How politics distorts reality

A central California Moderates (CM) theme is that political and religious ideology distorts the believer's perceptions of reality and, in politics, that leads to ineffective and inefficient politics and policies. Variations of that have been articulated by people like George Lakoff, someone that CM has been aware of for several years. CM opinion on this point isn't new or unique.

Lakoff lecture on moral politics (2008)

Through a post at the Rise of the Center politics site, CM has recently become aware of another analyst who argues essentially the same thing. Social scientist Johnathan Haidt has argued that American politics has become polarized. He also argues that political and religious ideology associated with that polarization tends to blind ideologues on both the left and the right.

In a February 2010 interview with Bill Moyers, Haidt argues that the polarized politics colors our perceptions of reality and, for many republicans, makes compromise literally impossible because that amounts to a capitulation to evil. Through the lens of polarized American politics, differences of opinion amounts to a battle of good vs. evil, not a competition of reasonable ideas. Each side believes they are good and the opposition is literally evil (or maybe severely self-deluded at the least).

Haidt's interview with Moyers

For example, at 23:43 through 24:40 of the interview, Haidt points out a political situation, the 9/11 attacks, where most republicans cannot fully see reality for what it is because reality undermines one of their key ideological reference points for understanding and thus seeing the world and politics. Distortion of reality by ideology is a key point CM has been making over and over and over. The problem of course is that ideologues reject this kind of thinking and logic. They have to reject that thinking because anything less capitulates to evil.

How does one get past the mental impasse? Unfortunately, CM has no answer.