Why Political People Tend to be Intensely Unpleasant
Here's one reason. The other reasons are Legion.
Imagine a mechanic working on a car that admitted of no mistakes. You put transmission fluid in the oil pan? The car runs fine. Remove the ground wire? Your dashboard doesn't light up like Mel Gibson's X account after a night of drunken Tweeting. Remove the tires? The car rolls like Hitler's tanks bypassing the Maginot Line.
It'd be great. You might get Kenickie's souped-up rod in Grease. You might be stuck with your same sh***y Plymouth. No matter. You had fun and nothing got hurt.
It'd be a day in Disney World for the left hemisphere. It'd get to roam in areas of comfort like problem solving and applied physics with no risk.
Success fuels the LH; setbacks hobble it. That car gives the opportunity of the former with none of the latter.
Nassim Taleb: No Skin in the Game = Blow-Up Risks
For the political class–and let's be honest, I'm talking mostly but not exclusively about folks on the left side of the political spectrum--legislation and decrees are their way of working on that imaginary car that admits of no mistakes. It's all fiddling and manipulation with no consequences, much less unintended consequences, fat tails, and invisible costs that pile up like forest duff.
The Covid Era was like a powerful blue light cast on the inside of Will Ferrell's Prius after Dirty Mike and the Boys' soup kitchen. Anyone with a shred of mitochondria said "ew" when looking at what activist politicians were willing to do to our freedom shack: lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates . . . you know the devil's litany. If they could've locked us in fleets of soup-kitchened Priuses, they would have.
And they were as smug about it as Dirty Mike writing the thank you note. They were, after all, doing what their idols--experts, "science," safety above all else, belief in government, disbelief in unintended consequences--told them to do.
The left hemispheric cherishes abstractions like a Viagra addict cherishes a harem.
It's the moral justification that's the real problem here. Moral justifications derive from abstract notions of good and bad, and just as the French Revolution activists yielded the abstract notions of Liberty, Equality, and Liberty to conclude they were morally justified to use the newfangled guillotine on about 15,000 folks--reprobates, every one of them, of course, even the hundreds of canonized and blesseds–who were interfering with their application, today's politicians wield their abstractions.
A fevered left hemisphere creates super-charged abstractions faster than Chinese kids make gift shop souvenirs. Scarce is a left-hemispheric notion that doesn't get relegated to something emanating from hell or elevated to something along the lines of a pagan god. The left hemisphere then uses these good and evil pantheons to work on the sedan of society.
We properly rage at the Wall Street crooks who gamble trillions of dollars with no downside: if they win, they win big; if they lose, they get bailed out. It's awful.
But all left-hemispherics implicitly adopt the same mindset when they push their abstractions and narratives on everyone else. If it f***s things up? Oh well. The direct effects on the politician are pretty minimal and, damn, it was fun and satisfying to implement all that shit.
The left-hemispheric is a busy body.
A real dick. Almost all of us incline to dickdom to varying degrees. Our need to navigate the exigencies of daily life requires us to hand the zipper of control over to the left hemisphere repeatedly. There's a constant pull to whip out all those characteristics the left hemisphere nourishes: opinions, control, assertion, power, competition, efficiency.
Most of us have the decency not to push such things on others.
Not the raging left-hemispheric. He can't keep to himself because the narratives he's put together from his abstractions make him feel like everything's his business. If a harridan barked at you on a Boston street corner in 2021 for not wearing a mask, you know what I'm talking about. (Perhaps the only time one of my verbal exchanges elicited a gasp from my wife, but I explained it to her: "I'm sorry, sweetheart, but sometimes 'f*** off' is the only response.")
To the left hemispheric with a few abstractions tucked under its arm like a lawyer hauling trial briefs into the courtroom, everything is his business.
These are the jackasses who ejaculate, "If one kid in this world goes to bed without dinner tonight, that's my business!"
I give them the same advice I gave that harridan in Boston.