Well, the whole idea of best interests in
the question, “Why do people vote against
their best interests?” is not an objective
thing in nature.
It’s one of the very problems in the politics
of inevitability, is that we think like economists
and we say, “Well, everybody is rational
in the narrow economical sense, everybody
knows what’s good for them.”
And that’s just not true, or rather the
ability of people to discern what their interests
are depends upon a process of education, which
includes not just reasoning mathematically,
which is very important, but also it has to
include some kind of humanistic side where
people learn to criticize or think critically
about what they hear, learn to make distinctions
among various kinds of media.
Because that notion of “one’s best interest”
is not at all natural, it’s the product
of a certain kind of education.
And that kind of education can be undone,
first of all it can not be done, but it can
also be undone, one can deliberately appeal
to the parts of the mind which aren’t concerned
with the future, with math, with critical
thinking, but to the parts of the mind which
think in terms of “us and them,” “friend
and enemy,” and you can draw people into
these cycles.
And the less—and this is how it fits together
with inequality—the less people see a good
future for themselves if they think in terms
of interests, the more they’re drawn into
a different way of thinking where it’s not
about their individual interests, but it’s
more about feeling like they’re on the “right
team,” they’re on the “right side.”
For a lot of people in the U.S. now I think
it’s a little bit like they want to ride
the bench for the winning team.
They know that things aren’t going well
for them personally, but they want to feel
like they’re on the right side.
And that helps to explain the appeal of someone
like a Donald Trump who, of course, himself
is a failure but has the skills to present
himself as a success and can get people thinking,
“Yeah, I want to be on that team.
I’m not going to do any better economically,
but I’m going to feel better about myself,
because I’m on the winning team, I’m on
what it feels like the winning team.”
So the whole thing about best interests has
to be seen as a project.
You have to educate people, you have to take
anxiety away by providing certain basic things
like schooling and pensions and vacations
so people can pause and think a little bit
about themselves and their future.
If you don’t provide those basic elements
of (I would say) political civilization then
people are too anxious, it’s hard for them
to get their minds around what their interest
actually are.
And beyond that if you don’t educate them
positively towards thinking with both math
and with the humanities they’re not going
to get there anyway.
So it’s a project.
A basic thing that we Americans forget—and
a basic thing that politics of inevitability
shrouds—is that creating the individual
is a project.
It takes a lot of work to create an individual.
I mean we want to have thinking individuals.
We want to have people who know what their
best interests are.
We want to have people who go thoughtfully
into that ballot box, but that’s a project;
we’re not born that way.
I mean as a father I can assure you that we
are not born that way.
I think it’s the noblest and best thing
we do, to try to create individuals, but we
can’t just leave it to chance, and I think
that’s where we go wrong.
One of the basic ways we go wrong with the
politics of inevitability, we think, “Okay,
automatically we’re going to be those kinds
of rational people,” but we’re not automatically
those kinds of rational people.
I mean the irony is if you want to create
individuals who can think about their own
best interests you have to, as a society,
say, “We agree to make it a project to educate
and form such individuals.”
