It might be that my current opinion is skewed by the present political situation in my country (Italy). I haven’t enough knowlegde of foreign internal politics to judge if the italian situation is typical or not, brief conversations with foreign people on the subject suggest it’s worse than in the average developed countries, but not that much. To the point.
There’s one main problem of talking about politics: that it doesn’t work like it should work, and there’s little way to collect enough information to produce a good model of the reality. In practice: politicians, on average, don’t try to do what they think to be the best interest of the country. They try to mantain the power and possibly to gain more advantages* from it. They have to pay debts to whoever supported them: the voters base, the powerful industrial groups, the trade unions, the banks and very likely the mafia. Sometimes these webs of interests are in plain sight, but very often they’re not.
Discussing of politics is therefore very often frustrating at best, since you have to work with partial (and very often wrong) info.
*E.G. the last year the government didn’t fell mostly because more than 50% of the congressmen wanted to reach the pension threshold, and therefore need to sit in the parliament for another six months ( Link—in Italian unfortunately )
But “politics is the mind-killer” is more about the tribal affiliation aspects of associating oneself with a party.
This is, in my opinion, a consequence of what I wrote above. You can’t properly evaluate politicians and parties and you can’t reliably predict their behavior, so you end up reacting emotionally and attaching yourself to one of the “teams”. If you could reliably predict what a party will do if it wins the election, then you could evaluate and discuss the precise program without being “mind-killed”. Since you generally cannot, you end up cheering for one of the team that you somewhat feel is more or less aligned with your position.
It might be that my current opinion is skewed by the present political situation in my country (Italy). I haven’t enough knowlegde of foreign internal politics to judge if the italian situation is typical or not, brief conversations with foreign people on the subject suggest it’s worse than in the average developed countries, but not that much. To the point.
There’s one main problem of talking about politics: that it doesn’t work like it should work, and there’s little way to collect enough information to produce a good model of the reality. In practice: politicians, on average, don’t try to do what they think to be the best interest of the country. They try to mantain the power and possibly to gain more advantages* from it. They have to pay debts to whoever supported them: the voters base, the powerful industrial groups, the trade unions, the banks and very likely the mafia. Sometimes these webs of interests are in plain sight, but very often they’re not. Discussing of politics is therefore very often frustrating at best, since you have to work with partial (and very often wrong) info.
*E.G. the last year the government didn’t fell mostly because more than 50% of the congressmen wanted to reach the pension threshold, and therefore need to sit in the parliament for another six months ( Link—in Italian unfortunately )
Certainly skewed by looking at Italy, but most of what you’re talking about would be familiar to cynics anywhere.
But “politics is the mind-killer” is more about the tribal affiliation aspects of associating oneself with a party.
This is, in my opinion, a consequence of what I wrote above. You can’t properly evaluate politicians and parties and you can’t reliably predict their behavior, so you end up reacting emotionally and attaching yourself to one of the “teams”. If you could reliably predict what a party will do if it wins the election, then you could evaluate and discuss the precise program without being “mind-killed”. Since you generally cannot, you end up cheering for one of the team that you somewhat feel is more or less aligned with your position.