As I type this, a certain orange person and his enablers have taken a flawed, but mostly positive economy and smashed it headlong into a brick wall, while simultaneously destroying decades of stable trade relationships with allies. All the while, absolutely gutting the vital government services that millions of his citizens depend on.

The people mostly likely to be hardest hit by these moves are the people who have so far counted themselves as his biggest supporters. And who will, if the last ten or so years are any indicator, continue to be his biggest supporters, even through all the suffering to come.

Which leads to an obvious question: why do people so often work against their own best interests? Even when there is plenty of evidence to show that it will definitely be against their best interests? Even as they suffer the consequences in real time?

The phenomenon isn’t restricted to the US. In Canada, a provincial premier with an objectively terrible legislative agenda and track record recently swept into a third consecutive majority government. In the UK, a majority voted to leave the European Union with the terrible economic consequences that were predicted materializing almost immediately.

Lots of people have tried to explain the last several years. Pundits have tried to point at education, income, gender and race divides, with little success, as neither orange guy’s fans nor Brexit supporters fit neatly into any demographic.

The concept of “low information voters” goes a little further to explain the phenomenon. These are people with one or more jobs, kids, elders who need care, busy social lives, those who get their news from the occasional TV or radio sound bites, people they know, and whatever memes cross their social media feed and that they happen to see. They have an incomplete understanding of very complex issues, and if they take the time to vote, they do so based on whatever caught their eye.

But this concept doesn’t explain the folks who have the time and resources to be Very Online (and I count myself among them) and thus, also have the time to access to the whole world’s knowledge base and should by rights be “high information” voters. How is it that anyone can personally check the stock market tickers directly in just seconds, and we still have people claiming “fake news!” when someone posts about markets crashing?

The answer, I think, can be found in Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler’s short book, Useful Delusions; The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain.

The authors talk about how self-deception has actually been critical to our evolution. Roughly speaking, the first kind of self-deception is the kind required to do forward planning. In our hunter-gatherer days, the mammoth might not be right in front of us right now, but we can deceive ourselves temporarily to imagine that it is, and then plan how we might, as a group, take it down. Likewise, humans can’t fly like birds, but we can deceive ourselves temporarily to imagine ways in which we might fly, and thus invent things like airplanes.

The second kind of self-deception allows us to cope with our mortality. We are, as far as we know, the only creatures aware of our inevitable biological fates. Yet, we also have the same sort of visceral fear/survival instincts as our fellow critters. So, we come up with all sorts of mental coping mechanisms (those self deceptions) to allow us to live out our lives without losing our minds.

This vital ability, self-deception, also leads to our greatest follies. The ability to engage in self-deception can lead us straight into self-sabotaging outcomes. That’s why we continue to consume too much sugar when we know it’s harmful, why we persist in driving drunk even when people (including ourselves) are horrifically injured or killed because of it, and why we can be convinced to vote for destructive policies.

And it’s something that us (too often arrogant) self-proclaimed rationalists must start accounting for in politics. A quote, with italics added by myself for emphasis:

“Foregoing self-deception isn’t merely a mark of education or enlightenment — it is a sign of privilege. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Virgin Birth, it’s because your life does not depend on your believing such things. Your material, cultural, and social worlds are providing you with other safety nets for psychological and physical needs. But should your circumstances change for the worse, were the pillars of your life to buckle and sway, your mind, too, would prove fertile ground for the wildest self-deceptions. There are, as we say, no atheists in foxholes.” (page xvii).

The words cultural and social do a lot of heavy lifting in this quote, particularly as they pertain to political situations like the orange man. This is why his support crosses gender, income, and racial lines. Cultural and social norms, for some of those supporters, are changing — quite rapidly in their view — in ways that no longer provide them the safety nets for their psychological needs. Whether you liked or approved of the previous cultural or social or even economic norms they adhered to is irrelevant. The point you have to take note of here is that the self-deception they engage in is a kind of defensive mechanism against perceived threats to their way of life.

And in some cases self-deception applies to defending their physical needs too. Those folks who have seen good paying jobs disappear overseas, wages stagnate, or their lives otherwise degraded by corporate interests, pollution, or opioid addictions, or any of the other modern plagues. They’re angry about this and don’t know what to do about it.

Put another way: it’s hard, if not impossible, for the vast majority of people to have the time, capability, and willingness to understand why and how their lives are changing for what they believe is the worst. They will instead latch onto and cling to an explanation that makes the most sense and takes the least effort to hold.

It’s why the women who have been failed by modern medicine flock to ‘woo’ cures for their debilitating menopausal symptoms. It’s why the unemployed guy in the trailer who’s seen his friends die from fentanyl can easily be persuaded the brown folks brought the drugs in and took his job as well.

When these explanations are coupled with an us vs them ‘greater cause,’ like religious disputes, cold wars, cultural wars, or actual combat, they are infinitely harder to shake.

Another quote:

“It’s fine to hold secular, cosmopolitan views. But when rationalists look down on people who crave the hollow panaceas of tribe and nation, it’s like Marie Antoinette asking why peasants who lack bread don’t satisfy themselves with cake. They fail to grasp what life is like for most people on the planet.

People gain a sense of meaning and purpose when they submerge themselves in the myths, stories, and rituals of their tribes. In the face of impermanence and loss, our groups remind us that a form of immortality is within reach.” (page 171)

Not only have our current systems evolved to make it that much harder to have the time to understand anything, those same systems make it so much easier to find those ‘simple’ explanations as to why your life isn’t what you thought it would be.

People with vested interests in preserving the status quo (because they’re profiting handsomely off it) will happily supply lots of ‘easy’ explanations, usually in the form of scapegoating a minority. Further, our systems allow you to quickly find and fall in with people who cling to those same explanations. A tribe, in other words. A political tribe. A conspiracy theory tribe.

On social media in particular, the end result is that its much easier and more satisfying to post an opinion (or meme, or video, or article) and gain the approval (through ‘likes’ and supporting comments) of your self-selected peers than it is to research and fact check any of it. And being challenged by anyone just invokes the human tendency to get stubborn, lash out, and double down.

What can we do about this? The solution might be twofold.

First, we need to start meeting people where they are. Your elected officials should be expected to understand macroeconomic concepts like tariffs. That’s what we pay them to do! Crapping on the average Joe Citizen because he doesn’t understand these same concepts isn’t the way to go, though. Kindly explain, sure, if the situation allows. Point and laugh, no. That’ll just get the double down reaction I mentioned above.

Second, we need to offer people something better. At the societal level, we don’t have ‘good’ big causes. Much of Earth has been explored; what’s left, like the deepest ocean voyages, is accessible only to people with access to specialized equipment. And much of the era of exploration involved destroying the people and animals in the area of “discovery” anyway.

The space race is long since done, and wasn’t as unifying as the movies would have you believe. Climate change is a huge issue, to be sure, but unfortunately we’ve set a precedent where the most noble action available to the individual is to chuck something into a recycle bin (instead of say, join the tree planting corps in the wilds of Peru). Hard to write soul-stirring ballads about rinsing out that tin of beans.

We need big, positive visions of the future. Ones that find a way to include the people voting for the orange guy. Visions that allow everyone to be prosocial instead of self-sabotaging.

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