I’d like to help change the world, but politics is no longer my hobby

By David McElroy · January 14, 2014

Why do people get involved in political campaigns and movements? Some do it because they’re trying to change things, either nationally or as it relates to some local issue they care about, but the biggest percentage of them are simply political junkies.

When I look back at the people I dealt with while I worked in politics for two decades, it’s really obvious that most of them were in politics for one simple reason. They loved the game. They might have paid lip service to the idea of making the world a better place — they might have even believed it — and they were definitely ideologues to one degree or another. But most were simply addicted to the thrill of being around the intrigue of the struggle for political power.

Most of us grew up being taught that “good citizens” are informed about news and involved with politics. If you’re one of those who’s attracted to power and is thrilled to be near those who have it, there’s no better excuse to indulge yourself. You’re just being a good citizen. You deserve a pat on the back as you name-drop about the people you’ve met. But it’s a game. It’s about the chase for power and ego gratification. You either become a political professional and get paid for or else it becomes a hobby for you.

Since I write and talk about political ideas, it confuses many people that I no longer care about politics. Many of those who generally agree with me about the sort of future I would like to see are confused that I don’t promote political advocacy and that I actively discourage people from participating.

Let me try one more time to explain why politics is no longer my hobby.

My reasons fall into two categories. First, I don’t believe in the possibility of making meaningful changes through the political process and I don’t believe in the morality of the system anyway. Second, I have better and more productive things to do with my time.

When I started working in politics, I told myself that I was doing it because I could make a difference. When I look back, I see absolutely nothing I did in 20 years that mattered. I did work for candidates running for offices ranging from city councils to governors. I helped make some politicians and their supporters happy, but I don’t see that anything I did made the slightest difference in reducing the power or size of government. Absolutely nothing.

I’ve discussed many times why I lost faith in the political process and how I slowly came to the conclusion that the entire idea of majoritarian rule was immoral. I didn’t want to conclude that, but I couldn’t come up with any moral justification for any random majority to have the power to give orders to everybody through their chosen candidates. (This interview with Ben Stone for the Bad Quaker podcast about a year ago covers some of my transition in that regard.)

If I don’t believe in the system and I don’t believe it’s actually possible to change anything politically, there’s no reason to be involved unless I’m being paid or I’m just a political junkie. I reached the point that I couldn’t ethically continue to do what I was doing, so I couldn’t keep doing it for money. And even though I had been following politics avidly since I was a small child who was too young to understand the ideological arguments, I was coming to realize that my time was better spent on my own future rather than playing the political game.

As I’ve said here repeatedly, I expect economic and social collapse at some point, whether that’s in two years or 50 years. The interesting questions to me revolve around what’s going to come next and how individuals can position themselves to take care of their families in that chaotic future. I don’t care who’s elected president in 2016 — or who’s elected to any other office — because I don’t think it makes any difference and because I think focusing on those trivial things distracts me from what’s important.

I had to come to these conclusions on my own. I read and heard other people who had concluded the same things years ago, but I stuck with politics until I was convinced for myself that it was a dead end and a waste of time. For that reason, I’m not upset with those who haven’t reached my conclusions yet. If you’re on a path that leads you to believe in individual liberty and reject the “social contract” that says others own you, I think where I am is the inevitable conclusion of that path. You might or might not ever agree with me on that, though

I don’t like to use labels to define what I believe, because they all come with baggage. Voluntaryist? Anarcho-capitalist? Libertarian? All have their strengths and weaknesses, I suppose. But the bottom line is that I feel so completely outside of the existing system that I don’t feel the need to define myself in relation to the “establishment.” I don’t see myself as rebelling against anything. I simply see myself as someone who’s looking realistically at the future and thinking about what to do in terms of that world — one in which today’s political system and labels are irrelevant.

Most of my friends are still heavily invested in the political system, for one reason or another. Among them are conservatives, progressives, libertarians, anarchists and socialists. Every one of you who claims one of those labels and chooses to be part of the system does so for his own reasons.

I have remarkably little interest in convincing you that I’m right. I have even less interest in arguing with you if you believe I’m wrong. I’m only interested in meeting like-minded people and sharing ideas about what we might do to get ready for a post-statist future. I have a lot of work I need to do in order to get ready. I don’t have time for many of the distractions that have wasted my time in the past. Politics is one of those useless distractions.

For those people who are still invested in the system, there are different motivations. For some, it’s a deep belief that they can change the system, despite all evidence to the contrary. For others, it’s simple inertia, because it’s always been “the right thing” to be politically involved. And for still others, politics is a hobby, because it’s fun and exciting.

I’ve been through all of those stages, but that’s not where I am today. I’m focusing on making money and building a future for myself — and my future family, for which it matters even more — taking into account the coming collapse as much as I can. Those are my urgent concerns. Partisan politics is an already distant thing that becomes more distant every day.

I encourage people to drop out of the system, but everyone has to do what seems right to him or her. For me, though, politics isn’t a hobby anymore. My life is much better as a result.

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Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

Few things threaten the future of the human race as much as the decline of the widespread ability to read words and evaluate them rationally. This has become a culture dominated by images and emotions, which scares me because our freedom and our wealth were built on ideas and rational thinking. Not so long ago, it was considered vital for every person to be able to read coherent arguments and respond to them with intelligence and reason. Today, emotions trump reason and images trump words. When Neil Postman published “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985, he made the argument that the age of television was slowly destroying Americans’ ability to reason. Postman is long dead, but it turns out that he and other academics such as Marshall McLuhan saw where things were going far before words started falling out of favor. I beg you to read Postman’s short and clear book, but if you won’t invest that much time, at least consider this article about news today. In “Could I have some news with my emotions, please?” a former NBC News executive bemoans the sad state of “emotion over information” in television news. I believe “television news” is an oxymoron, but I’ll leave that for another time.

UPDATE: For about 18 hours, I thought I had made a serious mistake at work last month that had sent a couple thousand dollars to the wrong party. When a problem was discovered last night, the data available to us in our accounting system made it seem certain that I had made that error. I felt sick. I was humiliated. Even though I’ve handled hundreds of real estate transactions for my company — millions of dollars — without ever making an error, I felt shame that I had made this one mistake. But it turns out that an anomaly in our accounting software was hiding the truth. Once I got to the office Thursday and reviewed the paperwork from the transaction, I discovered that I had done everything correctly. It’s great that I didn’t make the mistake, but it would be even better if I could learn not to have such horrible physical reactions of shame and fear just because someone else believes I’ve made an error. The fear of being flawed is very powerful for me. Old programming from childhood is hard to change.

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