Here's a fun but sympathetic comparison of undecided voters to the hassled, overscheduled, and under-rested college students who don't do the reading for freshman English.
https://slate.com/life/2024/10/undecided-voters-2024-election-trump-harris.html
The analogy makes me think about how the radical simplification of life that is Mustachianism could be the answer if enough people adopted it, and how the radical complication of life that is consumerism leaves us in a weakened state, unable to be informed enough to be confident in our opinions. That's my lens of course.
Unfortunately, the uninformed always seem to be the most confident in their opinions.
There's good reason for this.
Most things in the world are intensely complicated and nuanced. Not understanding the depth of complexity of an issue is what allows things to ostensibly "make sense."
The less one knows about a topic, the more obvious the topic seems because the underlying complexity is opaque. When things make sense, the solutions appear obvious and "logical."
I remember being much, much younger and thinking that an O&G supply chain setup in Canada was so stupid. It seemed so obvious that the reason for the bizarre supply chain was political, and the politicians definitely leaned into this easy to understand narrative.
It was only years later talking to O&G folks that I actually understood the complexities of the refinement process, pipelines, and why it wasn't as simple as seemed to me.
Virtually everything in this world has incredibly complicated, multi-layered reasons for being the way it is, and the ripple effects of change are actually incredibly difficult to predict.
But when you don't see those underlayers, everything makes so much more sense and solutions seem so much more obvious. Hence the arrogance that comes with ignorance.
It's very attractive to feel like you can see an obvious answer and the rest of the world is just too stupid and corrupt to see or accept it.
If you can see an obvious solution to a very important issue, what would you prefer? Feeling smart or assuming that you're just too ignorant to understand why it's not that simple??
The former is much more appealing.
The process of learning is an extremely humbling experience, it's just layer after layer of seeing how ignorant you used to be, and with a near infinite amount of nuance in this world, it also means slowly accepting that you will never have enough context to not be ignorant.
It's hard to accept ignorance, so it's hard to accept the reality that if something seems obvious to you, it probably means you're kind of dumb on that topic, not smarter than everyone else.
And we have political machines that know that, they can the flames of ignorant outrage framing the other side as the *reason* why obvious, common sense solutions aren't being pursued. Because again, that simple explanation makes a lot of sense on the surface.
This is why social issues get more political traction than economic issues because economic issues are actually REALLY complex and the policies that address them are nowhere near simple in terms of understanding their impacts. Social issues can be distilled down into simpler, more discretely actionable concepts.
When someone feels really confident that they know better, seeking out info to challenge themselves and complicate things is both laborious and uncomfortable, especially when there's always someone out there to provide them with a tidy narrative about how they are, in fact, right, and smarter than the other guys.
Who doesn't want to feel smart??
There's nothing like absorbing new information to make you feel stupid. Lol.
