Politics 1.0 is violence. It’s how our animal brains react when we feel threatened. It is the fear that other tribes are going to tear away our possessions and freedom. War. Brutality. Aggression. Blood. Guts. Glory. Cue the rallying cry.
Politics 2.0 is the false dichotomy that one tribe is right, while the other is wrong. Or is that right and left? It is the notion that the opposing side is the enemy, and that we must block them at all costs — barring physical violence, of course, because we are a civilized people. We would never actually hit anyone — physically.
Politics 3.0 is the echo triangle formed by walled-off biased news sources, special interest groups, and (un)social media. Their stock in trade are the 3Ds: divisiveness, dopamine, and drama (ps, public policy is actually usually pretty boring stuff). Not to mention the bad actors who see the echo chamber as their best chance to make stuff up and pass it off as truth — disinformation offensive, or is that offensive disinformation?
The results are that we can’t hear ourselves think, but the dopamine rush is awesome, and it has us addicted to ever more noise. Noise is a drug, we need to score, and indeed, we can score 24/7/365. Where’s my precious phone? We’re stuck in the echo triangle, and can only hear one side of the truth bouncing off our brains.
Here’s the thing, there are four sides, if we only ever talk about things that we can’t change then all we are is noise. However, we’re not noise, we’re humans. We’re emotional…
