Some Political Lessons

By Leo Gura - November 13, 2024

Here are a few lessons you should be learning from our present political situation.

1) Voters are fundamentally ignorant.

No accurate theory of politics is possible without grasping just now ignorant the typical voter is. Neither mainstream media nor anti-mainstream media is honest about this. They both want to pretend like voters are intelligent and vote based on legitimate grievances, sound logic, and coherent ideology. This is absolutely false. Voters are not just ignorant, they are profoundly, shockingly, brazenly ignorant. It’s hard to even comprehend such degrees of ignorance. They are misinformed, self-deceived, incoherent, illogical. Voters have almost no grasp of the mechanisms nor principles of governance. They do not have any kind of logical understanding of governance, nor do they care. They are deeply misinformed on most issues. They have no valid causal reasoning. They react to events like animals, based on narrow, petty, selfish concerns, and mostly vibes, personality, and group-think. They operate under madness of crowds. They are ideologically incoherent. They vote based on reptilian brain stimulation. They are easily fooled into nationalism, patriotism, identity, and religious identity. They have zero understanding of the root problems and solutions to governance. They have no understanding of what corruption is and how it works. They are deeply uneducated and under-informed about all political and historical events. They are historically and geographically illiterate. They do not care about nor have the capacity for abstract political reasoning or principles. Voters shift from one election cycle to the next because their views are not grounded in any well-thought-out abstract principles. They are just reacting as part of a herd, buying into whatever others around them are buying into. They are highly susceptible to charismatic personalities of social media influencers and do not think original thoughts for themselves.

Never, ever, buy the idea that voters are smart and hold some genuine understanding of politics or governance. Such understanding is precious and must be earned through steep mental and emotional effort. It is not automatic.

Neither mainstream nor alternative media can tell you this truth because they cannot afford to upset and alienate their cherished audiences. In case you haven’t noticed, most alternative, anti-mainstream channels are audience-captured — which means that if they stop pandering to their audience’s alternative views, their audience will turn on them. The truth is that non-mainstream audiences are just as ignorant, self-deceived, and corrupt as mainstream ones. Often more so. But you cannot tell them this because their whole reason for tuning in is the fantasy that their alternative view is truth. Alternative-as-truth is one of the biggest self-deceptions in vogue today. Most of these so-called alternative pundits are full of shit and they are misleading you into a collective delusion. So watch out!

2) Voters are highly susceptible to demagoguery.

By and large voters believe what they want to hear. Politicians can easily prey on them just by telling them what they want to hear by reinforcing their fantasies and delusions. There exists this narrative that voters are down-to-earth people who are sick of lying dishonest politicians and just want to be told the straight truth. What a load of pandering shit! Voters have almost no capacity for hearing or handling truth. Voters have almost no capacity for hearing real solutions to complex problems of governance. Voters mostly treat politics as sport, identity, and entertainment. Voters do not care about real complex solutions, they want their beliefs, biases, identity, and sense of self reinforced. What voters really mean when they say “the truth” is the fantasies which they believe are true and desperately need validation. Fundamentally, voters are immature children. But you cannot tell them this, because if you do they will react like immature children.

Nobody who voted for Trump cares about truth. Anyone saying otherwise is utterly deluded. This much is clear.

3) Voters do not vote based on policy.

This is perhaps the biggest political myth and illusion of all. Whenever voters say they care about policy, what they are really doing is rationalizing much more basic, animalistic, vibes and personality -based preferences. First the voters FEEL who they like, who aligns with their level of development, THEN they come up with stories about which policies they really care about. Any discussion of politics based purely on policy — which assumes that voters are logical, coherent, principled, well-informed, well-though-out people — is wrong. Such analysis fundamentally misunderstands ego psychology. I’m sure voters tell themselves they vote based on policy, but they are unaware of what truly motivates their voting decisions, because that requires a level of psychological self-awareness that few humans have.

Never, ever, buy the idea that voters care about issues such as corruption. This is pure nonsense. Voters may speak as though they care about corruption, but this is merely a backwards rationalization for their unconscious reptilian impulses, a fantasy they invent to explain what is really a vibes-based choice. Voters cannot care about corruption because 1) they are too ignorant to understand what corruption is and their role in it, and 2) they are not prepared to make the necessary personal and collective sacrifices to truly address it. To them corruption just means stuff they are annoyed by.

Nobody who voted for Trump cares about corruption. Anyone saying otherwise is utterly deluded. This much is clear. If you think you voted for Trump because you care about reducing corruption, you ARE the corruption. That you don’t understand this IS the corruption. If you cannot clearly see the staggering corruption of Trump and everyone in his orbit, you are the problem. Corruption does not mean what you think it means. Corruption is all of your egoic and ideological biases. Your anti-mainstream ideology — that is corruption. How you earn food for your children — that is corruption. How you get your sex — that is corruption. Your religion — that is corruption. Your tribe, your friends, your family — that is corruption. The corporation you work for — that is corruption. That business you operate — that is corruption. Your stock market investments and profits — that is corruption. The taxes you avoid paying — that is corruption. When you text while driving — that is corruption. How you see the world — that is corruption.

Your very soul is corrupt. The average human is corrupt to the level of soul. Your bones are corrupt with the toxins from the food you eat and the air your breathe. Your mind is corrupt with the human excrement you feed it every day from social media.

3) Voters are always less developed and more conservative than they seem.

Being conservative is the default human condition. Why? Because liberal and conservative are not symmetrical options. Being liberal has many prerequisites. Liberalism is a higher stage of mental and spiritual development. It took mankind thousands of years of evolution just to have today’s run-of-the-mill mainstream CNN liberalism, never mind radical progressive leftism. To be conservative requires no education, no development, no effort, no morality, no consciousness. Don’t get me wrong, that does not mean that all conservatives are uneducated, have no development, or make no effort. That’s not what I said. But if you take a human being who is not educated, not developed in any way, they will be conservative. Why is this? Because they will just act out unconscious survival instincts, like an animal. And our unconscious instincts are base and gross: racism, sexism, corruption, greed, selfishness, violence, hatred, fear, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, tribalism, religious fanaticism, dogma, ideology, extreme conformity, group-think, fascism, authoritarianism, theft, bribery, genocide, nepotism — all of this is the status quo. All of this is the default condition without intense education, cultivation, training, discipline, maturity, wisdom, and development. Falling into base instincts is easier than not. Domination, exploitation, and abuse of others comes more easily than treating them with compassion and respect. Theft comes more easily than hard work. Fear and hatred comes more easily than principled moral courage. Dogma comes more easily than original contemplation. Corruption and lying comes more easily than integrity and truth. Self-deception, fantasy, and illusion comes more easily than understanding. Closedmindedness comes more easily than openmindedness. Caring about yourself comes more easily than caring about others or the planet at large. Thinking within your culture comes more easily than thinking beyond it. So of course most human beings lean conservative, simply because they would need decades of personal development work to transcend that — serious work, difficult work, which no one wants to do or even knows is possible.

4) Influencers, pundits, leaders, business-people, celebrities, and intellectuals are less developed than they seem.

The intelligence, wisdom, maturity, and cognitive development level of public figures and talking heads is quite low. Do not mistake success, popularity, speaking ability, or charisma with development. These are mostly unrelated things. Often inversely related. The more popular, successful, and charismatic someone is, the less likely they are to have a deep understanding of serious issues. Be ware of all public intellectuals posturing as experts and authorities. These people are not doing serious development nor can they lead you to serious development nor understanding of serious matters. Their work should mostly be regarded as entertainment. They are using you to make a career as an expert for themselves. Their expertise is an illusion, a collective fantasy in which they and others participate without self-awareness. I refer to people like Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, or Bret Weinstein. Such people are unwitting charlatans and they will mislead you politically — all done with the best of intentions. But they cannot help themselves.

5) Alternative media is more corrupt and misguided than mainstream media.

The problems and corruptions of mainstream media are well understood. But the delusions and corruptions of alternative media are not. The fundamental error here is to think that corruption is so easy that all one needs to do to avoid it is to switch to an alternative, non-mainstream information source. This is absolutely wrong. Alternative information sources tend to be even more biased and corrupt than mainstream ones because their views go through no vetting process. The anti-mainstream is just as self-serving, self-deceived, ignorant, and under-developed as the mainstream. Why? Because the root cause of corruption is lack of development, education, and consciousness. And alternative media figures are no more developed than mainstream ones. Often less so. Alternative media loves to rant against corruption, but has no comprehension of the real source of corruption, which is the human mind. In this way alternative media is more deceptive, nefarious, and harmful than mainstream media. With alternative media people are completely deceived into thinking that they have found some truer, better way of understanding the world, when of course they have not. In practice, when average people turn away from the mainstream, thinking they found some better view of the world, that view is delusional, toxic, and even worse than the mainstream view. Why is this? For the same reason that Newton’s and Einstein’s theories, while incomplete, are still better than anything some crackpot amateur will cook up in his basement. Because developing a higher quality view of the world than the mainstream, well-tested one is very, very challenging. It requires serious philosophical inquiry and a keen attention to epistemic matters and self-deception, which no popular movement can sustain. Be ware of any popular movement that claims to have the truth or a better view of the world. Usually it is an illusion.

If you voted for Trump thinking he is a better alternative to mainstream liberalism, you are deeply deceived. Trump simply represents the most corrupt form of neoliberalism. Trump is peak neoliberalism + peak corruption. Which is why most of the neoliberal CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are eager to support and do business with Trump. Like recognizes like. It’s neoliberalism all around. If you don’t understand this, it’s because you are politically ignorant and you have been fooled by all the anti-mainstream online sources you consume. Trump is not going to solve a single fundamental problem of neoliberalism, because he is peak neoliberalism with some fascist flavors. Trump is neoliberalism on steroids + malignant grandiose narcissism. To understand this you would need to read some political science books and some psychology books. The Trump voter doesn’t even understand what neoliberalism, fascism, or narcissism are. Nor do they care to. They are not just ignorant, they are proud of their ignorance.

6) The anti-mainstream left are useful idiots for fascism.

Woke anti-war leftists and progressives who constantly whine about how centrist liberals are, in practice, just end up being useful idiots for fascists and conservatives. Such people love to whine about Gaza, genocide, war, empire, socialism, trans-rights or whatever, but in the end their ideas never win, they just mobilize right-wing passions on the one hand and demoralize and sour people to liberalism and center-left moderates on the other hand. This directly leads to fascists like Trump winning, which then makes all those important issues even worse. Such anti-mainstream leftists have good intentions but they are so politically naive they end up regressing society. They don’t have enough self-awareness nor pragmatism to understand that their ideas are far too radical to be sustainable, and in the meantime they cause tangible and powerful backlash and division. I’m referring here to people like Krystal Ball, who detests Biden so much that she influenced millions of her viewers to basically elect Trump. This is what Lenin called a useful idiot, but for the right. All the left-wing RFK Jr supporters just became useful idiots for the right, and they are a major reason why Trump won. Even Chris Hedges, who I respect, ended up being a useful idiot for the right in this election. A divided left means victory for fascism. That’s real politics.

Such leftists will make all sorts of excuses and rationalizations about the evils of centrism, but in the end this is what happened. It’s just too ugly for them to admit to themselves. Gaza will now be completely destroyed thanks to their naive moralizing. You traded Biden for Trump — one of the dumbest political things you could do. My advice to you leftists is to be mindful of how your ideals work against you. It’s a very counter-intuitive trap you fall into. Politics requires better calculation than that. Hating the center more than you hate the right is not wise if you are a real progressive.

Here’s what these progressives do not understand: the country is not failing to go progressive due to centrists. It is failing to go progressive because very few humans are developed enough to sustain a progressive majority. There is no progressive majority, that’s just your echo-chamber. So don’t be mad at the center. The center cannot magically make tens of millions of people progressive. If you are progressive, recognize that you are a very lucky elite human being. Don’t squander it by helping elect fascists and regressive right-wingers. As a progressive you need to understand that as an elite you will not get your way. Your way is too advanced for the vast majority of humans who operate on much simpler terms. You might care about genocide — the average human does not. This is reality.

7) Democracy only works when the majority is well-educated.

Education is not a luxury, it is the linchpin to everything. You cannot be developed without decades of serious education. Our political situation is bad because most people are not only very under-educated as teens and adults, their situation is made doubly worse when combined with the mis-education of anti-mainstream media. Just imagine that typical C-student from high-school who slacked off in class and wasn’t serious about learning anything. Now imagine that level of intellect applied to governance. That’s your average voter! When you see it like this, all of politics starts to make sense. Of course that kind of intellect could not vote wisely. It takes decades of intense A-student level education, reading of 100s of books, and decades of contemplation and philosophy just to vote intelligently. And even then it’s not guaranteed because many college-educated people are still deeply biased, corrupt, immature, underdeveloped, self-deceived, conservative, and compromised by their career, business, religion, nationality, ethnicity, or family.

Every political side is self-deceived and misleading you.

Liberals are self-deceived. Conservatives are self-deceived. Progressives are self-deceived. Socialists are self-deceived. Libertarians are self-deceived. Anarchists are self-deceived. If you take any of these people seriously you will end up just like them. To truly understand politics requires transcending all of those views. I hope you are starting to see how nobody on any of these sides has a serious understanding of politics, which is why they keep failing to make predictions, and then they ply you with spurious, self-serving, backwards rationalizations. A few days before the election Krystal Ball predicted a Blue landslide, with Kamala winning all 7 swing states — pure fucking leftist delusion — a result which her own show made virtually impossible thanks to 4 years of anti-mainstream ideology. Their ideology is not equipped to handle reality. Because no ideology is.

And don’t make the obvious mistake of thinking that just because Trump won, or conservatives are in power, that this somehow lends any credence to, or in any way validates, their view of politics. Absolutely not. No one in politics is more self-deceived than a Trump conservative. Temporary victory, success, and popularity — in a domain where madness of crowds operates — is nothing to hang your hat on. In this domain, victory is often thanks to illusion rather than correct view. When the masses are uneducated and misinformed, bullshit wins and truth loses. That is not a mistake. That is as it should be. Do not wish that ignorance have no cost.

When people do not respect truth it is proper that they should drown in their own bullshit. This is the real state of our union.

People make the naive mistake of thinking that truth should somehow automatically prevail over falsehood. But the existential lesson of reality is that you are free to bullshit yourself as much as you want. That is the real meaning of freedom. If you don’t respect truth, you will not have it. Then you will see what life is like without truth — that will be the next 4 years — and that will be your most important lesson.

9) Things can always get much worse.

Oh yes! You don’t know how bad things can get. You think Gaza was bad already? It can always get much worse. There is no bottom to the horrors of God. So appreciate every ounce of progress we got. Every step in progress must be fought for. Every human right. Every regulation. Every good thing in society had to be fought for against the selfishness, corruption, and ignorance of someone who stood to benefit from it not existing. Over the next 4 years you will learn to appreciate that more than ever. To you progressives, stop taking human progress for granted. Stop expecting it to be given. It will not only not be given, it will be taken! Because humans are devils. That is human nature. So it has always been, and so it will always be as long as you’re alive.

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All this is to say that our political problems are of the deepest, existential sort, not anything that a single election cycle, politician, policy, or ideology can fix. Populism cannot fix our problems because the populace is uneducated and misinformed. The real problems are all meta, and voters have zero interest in solving meta problems. The ultimate meta problem is ignorance, for which there is no magic pill. The only solution to ignorance is 20-40 years of intense education, which virtually nobody is willing to do. Instead we got people learning about politics on TikTok. And now, thanks to Trump and his religious conservative ass-lickers, the public education system will be further corrupted and gutted, doubling the meta problem.

Perhaps the most important lesson here is to recognize that virtually nobody in society is doing the work I teach. Liberals are not doing the work. Conservatives are certainly not doing the work. Nor are progressives and leftists doing the work. They are all lost. Even the people who seem to be doing the work are not doing the work. Even those who speak of spirituality and consciousness and awakening and development are not doing it! Those taking psychedelics are not doing it! They are deceiving themselves. This is all a game of infinite self-deception! Even I am not doing the work as much as I should.

Truly developing yourself into Tier 2, beyond the center of gravity of your society, your friends, your family, and your co-workers, is a rare, precious, super-human feat. Do not take it for granted. Do not assume it. Virtually nobody has done it. Just because you see some talking head on a podcast or in a YT video mouthing off with some high ideals, do not assume he has done it. Talk is cheap. Talk is self-deception. When it comes to development level, no one should be given the benefit of the doubt. Assume they are Tier 1 unless proven otherwise. Assume they are two levels less developed than they say they are, unless proven otherwise.

If you voted for Trump, you have not even begun to understand this work.

Welcome to real self-actualization.

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