Trading personality for politics: What do we stand to lose?

Memes. Mortifying merch. Malignant monopolies on policy and ideology. These are some of the most salient features of modern political discourse. Over the last decade, we have witnessed an equally fascinating and worrying shift in how people like you and me approach politics, and how much of our beliefs we allow to spill over into our daily lives. At the intersection of technology, politics, human psychology, and culture lay the conditions for a perfect storm — one that has enabled this grotesqueness.

Politics is the new personality.

Gone are the days of civilized, constructive conversations between ideological opponents. A rational argument against one’s beliefs is no longer a good-faith discussion on evolving governance toward social progress but an attack on one’s right to exist.

Gone are the days of rich, multidimensional characters honed by education and experience. Today, we are left with exaggerated caricatures, hollow shells of what used to be real humans with complex thoughts, emotions, and motivations.

Gone are the days of the mythical common ground, on which we stood in recognition of each other’s humanity, collectively adjudicating what mattered to us universally. Instead, we have a zero-sum live-action role play that we stay in character for, 24 hours of the day.

Gone are the days of awareness beyond surface-level sensemaking, of curiosity for why things are the way they are. The inquisitiveness in our nature is now stifled by mindless propaganda that discourages asking questions — the right ones, anyway.

Gone are the days, indeed, of natural reality as the ultimate representation of the truth. Is it or isn’t it? We have diverged so far from each other that alternate mental realities, propped up by competing narratives and fueled by diametrically opposed ideologies, have replaced our traditional, more grounded way of understanding life.

In this new ecosystem, characterized by nothing short of mass hysteria on both sides of the aisle — though perhaps one more than the other — we are swimming in vast oceans of information with no reliable way to discern the truth, let alone make sense of it all. Our goalposts for what qualifies as believable have been moved as a result. Why settle for the factual when we have access to the fantastical? What good is a common-sense explanation in light of a conspiratorial narrative?

The biggest casualty in this fractured understanding of reality is our halted transformation into mutually beneficial collectivism. If we can’t agree on what’s real, how can we possibly make that happen? The result has been a clearly demonstrable regression to modern tribalism, where we eschew altruistic, communitarian goals geared toward larger social units for immediate survival focused on preserving the individual — despite the promise of collective prosperity. It’s like we’ve devolved into 21st-century cavemen, our new tools for prolonged existence being iPhones and Twitter/X accounts.

This new world has many wearing their political hearts on their sleeves and steering every conversation possible into one of philosophy. Blue and red mean infinitely more than just traits of physics and physicality. They represent deep-seated values that color our perception of the world. Which way we lean controls the relationships we form — and with whom — as though we were back in whatever century it was when information was scarce and we spoke no common tongue. We perceive those who oppose us as faceless existential enemies, not real people motivated by priorities different from ours, but which are nonetheless still in search and service of a full life.

In the chapters ahead, we’ll delve into the realm of post-2016 public discourse, investigating outrageous claims, the real-world events that give rise to them, and the political agents who straddle both for personal gain. We’ll explore information overload in the face of declining information literacy and examine dwindling critical thinking amid rising human intelligence on a global scale.

As we evaluate the issues that underpin this troubling phenomenon, let’s agree to keep one overarching question in mind:

Why have we nothing better to make of ourselves than politics?

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