A little full disclosure…….when I was at university I took many philosophy courses and by grad school I was intrigued with political philosophy…….I wanted to find answers to the really big questions of life and thought that philosophy would help in that search……

To me politics, in the beginning of my quest, was to help me in my search for the right balance to turn this country that I felt it could become…but year after year things have gotten worse………No longer does politics help in answering questions….all it accomplishes is creating more questions without useable answers……

When I began this post I was trying to work out the best way to present it….and then I saw this bit of info that will help…….

Politicians devote a lot of energy to what Ezra Klein calls the “More Information Hypothesis,” the theory that voters would agree with them if they understood the issues better. But a 2013 study suggests that’s not true, Klein points out at his launched-last-night site Vox. Researchers first polled the participants on their political ideologies and tested their math skills using a word problem about skin cream. Then they gave them some more word problems, about gun control and climate change. The result: Respondents were drastically more likely to arrive at the right answer if they agreed with it politically, and vice versa—and being better at math actually exacerbated their likelihood of getting it right or wrong depending on their political sensibilities.

The authors theorize that “humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth,” like “ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe,” Klein explains. If Sean Hannity changed his mind about climate change tomorrow, it would have profound personal costs. “He would lose friendships, viewers, and money. He could ultimately lose his job.” He’s incentivized to use his intellect to reinforce the ideology he socially identifies with—and to a lesser extent, that’s true of almost everyone. Washington has made this easy; our two parties (or “tribes,” per Klein) have developed “their own machines for generating evidence and their own enforcers of orthodoxy. It’s a perfect storm for making smart people very stupid.” Click for Klein’s full column.

We put ourselves in political camps……we do not know what a conservative is or for that matter what a liberal….what we have is what the media and select special interests that form our opinions for us…….it is as if we do not really want to have to think about solutions to our problems…..we had rather to point fingers and accuse each other of dogmatic ideals…….

NO politician can stay on topic beyond a 30 second ad…….henceforth there will NEVER be any useable answers to our mounting problems…….ergo…politics, in the classical sense, is dead!