GrammarPoliceLemmy fell off
GrailHumans are the most political species. Politics is group decision making, and humans have the best group decision making processes. They even have organised structures for passing on knowledge and wisdom, which have ensured that nearly every generation of humans are smarter than the previous.
You know who has just as much raw intelligence as humans, but no politics? Octopuses. Fucking apolitical savages. They’re capable of learning so much, I saw a youtube video where an octopus learned to play the piano. And by now he’s probably dead, and his knowledge lost. Octopuses aren’t political enough to teach each other. That’s why they’ll never get as much done as humans.
Billionaires are trying to convince you that you don’t like politics, so you’ll be as easy to control as the apolitical animals are. Do you want to be used for labour value by a smarter animal, like oxen are? If you aspire to apoliticism, you will be!
I think the problem is that people get politics fatigue after a while on the Internet. Our brains weren’t prepared to handle any and every political event all of the time. Even the experts whose job is to keep up with politics can’t do it, so they focus on particular regions. And those who try to have an opinion on everything end up not having a well-formed opinion on anything.
I think rich people brainwash us into thinking politics=controversy, and then inundate ourselves with controversy, as you say. But we spend the entire rest of our lives engaging in uncontroversial politics, and we love it. Human beings go insane and die if they aren’t given enough politics.
Good point. I guess the solution is to promote politics that isn’t drama/controversy, then. Things most people can agree on, such as getting lobbying out of government and getting rid of mass surveillance and Silicon Valley tech monopolies.
We can think even more pleasant. This conversation here is politics. Deciding what to have for dinner, that’s a group decision, which makes it politics. Fandom discussions are politics. Agreeing that a cat gif is cute, that’s politics. And it’s nice and fun and sweet.
That’s a pretty broad definition of “politics”, at least compared to the common one or the dictionary one - and its one that waters the term down to the point of uselessness.
Wikipedia: Politics[a] is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society.
Merriam-Webster: the art or science of government
Collins: Politics are the actions or activities concerned with achieving and using power in a country or society
We live in a society where power is concentrated in the hands of the few. In other words, an authoritarian society. This society wants us to believe that the power to govern society can only be wielded by an economic and/or social elite. If we’re going to move on to a libertarian society, where everyone has the power to change their circumstances and help govern their community, then we need to accept that politics is something we do every day when we work together to make decisions.
I believe that the unfairness of our society is maintained by a mind prison. This narrow definition of politics trains us to think of ourselves as powerless. That’s one brick making up the walls of our mind prison. Let’s smash it.
Still, “agreeing that a cat gif is cute” is as far from politics as it gets.
By all means, power to the people. But surely that doesn’t mean EVERYTHING is politics?
We agreed to make a decision: to collectively call this kitty cute. In so doing, we reaffirmed our social values: The young are to be protected. Cats are to be kept as pets. We contributed towards the maintenance of certain conditions of our present society. If tomorrow everyone instead agreed that kittens are annoying pests, cat ownership would fall. People may perhaps devote themselves more strongly to solving the feral cat problems we have here in Australia. Instead of sterilising stray cats, programs would simply kill them. We would become a harder and less empathetic people. We would make different big decisions.
Everything you do with others matters. No action is without consequence. You are powerful.
That’s an interesting and in-depth perspective.
Thank you! I got to it through evolutionary psychology. Because it seems like just about every culture thinks small fluffy animals are cute to some degree. Mainstream science tells us it’s a side effect of needing to think babies are cute, and I buy that explanation. But what that means is, thinking small animals are cute is so imperative to the survival of the species, it got genetically hardcoded. Anything that ALL humans do seems to be in the genes, seems to bear some relationship to survival. And I know kittens aren’t human babies and the reasons aren’t the same, but the impact is still visible: our political instincts for young-preservation have a big impact on our world. Our genes gave us these politics because they’re important.
Makes sense to me.
“If not baby then why cute” - our brains