Serious People and Those Who Aren't

I’ve gone around in circles about this whole politics thing when it really does just boil down to something simple: are you a serious person or not? Serious people can tell the difference. Unserious people have no idea what’s going on, or at least they don’t care.

The TLDR of this post is just simply that you can safely ignore the opinions of unserious people. What else are you going to do? Argue with them? You know where this ends, and you have shit to do anyway.

Lots of people are very political these days, and maybe that’s been the norm for a while now, but the gap between what people say and what they actually do has become a chasm. People argue about politics like it’s existential, but they sure as hell don’t act like it. Maybe some do, but most Americans are passive observers of politics at absolute best. They don’t study the political machine they get so worked up about, and they certainly don’t try to participate in anything that asks them to do something even once a week. And on this, I do want to say I’m mostly pointing this at college-educated Americans who do have the leisure time to reason about politics. For those unaware, poverty isn’t generally a place where you can do that. Your thinking is dominated by which bills you’re gonna pay this month and how to keep your life from blowing up from a $200 emergency cost. These are not problems most college grads have (for now).

The problem isn’t about whether or not we should be political. We should. The problem is that unserious discourse has become the primary way people interact with politics, and it crowds out conversations over things that actually matter. In the place of useful discussion, we instead get agency-draining abstractions, moral panics, and literal celebrity discourse. We’re too eager to blame abstract systems for our behavior. There are lots of bad incentives, undoubtedly. But if you have the mental bandwidth to get worked up about politics, you also have the mental bandwidth to actually do something about it. We can quickly become derailed the moment we think something is a more pervasive problem than it actually is: are bathrooms signs something important to get worked up over? And why do we care about Kanye’s political takes? Is there anything about that guy that suggests his political takes might be good? Are you surprised?

There’s serious stuff happening in the American political sphere as of writing. And sometimes the discourse centers around it. For a week. This war on Iran is some serious shit! But it’s eventually going to become noise in the news cycle, the way the War in Afghanistan did. I will make the bold assertion that things like literal war probably require more than a week of deliberation over something other than short form content. My other assertion is that probably not every single topic needs to be as morally charged. It’s genuinely insane how angry people get over celebrity political opinions. The court jesters have always had opinions, you’re just being exposed to them now. Yes, they’re bad. Why would they be anything else?

If you’re regularly worked up about politics but are unwilling to throw your hat in the ring, you’re being completely unserious. Yes, the work is humbling, but you’ll leave with a much better idea of how it all works and the sheer amount of effort it takes to get anything done.

Serious people pay for knowledge with skin in the game. Knowledge through any other means is illusory. So go do the thing, or don’t.