It’s Rational And Humane To Lack Strong Political Beliefs

No one is actually as smart and informed as the median Twitter pundit claims to be

“Is it pointless to have beliefs?” asks the title of a post on the Blocked and Reported subreddit. I wouldn’t normally devote a newsletter to responding to a Reddit post, but man, did this one strike a chord in me:

Short background on me:

• used to be a super passionate and very tribal lefty (who held secret problematic beliefs about Gender)

• got canceled

• realized many of [the] things I believed to be Righteous and True were, at best, more complicated than originally depicted or, at worst, outright lies.

Now, after two-ish years getting most of my information from ~heterodox spaces~, I find I have a handful of things I still feel strongly about on a moral level — but I struggle to see the point in believing in basically anything else. I can’t imagine feeling energized about any cause, even though I used to get energized about pretty much EVERY cause. It just feels like, aside from a couple of pet issues where I feel confidently knowledgeable, everything is just too complex for me to come down on one side or the other.

I get that this is probably an overall more rational way of life, but it also feels a little. . . inhuman? I used to have an emotional response to news about injustice or oppression. Now it just feels like, eh, why bother? I’ll probably find out that that injustice wasn’t actually so unjust in a month or two anyway. Why get upset about that news item? The reporting might not even be accurate.

Can anyone else relate? Does this even make sense? Am I just dealing with normal, information oversaturation–induced depression? Would love to hear what y’all think.

I can’t speak to the question of whether OP is depressed, but a lot of this sounds like a very healthy, adaptive evolution of their online and media-consumption habits. Speaking anecdotally, based on my many — MANY — hours observing weirdos on Twitter (and being one), the people who have emotional responses to every new injustice, and who have strong opinions on everything, come across as profoundly unhealthy. They seem less like people than anthropomorphic bundles of frayed nerves.

I can really relate to the feeling that “everything is just too complex for me to come down on one side or the other.” I repeat the “it’s complicated” mantra so often on BARPod that it’s a bit of an in-joke. At one point we sold “Pervert For Nuance” t-shirts. 

There’s obviously a caricaturable version of this, in the mind-so-open-your-brain-falls-out sense: “Was slavery really evil? Let’s discuss.” But the frequency with which people invoke this trope to shut down reasonable debate — “Oh, so you’re saying we should debate everything? Even slavery? Even Hitler?” — far exceeds the frequency with which normal people engage in impassioned discussion about whether slavery is good. Most people, other than a loud and unbelievably unpleasant group of white supremacists overrepresented on Twitter, understand that slavery is bad. Accepting that the world is fiendishly complex, and that epistemic humility is warranted, is not a one-way ticket to a Klan rally.

The fact of the matter is that some individuals develop an addiction developing opinions about everything, and (relatedly) following the news closely, and that these are maladaptive habits. I’m talking at the level of averages. Some people can handle all this, just like some people can handle social media. But a lot of people can’t, and it’s a fundamentally unhealthy way to be alive, because if you’re actually having emotional reactions to every new bad thing that happens, how could that be healthy? 

How to live your life instead? It depends a lot on this sentence from the post: “I have a handful of things I still feel strongly about on a moral level — but I struggle to see the point in believing in basically anything else.”