What should I do when I am shocked by politics?

Embrace what increases political comprehension and reject what doesn’t. (3 minutes read, or skip to the list of resources)

It is easy to feel stressed and maybe even overwhelmed by politics. When we do, our stress is all about how shocking we find the behavior of our political adversaries. It leads to feelings of indignation, disbelief, grief, resentment, etc. And it is difficult to decide what to do with those feelings or how to respond to a given situation. At bottom, the question we are wrestling with is this: what should we make of the shocking thoughts, words, and deeds of our political adversaries? What should we think of this situation and what should we do about it? Today, what I would like to offer you is a way to recognize the difference between answers that help and answers that don’t.

The right answers to these questions allow you to see that “those who come to hold bad beliefs” (and therefore engage in bad behavior) “do so for roughly the same sorts of reasons as those who come to hold good beliefs. It isn’t because they’re irrational and we’re not.”¹. These answers increase political clarity; they have the potential of both decreasing our political stress and of allowing the remaining irreducible stress to be channeled into effective political action. Whereas, on the contrary, the wrong answers make you believe that there is something fundamentally different about the way political adversaries choose their behavior or acquire their beliefs. Those answers lead to political cluelessness, ineffectiveness, as well as to misery and misanthropy.

So to the question “what should I make of the shocking behavior of my political adversaries?”, the answer is: I should interpret their behavior in such a way that increases political comprehension. This means that I should come to understand their reasons for acting this way, and to see these reasons as analogous to the ones that dictate my own behavior. Not only do we tend to be bad at doing that, but we also tend to gravitate towards answers to political stress that explicitly tell us that we should be doing the opposite! Some of those views state that understanding the offender’s reasons would mean agreeing with them or forgiving them. That it would mean giving up on our own moral standards and political convictions. That isn’t true, though this concern can initiate an interesting and productive discussion about exactly what kind of “understanding” is necessary in the context of political comprehension. Other views state that to understand the behavior of political adversaries is to understand its causes, in a way that necessarily breaks the analogy between what motivates them and what motivates you. For example, a view might describe “critical thinking” as what your adversaries lacked, hence why they behaved that way, whereas the same “critical thinking” is taken to be what you are proving that you have when you perform this analysis. In those conditions, there can be no analogy between their reasons and yours, because only your reasons are proper reasons, and not just causes. This too should be rejected as lacking political comprehension.

Here is the situation we are facing: the experience of being shocked by political adversaries is so bewildering that we intensely crave answers, ways to understand what is going on and to make things right. Because of this, it is very easy to fall for the answers that do not help, and in fact make things worse. Over time, you can learn to spot the wrong answers and why they are both tempting & wrong. While perhaps counter-intuitive at first, the right answers can become more and more intuitive with study and practice. I make it my mission to share with you all the resources that I have found to help, through a series of articles. Therefore, the present post will be updated regularly to point to them. You will find the list of resources below (short at first, and then updated over time). In those resources, you will find the arguments that back the change of attitude I am advocating for, and I hope it will help you the same as it helped me.

Resources:

- "Is my political opponent irrational? No, they’re not." In this blog post, I explain, in an accessible manner, why treating people you disagree with as irrational is based on a fundamental mistake. I suggest you do not sleep on this one, even if you think you do not commit this mistake because you don't exactly use the word "irrational". You might be surprised how pervasive and wrong political psychologism is once you learn to recognize it precisely. Click here to read the blog post. In some way, this post is my "public philosophy" version of an academic article by Jeffrey Friedman, which is really worth a read: “Is political irrationality a myth?” (in The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology). Spoiler alert: it is!

- The Trustful Approach: it is a mindfulness-based philosophical exercise that I have developed in order to deal with political shocks. It teaches you to be more confident about your political convictions and to refrain from misunderstanding the words of your adversaries through insecure and incredulous interpretations. It requires no perspective-taking or empathy, and it is deliberately agnostic as to the usefulness of anger. It focuses more on feelings of strangeness, disbelief and horror. It is good to avoid toxic political polarization and to avoid activism burnout. Click here to read: The Trustful Approach: An Introduction

- Bad Beliefs by Neil Levy. I would normally link to an article where I explain a philosophical idea, and not just to an entire book you can read. However this book is available for free, in open access, and so I thought I would share it. This brilliant book shows how bad political beliefs are not the product of a deficit of rationality on the part of our political opponents, but the product of rational processes. Click here to read the book.

- [More resources to come!]

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1Levy, Neil (2021). Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People. Oxford University Press. ; Preface: Rational Social Animals Go Wild xiii --- Note that when Neil Levy talks of “bad beliefs”, he uses it as a technical term which is not synonymous with “wrong beliefs”. He uses it to designate beliefs that go against expert consensus even though this expert consensus is readily accessible. But allow me to re-purpose that quote a little bit out of context given that it broadly points in the direction of the same puzzles we are worried about.