How to think and talk about politics online and not go crazy
In the study of Psychology, academics refer to the “Big 5" – the 5 key characteristics that make up a personality – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeability and Neuroticism. Each factor represents a continuum – where you sit on the continuum and the combination of all five together describes your personality.
Research has indicated that the factor most correlated with positive life outcomes is Conscientiousness. “Positive life outcomes” in this case means getting a good job, holding it down while also progressing in your career, being regarded as a reliable person, accomplishing your goals, keeping a marriage together and so on.
Examples of the sorts of characteristics of a person high in Conscientiousness would have: they clean up after themselves, have a routine, do what they say they will, finish what they start, have goals and strive to meet them, don’t get distracted, don’t waste time, do things quickly. There are others, but that gives you the sense of the type of person we’re talking about. That way, happiness lies.
Imagine the anti-conscientious person, the opposite of the type described above. They leave their shit lying around everywhere. Their life is aimless. They break promises. They’re chronically distracted. They’re always late. If you ask them to tidy the kitchen it’ll take them an hour to get to it, an hour to do it, and when they tell you they’re done there’ll still be unwashed pots in the sink that “need to soak”. Again, you get the drift. Who does that sound like? Maybe this is reflective of my own experience (*brushes Dorito crumbs off chest*), but I think it sounds like someone who uses the internet too much.
We have come to accept that networked technologies in general and the internet in particular are causing us lasting social and psychological harm, that much is news to no-one. But it’s worth calling out a couple of points about how the addiction functions and its specifically political consequences.
At first the internet draws you in by showing you some thing you like or are interested in. Think of these psychological hooks as doors, brightly painted and easily opened. Then it shows you a million other doors that lead to similar rooms you might be equally interested in visiting. It presents these options to you in such a way that you get a small amount of satisfaction from opening each door a crack and seeing what’s behind it (usually more doors).
What you really want to do is open one door, see what’s behind and fully comprehend it. But that takes effort, and instead its easier to get into the habit of opening all the doors a little. It helps that you’re often fleeing something outside the world of unopened doors, seeking an escape from something difficult into something novel and easy. A strange thing happens, which is the more doors you open, the more you want to open, and the harder it is to stay in and understand a single place no matter how much you know that would satisfy you.
Networked technologies prosper because the lead you away from doing the harder things in your life for a moment; but through their ease and ubiquity they kill your ability to not be distracted. In this way they are antithetical to Conscientiousness, and to Depth. They not only foster shallowness but destroy our ability to be deep.
The effects of this are reflected in all areas of our life penetrated by the internet but especially in politics, since now, politics is everything. Political culture is the culture of the internet, and the culture of the internet is violently shallow.
Depth – both as a personal attribute, and a quality that you can tolerate – requires above all the ability to concentrate, and the internet is kryptonite to concentration. This is the bait and switch the internet pulls and the root of the personal-political problem it causes. It draws your attention to more immediate social, political and cultural problems at one moment than an average person of a hundred years ago might have been forced to acknowledge in a year. Then it robs you of the intellectual tools you need to focus on, understand and address your problems.
Think of the politics and political ideas you hate the most, from whichever end of the spectrum they come. Aren’t these the calling cards of that ideology? Nihilism, wrecklessness, carelessness. An aversion to anything slow or mild or moderate or well thought through. An attraction toward extravagant displays of emotion and outrage, the more public the better. Impatience and irritation, spilling over into violence. The ideology and the atmosphere they grow in are one and the same.
So what to do?
The most obvious solution is to switch off the internet, but I’m not going to tell you to do that mainly because we both know it’s not going to happen. For good or ill it’s how we interact with each other, and it made itself essential to our social and cultural lives. It also has facilitated friendships, ideas and political moments that would not otherwise have been possible, and its right to not want to give that up. What we have to do is find some way to live with it, and counteract its worst effects.
The internet it kryptonite to depth. So what’s kryptonite to shallowness, to distraction? I’ll tell you: books are, and reading.
Read a book. Not a magazine, or reddit – a book. Not on a Kindle or a phone – a paper book. Read five pages of literally anything, three times a day. If you’re an office worker and commuter, that could be on the train home and back, and at lunch time. It doesn’t matter what you read, but it helps once you get going to read progressively more complicated things. Do not, under any circumstances, pick up your phone.
Reading takes concentration, so it builds your ability to concentrate. Unless you’re reading a book of poetry, it’s probably going to be a deep exploration of a very small number of topics, and while reading you’re required to focus on those topics, and not to distract yourself with every easy, interesting idea that flutters past your nose. You’re staring down the barrel of a thousand problems every day. You cannot solve or understand one problem you can’t concentrate on, let alone a thousand. So you need to spend some part of your time concentrating on individual, complex concepts for extended periods. That’s what reading books is.
If you need further persuasion that this is worthwhile, the good news is the epidemic of shallowness presents personal opportunities. Depth and focus are rare and selling at a premium, and anyone who can display them is at a competitive advantage. This is especially true politically because such a person is more likely to be able to mentally process and then address the problems they see. But it’s also true in a personal and professional sense.
In a personal growth sense, if nothing else we’re at a point where being a daily book reader (especially of complicated things) puts you in an elite intellectual category few inhabit.
The internet loves and thrives on shallowness. It rewards shallow behaviour while simultaneously destroying the capacity to be deep, to think deeply or sustain an interest in deep and complicated things. At the same time it places an unheard of array political, social and cultural problems in front of you and tacitly implies you get to work fixing all of them, which is not possible. That shallowness has therefore become a political problem. The only way we can function in that atmosphere is if we build the ability to focus on understand and address individual issues, to go deep on issues and get right to ocean floor. Right now we’re downing in an inch of digital water. Start turning those pages.
