Only four percent “of US adults say the political system is working extremely or very well.” Sixty-five percent say we “always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics.” Yet, we keep doubling down, thinking that more attention on politics will somehow fix what ails society.
In 2020, candidates spent over $14 billion seeking the presidency. This was double the amount spent in 2016. The 2024 presidential campaign is far from over. How much will candidates spend this time to fix our attention on politics?
If you are one of those who find politics dispiriting, C. S. Lewis would understand. In his essay “Membership,” contained in his collection The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis wrote, “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other.” Politics, Lewis explained, is not “the natural food of the mind” but a “necessary evil.” However, too much emphasis on politics has become “a new and deadly disease.”
Lewis compared fresh fruit to canned fruit. The latter can be necessary for storage, but Lewis observed he had met people who learned to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh.
Similarly, among us are those who prefer to weigh the promises of candidates as a pathway to societal advancement rather than shore up the foundations of a free society.
If candidates still fix your mind on their empty promises, Ralph Waldo Emerson has an instant mindset cure. In his essay “Experience,” he wrote, “A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveler, but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree.”
Running ourselves up trees has consequences. Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom warned, “The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society.”
Friedman continued, “Every extension of the range of issues for which explicit agreement is sought strains further the delicate threads that hold society together.”
Hellbound and Down 