A question that's very similar to PmCd9's observation:
I live in a low income town and I see a lot of "PLANNED PARENTHOOD BAD FOR (town name)" signs on people's lawns. The signs are big and ugly black lettering on yellow background.
I got to wondering the other day why the right side of the political spectrum is so much more vocal in this respect. Also, the e-mail forwards I get. Some of them are objectively fallacious, like the one about how you can save yourself from cardiac arrest by coughing or some such. But many of them are political in nature. Many people from all sides of the political spectrum have my e-mail address, but I only receive e-mails of a political nature from people on the right side of the political spectrum, in most cases from the extreeeem right.
I got one the other day that was bitching about how if you're proud to be white, then you're racist, but it's okay to be proud to be black... The racism in it wasn't really offensive to me. I've come to expect racism from so many people in America. It was the ignorance that I deemed to be offensive and dangerous. I don't think I'll ever become complacent about ignorance. But I guess that's basically what racism is - is ignorance. So anyway, I hit reply all and I asked the guy to never send me another e-mail again. Some guy I worked with for several months. It's amazing how someone can seem to be so nice and friendly and even intelligent, and yet be a complete bigot. And an ignorant one at that. Oh well. I guess when I worked with him we never discussed anything political, but then I start getting these e-mails from him. I think maybe I'm gradually learning to be more perceptive, up front, about people. Or maybe I'll never learn. Whatever.
So anyway... back to the lawn signs, which are essentially a form of SPAM. I was wondering: why are people of hypothetical political ideology X more likely to put up lawn signs than people of political ideology Y? I decided that the answer must be that people of ideology Y have an ideology which is more rooted in rational reasoning, and therefore, these people are less likely to be influenced by a lawn sign, and are less likely to envision other people as being influence-able with a lawn sign, and so these people don't even bother, whereas, for people of ideology X, ideology X is more amenable to expression on a lawn sign because it's less rooted in complex and extended layers of reason, and more rooted in simple knee-jerk reflex.
Moreover, we can differentiate our hypothetical political discourse of adherent of ideologies X and Y by how interactive the discourse is. A lawn sign is not very interactive. It's a one-way communication. It's not a cooperative exploration of a topic, it's a unilateral expression of an idea.
Theoretically e-mail is possibly a more interactive format, but in actuality, can you imagine what would happen if everyone who got forwarded an e-mail hit reply-all and engaged in a discussion? Well, the productivity of a conversation is logarithmically proportional to the number of partici#####... Furthermore, when you look at the structure of the reasoning of these political e-mail forwards, this reasoning is not too sophisticated. It's not complex. It's basically a series of short and concise lawn signs strung together, resulting in an overall argument that is nothing more than a unilateral expression of a political position, and is usually also substantially fallacious and replete with non sequiturs.
In other words, people don't forward these political chain e-mails with the intention of engaging in conversation or debate. People don't look forward to the mutual exploration of a political subject. People merely are getting a dopamine high off of unilaterally ejaculating their bias simultaneously into as many people's inboxes as possible.
I don't believe that this all tells us as much about properties inherent in human nature as it tells us about behavior which is cultivated by our overall culture due to it's being excessively rooted in consumerism. Instant gratification and education seem to me to be mutually exclusive concepts.
I know I come off as cocky and arrogant at times, but that's just because I'm pissed at people's ignorance and the terribly negative effects ignorance has on us as a society and on the whole world. But at the same time, I do understand that education is something which, if deprived of, places people at a rather significant disadvantage. Condescending attitudes towards people because they ain't educated isn't going to solve anything. The million dollar question is: how do we educate all these people who are engaging in unilateral SPAM discourse? How do we get them off of their mental masturbation habit, how do we help them kick their dopamine instant gratification addiction to jizzing this discourse all over the place? That's a question I have.
If it's political idiocy, or any other kind of idiocy... it's all around us, and I honestly don't know how to begin to engage these people... some of them are friends, some are even family. I'm not the most clever person in the world. I'm not a quick thinker. So I'm not going to be able to seize on a person's perceptions, grapple with their preconceptions, and wrassle them into some kind of intellectual hold that forces them to see a little bit of the complexity and nuance in a subject. It's like... where do you start? I went to school... I took debate class.. In school we studied how to debate things... intelligently... but debating with an uneducated uninformed ignorant prejudiced bigoted person... that is a whole other game... is there a college class for that? Maybe it's called politics 101? I'm being facetious here, but at the same time I'm serious... this is a serious question that is facing the US right now, and it's not going to just go away any time soon, unfortunately.
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Topic: It's Almost Never Real (Read 5062 times)