ideology that they simply cannot comprehend how dangerous climate change is to humanity?"
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It's usually considered "rude" or "unfair" to question the motives of anyone when they say or do something. Indeed, I've been accused of being a "troll" in on-line discussions because I sometimes do this. The idea is that you have to simply accept that someone is saying something with the best of intentions and only deal with what they say instead of why you think that they may be saying it. The problem is that many people suffer from a profound lack of understanding about what the implications of their actions will be. To an outside observer what might seem like a profoundly cynical power play might simply be a case of someone being oblivious to the effects that the course of action they support will have on other people.
I first considered this idea when I heard a fellow at work talking about being in a developing nation and seeing a man with no legs rolling around on a creeper and begging for money. My co-worker said he was with a couple other tourists and he was amazed to see that they were actually afraid of this guy, even though he offered zero physical threat because of his disability. I opined that perhaps they were terrified by the implications that this man raised about the nature of life. This is the idea that "there but for the grace of God goeth I", and this can be a scary thing to contemplate. My co-worker looked at me with amazement, thought for a while, and said "I think you may have something there. I'd never thought of that." The point is that what had seemed obvious to me was something that had never occurred to this other guy.
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| Too stupid to know he's stupid? Public Domain, US gov photo c/o Wikicommons |
This is where the "too stupid to understand" idea arises. I'm not talking about people suffering from some sort of brain damage. Instead, I'm talking about people who have had their heads so stuffed with nonsense that there isn't any room left for evidence or logic to alter their opinions.
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Time for the begging bowl. If you like these articles---and I suppose you do if you are reading this---consider subscribing to them through Patreon or toss something in the Tip Jar. Maybe, you could buy a book. All these options exist on the upper right hand of the screen. (Switch to the desktop option if you read these on your cell phone.) Writing these things take a lot of time and energy and I have bills to pay and family obligations just like anyone else. Part of the problem that I'm identifying in this article is that if people expect to get their news for free, people write wild, sensationalist articles in order to get clicks and shares to increase ad revenue. If you want to "damp this down" and get more logical, fact-based stuff (ie: less ideological), people are going to have to get back into the habit of paying for it. Lots of folks used to pay for newspapers---why not blogs?
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A few years back I was at a dinner party and one of the guests was a fellow I'd never met before. He was a profoundly odd person. Among other things, he said that "everyone in the USA has healthcare". (My wife, Misha, is an American---one who has never had health insurance except when she was in the Armed Forces.) I was taken aback. I tried to get an idea of what he meant, and said that I knew for a fact that this was simply not true. But he just blustered and got angry if anyone disagreed with him. Eventually, I just left rather than spend any time in the room with this disagreeable person. (I wasn't the only one. An elderly woman who remembered England before the National Health Service similarly couldn't stand this "nonsense" either, so she left too.)
While it was hard to figure out exactly what this guy was thinking (simply because he refused to engage in the "back-and-forth" of conversation that allows one to tease out this sort of information), I did learn that he owned a local company and he was profoundly pissed off about the amount of money he had to pay in taxes. In fact, it seemed like he had worked himself into an almost permanent frenzy over the subject.
Moreover, my hosts told me afterwards that they had made a mistake inviting the three of us to dinner at the same time. They'd forgotten that they had invited this person earlier. The fact of the matter was that my two friends were also self-described "right wing", but they tended to keep quiet around me and the elderly relative, because they knew that we didn't share their opinions.
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I might be odd (in fact I've been told I am by several people), but I tend to think that we should subject our cherished ideas to some sort of "fact checking" once in a while. The idea that someone would tell me to my face that I was wrong, and that my wife does have health insurance when I know that this isn't true---and that in some sense this is a question of "opinion" instead of "facts"---just seems weird.
Of course, there are nuances to most conflicts. It might be the case that the fellow I met at the dinner had conflated the idea that no one can get turned away from an emergency department in an American hospital with the existence of "medical insurance". But if you do end up at a hospital, you will end up with a bill afterwards and people can and often do lose their entire life's savings over this sort of thing. And as a result, people often think long and hard about whether they want to go in for a "check up" after a minor accident. Indeed, Misha had a friend who got into a "fender bender" on his motor scooter, got a significant bump on the head, but avoided going to Emergency because of this concern. He died of an aneurysm the next day. People who have no health insurance never go for check-ups either. Which means that if I lived in the USA I would never have had my high blood pressure identified and would probably be well on the way to kidney failure right now.
The important point, however, was that we never had this discussion because this guy was so angry and belligerent that he would not allow me to find some sort of "common ground" that we could build a conversation on. He just made angry, universal statements. Indeed, if my friends had been better organized, I would never have even met him because the two of us would have been kept carefully separated into our own, independent "filter bubbles".
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This isn't a new thing. In fact pretty much since the revolutions (British, American, and, French) that changed European politics from being about intrigue between courtiers to being about the worldviews of an entire nation, people have been creating grotesquely over-simplified ways of looking at the world. Political scientists and revolutionaries alike call these "ideologies".
The thing about ideologies is that they aren't fully-formed, well thought out, and, evidence-based. Instead, they are a type of tribal identity that one declares allegiance to. Before I figured this out, I would often be surprised by people who complained about things like "the liberal bias" of universities and who expressed a desire to see space created there to allow "a conservative point of view". Why---I would ask---can't we just judge each issue on its own merits and see where the facts lead us? The problem I couldn't see was that in the hierarchy of understanding that these people hold, "conservatism" is more important than facts or logic. At the dinner party, the anti-tax business guy simply ignored my statement that my wife didn't have health insurance because it didn't agree with something more important, namely his ideological opinion that all taxes are a form of theft.
Ideological conflict has been around since the 17th century's battles over the divine right of kings. But until now the "stakes of the game" haven't been all that large. It just involved whether or not thousands and hundreds of thousands of people would suffer horribly because of minor irritants like slavery and horrific poverty. Now, the fate of human civilization is on the chopping block. What is more important, whether a company in Guelph has to pay more taxes or the ice caps melt and Bangladesh gets drowned? It seems clear to both the federal and provincial conservatives that taxes are much more important. But that's absurd. Our world is too complex and our technology far too powerful to continue this childish game of ideological thinking.
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