Your healing can begin with Political Junkies Anonymous

By David McElroy · June 23, 2011

I’ve already done the hardest part. I’ve confessed that I was once a serious addict — a political junkie addicted to the highs of winning elections and helping my ideological bedfellows take over part of the world.

But as a recovering political prostitute, it’s time for me to try to help others make a break from their addictions, too. So I’m happy to announce the founding of Political Junkies Anonymous.

If you’re a political junkie, you already know it in your heart — and you know you need help. You’ve found yourself caring more about elections than real life. You’ve made the mistake of thinking that it really mattered whether your favorite candidate won. Worst of all, you’ve taken buffoons such as Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann seriously. Yes, my friends, you need help.

Here at Political Junkies Anonymous, you can meet with other political junkies who have come to understand that majoritarian political systems are just traps that let you compete with other groups to impose your will on everybody else. We can jointly admit that we love the drive for that power — and we can help each other as we seek to learn to leave other people alone to live their lives as they choose. The program has two levels — one for the casual abuser and another for the hardcore cases who’ve turned to political prostitution.

Like any good 12-step program, we have a system for you to work through. Take a look at our steps and see if you’re ready to admit you’re a junkie and begin breaking free:

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless to control our craving for electoral politics — that our lives had become unmanageable from political overload.

Step 2: We came to believe it was only through the power of individual choice that we could be restored to sanity rather than live with the insanity of majoritarian dictatorship.

Step 3: We made a decision to turn power over to individuals to allow them to make personal choices for their lives rather than trying to raise up rulers over them.

Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the harm that our previous political activities have had on others.

Step 5: We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our coercive political sins.

Step 6: We were entirely ready for God to remove the defects of character that made us believe we had any right to choose rulers over other people.

Step 7: We humbly asked God to remove the shortcomings and delusions that led to getting involved in politics and polluting our minds with garbage from pandering cable TV news shows.

Step 8: We made a list of all persons we could think of who had been harmed by the politicians we worked for and supported.

Step 9: We apologized to those who had been hurt by the politicians we worked for and supported, except in the cases of those who hadn’t yet figured out they were still being hurt by willingly following politics.

Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and we confessed to each other whenever we felt ourself start to desire power over others or desire to watch idiots argue on TV.

Step 11: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood God, praying only for better understanding of the morality of not forcing our will upon other people.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other political junkies and began trying to build a world where everyone could make choices for his or her own life.

If you’re ready to take your life back and quit trying to control other people, it’s time to join us. We can turn off cable news. We can quit working in campaigns. We can quit pretending that we’re doing good things when we send money to politicians. We can start building alternatives that don’t require us to tell other people how to run their lives.

Yes, it’s tough, but we can do it. Altogether now: Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

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There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

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