Why is Politics in Public a Taboo?
Everyone has seen it: that one person in a group of people who is talking too loudly about tax cuts and foreign policy. With every new point, the crowd begins to edge away. The speaker has obtained a bad odor. Politics are offensive.
Recently I got into a long political discussion with a man from Syracuse, NY. The conversation lasted a whole plane trip of 3 hours. It was heated and we did get a little loud. As loud as people who have conversations on their cell phones in public places.
I could tell that people around us were getting very angry. We weren’t experts in government or policy making and didn’t have a clue about foreign policy. Our conversation was probably a confusing string of misunderstood facts, misquoted speeches and badly remembered history lessons.
As we left the plane I heard people making comments with the intention of being over heard by us. They basically said that we were jerks. That experience left me wondering how talking politics in public became a taboo.
Aren’t We Supposed to Share Ideas?
The whole idea of a democracy is that people share ideas. In fact, the classical Greek philosopher and mathematician Plato believed that we grow our knowledge when we talk to each other. In his view two people can learn from a conversation and become closer to the truth. I find the opinions of my neighbors and fellow travelers very interesting. Eight sets of eyes can see the world better than one. I expand my horizons with every conversation.
In modern society we talk about weather and basketball with a casual ease. They aren’t personal topics and there is a comfort in talking about things that aren’t too personal. Even an intense sports rivalry is really not personal. You can know about a person’s favorite sports team and never really know who they are. Keeping things impersonal reduces the risk of disagreement or unpleasantness.
I don’t mean to say that sports conversations are not important. We are social animals and we need to have different types of contact with others. But most of that contact is now avoiding talking about meaningful topics.
Shouldn’t We Be Talking With Each Other About Our Issues?
When I ask most people what they think about the health care bill, they shrug their shoulders and change the subject. The ability to be seen by a doctor should be a universal issue. All of us get sick and we all need a good health care system. But people seem not to care. They make jokes or they get overwhelmed. They don’t know how to deal with what they feel about a topic. They feel powerless to change or affect our world. Or they don’t have the energy to think about it.
And I admit that I too feel pretty powerless. I know the answers to almost all of our problems but I don’t think I can solve them. I am not arrogant for thinking this. Deep down everyone knows the answers to all of our problems. Take health care, for instance. We don’t want to let people die because they are poor. But we don’t want to sacrifice quality care for people who work hard to pay for it.
We already have the answer. Let people buy whatever health care they can afford. Provide government assistance for those people who can’t afford health care. That is a combination of the two systems and that is what we have today. The problem with our current solution is that the government isn’t working hard enough to root out fraud, and the private sector is seeking higher profit maximization to please hungry investors look for larger returns.
The solution is to increase government oversight of its healthcare programs and to begin protecting consumers by increasing government regulation of the insurance companies. I don’t mean the kind of regulations that involve tons of unnecessary burdens for companies. I mean the kind of regulations that uphold the principles of fair play and honest dealing that embody a healthy marketplace. Government regulation of business is one the services that we pay taxes for. It is an important responsibility that shouldn’t be neglected.
Pitching any other solution is just telling people what they want to hear. We don’t have to compromise or we need to compromise too much. Someone has to lose or no one can win. That isn’t true and it isn’t honest to say that it is.
Is Mass Media Hurting Our Ability to Have Reasonable Conversations?
We ignore these obvious solutions because people are on TV screaming at us. They are demanding and insistent and passionate. They talk about being impartial or reasonable but none of us are. How can we be? If my family’s well being depended on the money I made from talking on TV, I would just say whatever I had to. Comedian Dave Chappel once asked why people took him so seriously as a public person. He claimed to endorse Coke and Pepsi because he didn’t care one way or the other. He just wanted to get paid.
I feel like we let the ideas of people who get paid, which means that they can’t be truly objective, control us. Why should I sit and listen to someone I have never met on TV when I would much rather listen to the guy on the plane. How do we feel about what is going? What can we do? Those are great conversation to have with real people, not with televisions and TiVo’s. Televisions don’t care.
Television can be harmful because it can provide an intellectual loop for our brains. We have an idea so we watch a show about that same idea and the buy a book about that same idea and then tell our friends about that same idea. Then we have the same idea again and watch another show about it on television and buy another book and tell our friends. Pretty soon we have a favorite show, a bookshelf of agreeing authors, and a closed group of friends. The brain is looped. No new ideas can enter.
The brain can’t form realistic and meaningful political ideas unless it is challenged by people who aren’t being paid to entertain. And make no mistake CBS News, ABC News, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc…they aren’t supported by Journalistic Ethics. They aren’t supported by the Quest for Knowledge and the Betterment of the Country and the World Through the Increase of Public Knowledge. They are supported by advertisers who are trying to sell us products. They are supported by investors who are trying to make money. They are supported by public relations people trying to get news stories about the products that are being advertised during the commercial breaks. Having a productive political discussion is last on the long list of concerns for any successful mass media outlet.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against mass media. I think it is great. But it has one huge shortcoming. We put too much faith in the actors, and entertainers that we see on TV. We let mass media influence what we believe and affect our values. I think that is why the Matrix had such a huge impact on so many people. In some ways the matrix is television/TiVo/internet – an addictive artificial world that makes us we feel like we don’t have any control. The real world is full of less beautiful people, with flaws, and who don’t disappear after the credits. They have to stick around to deal with reality as they find it.
Real People vs Television Pundits
This brings me back to the plane where I talked to the gentlemen from Syracuse. The reason I enjoyed our conversation so much was because I didn’t know what he was going to say. I was learning about him and about myself during our conversation. I was willing to accept that he didn’t have a teleprompter or wasn’t the head of an Ivy League debate team. He was just an American with a point of view about the things that he saw and experienced.
People got annoyed because they didn’t want to overhear a conversation between to real people. They didn’t want to even have a conversation themselves. I rarely met people that do. They don’t want to risk disagreement. People are forgetting how to disagree. And avoidance is not the same as knowing how to disagree. True avoidance is really passive violence. This kind of avoidance is averting conflict by wielding the sword but not using it. Knowing how to disagree means putting the sword away and interacting unarmed. People don’t know how to be unarmed so they would much rather leave the politics to the Television and the TiVo.
Without Disagreement We Aren’t Empowered
Maybe the reason that voting turn out is so low, that youth engagement is so weak, and that community spirit is dwindling is the fact that we won’t confront each other unarmed. We would rather avoid than disagree. Many important view points are being left unseen and important ideas are being left unheard. But we don’t want to risk disagreement and we are afraid to put away our swords. Until we learn how important it is to disagree politics will only be for TV and we won’t have control over our communities and our lives.
