Via Dean Esmay, I found Joe Gandelman's very important post on a very thorny subject: politics and emotion. MRI studies confirm that people who will not listen to reason may be slaves to their ventromedial prefrontal cortexes!

Apparently, information that relates to politics is not processed by political partisans the same way that normal people process information. Instead, there's something I see as a sort of animalistic threat response. Here's Joe Gandelman:

Many political partisans get so emotionally involved in issues that taking stands on issues becomes less a process of looking at information from a variety of sources and making decisions than of protecting and defending belief systems. A conflicting fact seemingly endangers a cherished belief system and therefore must be ignored, discredited or simply denied as fact.

The decline in the automatic acceptance of fact-based reporting and the rise of news consumers who now want to read news slanted in way that agrees with their preconceived views (on the right and left) is yet another sign that it's no longer a "given" that people harvest info, sift through and analyze what they have in front of them, and then decide. Rather, many people now seem to pick up factoids that fit into what they already believe, and ignore ones that conflict with what they already "know."

Instead of the highly-touted global community, in political terms modern-day America increasingly seems moving towards more of a tribal community. Or to a model where politics is like sports and political parties are considered like sports teams: you always defend YOUR team and demonize and dump on the other team (even if the other team does exactly what your team has done minutes before) — and keep focused only on the goal (your team winning).

What really bothers me is that if you aren't a partisan, you'll get more grief from partisans than you would if you were. Worse, you'll get it from both sides. So in light of the study that Joe Gandelman cites, I'm wondering whether political partisans (especially activists of the sort I've tried many times to analyze) might tend to see everyone as either a fellow partisan or an enemy. And, further, that activists might in fact be enraged by non-activists -- in many cases considering them a bigger threat than even the partisan activists from the other "side."

To put it in more primitive terms, it's as if you have to be a member of a tribe. And to put it in more animalistic terms, if you aren't in our tribe, we'll give you one last chance to join, and if you don't, why, you deserve to die! (It often seems to me that the political divisions in this country are making us more and more like Northern Ireland.)

In the 1960s, this was reduced to a convenient slogan:

"IF YOU'RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM."

I think that slogan typifies people who just plain flat-out refuse to listen to reason. Reasoning with people whose only political goal is to determine which "tribe" you belong to and then "debate" you accordingly is an utter waste of time. This can be hard on the emotions of the person trying to use reason.

Dean identifies this additional factor (something I'm inclined to call "reason fatigue"):

I'm personally sick of having to shoot down the same arguments over and over and over again.

That's because it doesn't matter how ridiculous or unreasonable an argument may be. Arguments never die, no matter how many times they may be shot down.

At the risk of sounding all mealy-mouthed and mushy, I have to confess that there's an eternal optimist trapped inside me who thinks that shooting down arguments is better than shooting down people. Or shooting down civilization.

(Not all activists would agree.)