Political Memes

Yah, I think we'll start making progress again in this country when we all realize that most people don't care about facts, they just want stories.

Donald Trump's power has nothing to do with anything other than his flagrant disregard for reality and his chronic disorder that makes him just launch into stories about anything and everything. And not just stories, they're always ridiculous stories like you would tell children. This works because most people are again, children who want stories.

While Trump and his ilk have woven these epic stories of good versus evil and how rotten the enemies are and how great the good guys are, the left and the dems have been trying to quadruple down on being "civil" and producing charts and graphs and data to back their arguments. I get it, I used to think reality mattered to other people, but now I get it, that for the vast majority of humans, nobody really thinks.

I don't mean that as an "I'm smarter than everyone" statement, but a discovery about a fundamental quality of the human experience, which is people only think they think. What actually goes on for all of us, all day long, is we feel a thing, experience a sensation or emotion, and our brain writes a story to explain it. You believe this story because you tend to never doubt what you come up with in your head, but your brain doesn't naturally default to facts and logic, just ways to connect feelings and experiences. This is intrinsic to how our minds work and it's what let us survive ice ages and predators and apocalypses of ancient times. But in a modern, complex world with language and politics and technology, it just makes us more confused and wrong, which is why people tend to cling to people who can successfully create a narrative that weaves everything together in some sensible way. Not actually sensible, it just has to "feel" right and the brain will accept it even if you don't agree with the person telling the story. This is why there are so many people and institutions that suddenly feel like they've turned "pro trump" it's because we're monkeys and we follow our leader, especially when they can make enough of us follow a storyline.