Why is Politics so Hateful?

iarwain said:

I wonder what it is about politics that makes people so hateful? I've many times considered dropping my interest in politics because of people's toxic attitude about it. Most particularly I am tired of going to forums and seeing people routinely toss around insults and name calling as if it was acceptable behavior. I don't care what you think about candidate x or y, if you can't engage with someone with respect, you shouldn't be talking with them.

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Richard T said:

Usually the most defensive people are the one's that really don't understand many issues or the way politics works. Authoritarian types too always think they have it right with an attitude of my way or the highway. You find these people all over. Many bosses are like that. All of us just need to try harder and not let the media and certain individuals goad us into extreme language and hate.

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iarwain said:

I wonder what it is about politics that makes people so hateful?

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iarwain said:

I wonder what it is about politics that makes people so hateful? I've many times considered dropping my interest in politics because of people's toxic attitude about it. Most particularly I am tired of going to forums and seeing people routinely toss around insults and name calling as if it was acceptable behavior. I don't care what you think about candidate x or y, if you can't engage with someone with respect, you shouldn't be talking with them.

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Richard T said:

I will add too that I once knew the Chair of Political Science of a major state university. He said that the older he got with politics the more cynical about politics he became. Some decades later I can say the same thing.

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iarwain said:

Honesty? What kind of politician is that? No wonder McCain didn't win the presidency.
Kidding, kidding. I think.


I think people are heavily invested in having people agree with them. They take it personal if someone doesn't agree with them, because their world view isn't being validated, and they can get very angry.

You also make a good point about all the little flash in the pan issues. What the big story of the day is. Two years down the road it might not seem so important. But in the heat of the moment, people get really wound up about it.

I just really dislike it when people won't talk to each other respectfully.

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jacks said:

Unfortunately some people thrive on their anger and righteous indignation. Perusing the news for anything that validates their hate and anger. At some level it is a joy to them.

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iarwain said:

I think people are heavily invested in having people agree with them.

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d taylor said:

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Because it deals with the kingdoms satan now possesses and they deal in deception.

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The Machine Without a Soul: Neoliberalism, Empire, and the Extinction of Meaning

Introduction

In recent decades, it has become nearly impossible to ignore that something in American—and global—civilization is spiritually exhausted. Behind the bright screens, frictionless commerce, and algorithmic conveniences lies a profound hollowness: an inability to answer the most basic human questions—What are we for? What is enough? Whose lives matter?

Many contemporary observers diagnose these symptoms as the “meaning crisis,” a term popularized by John Vervaeke and others who frame this malaise primarily in cognitive and cultural terms: the collapse of traditional religion, the fragmentation of communities, the erosion of shared narratives. While this framework offers real insight, it remains incomplete.

The core argument of this essay is that the crisis is not only cultural or psychological but fundamentally political and economic. Its engine is the triumph of a specific ideology and spiritual power: neoliberalism. This is not merely an economic system or a set of policy preferences but the latest and most refined form of empire—a Machine whose only purpose is to grow, and whose only method is to convert every dimension of life into a market.

Neoliberalism as the Beating Heart of Babylon
To describe America as a contemporary “Babylon” is not simply rhetorical flourish. In the Book of Revelation, Babylon symbolizes a system that:

consolidates wealth through seduction and violence,

enthrones commerce and luxury as ultimate goods,

manufactures illusions of progress and peace, and

devours the sacred in pursuit of profit.

Neoliberalism—emerging through the Chicago School and institutionalized under Reagan and Thatcher—serves as the contemporary engine of this imperial logic. It systematically elevates what previous generations regarded as vice:

Greed becomes rational incentive.

Endless accumulation becomes growth.

Contempt for the vulnerable becomes fiscal responsibility.

Extraction and exploitation become efficiency.

This system does not merely tolerate these impulses; it requires them.

The Spiritual DNA of the Machine
One of the more unsettling realizations is that neoliberalism did not appear ex nihilo. It is, in a sense, the bastard child of a distorted Puritan spirit:

A Calvinist conviction that disciplined work was a sign of grace.

A deep suspicion of unearned dignity, whether aristocratic leisure or peasant subsistence.

An anxious compulsion to prove moral worth through productivity.

Over centuries, this ethic gradually shed its theology but retained its relentless drive to prove, accumulate, and dominate.

When fused with modern finance, industrial technology, and global capital flows, this compulsion produced a totalizing system in which every relationship becomes transactional:

A person is a unit of labor and consumption.

A place is a resource to be optimized.

A culture is a market to be penetrated.

Hence the inescapable language of efficiency. Efficiency is the Machine’s mask—the rhetorical device that makes domination appear neutral, even benevolent.

Efficiency as Voodoo
When George H.W. Bush derided Reagan’s supply-side orthodoxy as “voodoo economics,” he intended the phrase as a critique of fiscal irresponsibility. But in hindsight, it was more revealing than he likely understood.

Neoliberalism functions as a form of voodoo—not in the sense of an indigenous religion but as an enchantment that conceals power behind incantations:

Arcane metrics and models that no layperson can decode.

Algorithms masquerading as neutral arbiters of truth while embedding systemic bias and greed.

Repeated mantras—“innovation,” “disruption,” “flexibility”—that hypnotize publics into compliance.

This system does not need to persuade through reasoned argument; it relies on spectacle, distraction, and the technocratic priesthood. The result is a population anesthetized by performance metrics and captivated by illusions of inevitability.

Necropolitics and the Rise of Authoritarianism
Once neoliberalism’s promises began to collapse—especially after the 2008 crisis—the Machine lost much of its capacity to seduce through prosperity narratives alone.

In this legitimacy vacuum emerged a predictable adaptation: soft authoritarianism and necropolitics.

When the masses could no longer be convinced to comply with market logic, they had to be governed by fear.

When prosperity failed to materialize, resentment was stoked against internal enemies.

When consensus eroded, surveillance and coercion became primary tools of governance.

Trumpism is not a rejection of neoliberalism but its final confession.
This figure did not arise as an ideological innovator but as a performer of white resentment and wounded status:

The familiar “adorable everyman bigot who made it big,” akin to Archie Bunker with a golden toilet.

The carnival barker whose cartoonish cruelty and spectacle distracted from the continued plunder.

Trump became both the mask and the decoy:

For supporters, he offered catharsis and scapegoats.

For the liberal class, he served as a convenient repository for moral outrage, allowing the underlying system to continue untouched.

Underneath the clownish performance, the technocratic neoliberal elite carried on:

Corporate tax cuts.

Deregulation.

Record profits for billionaires.

Accelerated extraction of what remains of the commons.

The difference was no longer one of substance but of tone. The Machine, no longer able to inspire, relied on nostalgia and resentment to preserve its authority.

This was not a rupture but a rebranding—the same empire, more frightened and more desperate.

The Disappearance of Wisdom
Perhaps the most telling symptom of this crisis is the near-total absence of any cultural resources that could be called wisdom.

A simple search for “American wisdom” in Google or YouTube yields almost nothing but noise. Algorithms deliver content about:

IQ and cleverness,

strategies for appearing intelligent,

tactics for rhetorical victory.

Wisdom—understood as lived moral understanding of how to flourish in community—cannot be monetized, measured, or scaled. Therefore, it has vanished from the mainstream.

This is not incidental. It is the inevitable consequence of a civilization that:

Equates worth with measurable output.

Worships performance over substance.

Considers reflection unprofitable.

In such a system, cleverness becomes the final substitute for wisdom—a continuous performance in a hollow theater.

The Inadequacy of Apolitical Spirituality
These dynamics also expose the limits of popular meaning-crisis discourse that remains apolitical. Vervaeke and others have offered important insights into cognitive collapse and participatory knowing but stop short of naming the Machine that produces the crisis.

No amount of cognitive reframing can make life meaningful inside a system whose survival depends on distraction, commodification, and spiritual exhaustion.

Spiritual practices that remain detached from economic critique inevitably become instruments of adaptation:

Mindfulness without justice becomes self-soothing anesthesia.

Contemplation without solidarity becomes a consumer luxury.

Personal growth without collective transformation becomes another product for the affluent.

Early Christianity understood this. Revelation does not offer strategies to cope with empire but a call to:

Name Babylon without euphemism.

Refuse its idols.

Witness to a different kingdom.

Accept the costs of noncompliance.

The first Christians were not persecuted for praying in private but for refusing to venerate the empire’s gods.

The Recovery of Meaning
If meaning cannot be produced by neoliberal structures, the work is not to reform the Machine but to build refuges it cannot consume.

This requires practices and communities that:

Honor limits and sufficiency.

Protect time and space from commodification.

Re-root belonging in relationships, not transactions.

Examples of such practices include:

Sabbath rest that interrupts the cult of productivity.

Silence uncolonized by platforms.

Shared meals without economic exchange.

Lament that names collective grief without monetizing it.

Conclusion
A civilization that offers only cleverness in place of wisdom and efficiency in place of meaning is already spiritually bankrupt.

Trumpism did not emerge to challenge the Machine but to distract from its decay.
The spectacle of an aging empire—fronted by a reality-TV demagogue, cheered by some and loathed by others—served to conceal the fact that the underlying system had already lost the power to inspire or to persuade.

The diagnosis is stark:

This is a Machine without a soul.

Yet in recognizing this truth, something essential becomes possible:

To withdraw consent.

To remember that no algorithm owns the sacred.

To practice a spirituality that does not flatter empire.

No amount of innovation will redeem a system whose premise is that life itself is an input. The work is to recover an anthropology in which no human is disposable and no value is exhausted by price.

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Fervent said:

Any time there is power involved there is bound to be acrimony. Politics invites strong opinions and a sense of righteousness in the cause that all but requires divisiveness and viewing opponents as enemies. The more a politician can inspire emotional responses, the more likely they are to succeed in a democratic system.

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FireDragon76 said:

The US political-cultural system fits into the type of Babylon in the Bible. I had a long discussion about this with ChatGPT a few days ago, and summarized the discussion as an essay. Dehumanization and performative cruelty are the end result of a dying empire trying to uphold itself.

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