To Recognise Your Personal Political Foolishness, Look at Foreign Elections

By looking at others making our thinking mistakes, we can learn to recognise them.

Photo by the author

We all fall for the same traps in our thinking around politics, especially around election times when emotions run high. We’re blinkered to it, too, and don’t know we’re doing it. We watch the opposing side make arguments and can’t believe their stupidity and blindness, but think that we’ve got it all worked out.

But, and it pains me to say it but it’s true, we’re often as bad as the other side. The same psychological systems are at play. We’re all wired the same.

We can’t objectively recognise ourselves in the other side because we won’t let ourselves do that. Our identity is sometimes caught up in our political affiliation. Our emotions come out when politics gets heated, and dampens our ability to critically think.

A chance to see clearly

So how do we get around this, and take a look at ourselves without identities, sides or emotions coming in and skewing our thinking in a hundred different ways?

We can look in the mirror: the mirror of others behaving just like us, in foreign elections – which we don’t care about, and can see more…