The Politics of Poetry
That phrase, "the politics of poetry," is the way I reference humans' astonishing ability to be completely brainwashed by total BS that sounds really good. Or at least sounds just like what they want to believe, and is prettily phrased. Or sounds "romantic."
It especially seems to show up in the way that people absorb song lyrics as gospel. The funny thing is, way back in school, whenever I was forced to write poetry -- the easiest stuff to come up with was angsty crap. Especially when I didn't mean it at all. Now, the lyrics I'm always hearing consist of angsty crap. Do the songwriters even mean a word of it? It doesn't really matter, it seems -- people will absorb it if it "resonates" with them. That's all that matters with lyrics: "resonates".
I'm not sure if this all reflects people in this culture losing their critical thinking abilities, or whether it's more that the people who craft "messages" are getting better and better at phrasing them to catch the public mind. I expect it's both, of course, but mostly the latter.
One place that I notice this most often is in left-wing politics. A huge example would be whether war is "senseless" or not. A million songs full of angsty crap say it is. And almost every lefty I know will insist on it. They often say it to each other. The reinforcement certainly is an important part of the brainwashing. But any critical analysis of the concept easily shows that it's BS.
An easy number to calculate is an "effectiveness rating." Out of how many times of trying tactic X does it succeed in getting you what you want? An example: after this last election, RFK Jr wrote an article complaning vociferously about how the election had been "unfair," and citing things that looked like examples. So, how often does complaining about unfairness actually produce results? Less than 2% of the time, certainly. Probably a lot lower. Another example: protesting. How many protests of this or that local, state, federal, or foriegn policy have you seen? I've seen, or heard about, thousands of them. The last actual effective set of protests I can think of would be in the Civil Rights era. (People who like to protest will try to claim the WTO protest in Seattle, or the Vietnam protests -- but a little critical thinking will clearly show that those protests did not get the protesters any satisfaction in any reasonable time or direct fashion.) So, I'd also rate the effectiveness of protests down under 2% -- probably lower. One of the absolutely least effective methods of getting what you want that I know of, in fact.
Now: when country A goes to war against country B, how likely is it that country A will come out of the war with what they wanted? I'll admit that there are occasions when both antagonists will lose -- but the effectiveness rating of warfare is probably just a bit under 50%. That's a hell of a lot more effective than protesting! Or economic sanctions, or diplomacy, or asking nicely, or begging. In fact, it's the second most effective method I know of for getting what you want on an international scale. It just also happens to be immoral.
(What's the first most effective? Buying what you want from a willing seller at full market price. Nobody has managed to come up with a fairer method for getting what you want, since the ancient greeks invented it 3000 years ago.)
HOWEVER, the point is that a bit of critical thinking will easily show that the one thing that war is not, is "senseless." War makes a whole lot of sense! It's just rude, unkind, unfair, harsh, and immoral. Would hominids really have done it for the last 6 million years if it made no sense at all? Would chimpanzees also do it if it made no sense? Would crows take things from each other by force, if it made no sense to do so? You'd have to be drowning in self-deception to think so.
So, the next time you hear an angsty lyric in a song -- please think about it really hard before accepting it as truth.