too often in politics, people base their perception of an action being wrong, immoral, or corrupt, more on WHO did it than on WHAT was done.
agree?
if you agree, how do you feel we can start teaching future voters how to be logical and analytical instead of emotional when making political choices?
I think you may have misidentified the problem.
Most of our education is already designed around encouraging logical reasoning over emotion and desire.
I think that many of the people who are doing the most and loudest personal attacks, know perfectly well that they are urging people to act against their own logical best interests. in fact, that's exactly why they are doing it.
When your plans for the world are obviously illogical, selfish, and destructive, the best way to get people to sign on anyway, is to get them to want to do ANYTHING to upset the other side. And nothing works easier than making it personal.
I think the only way to fight this technique, is to point it out repeatedly, AND refuse to join in going the other way.
I agree with that too. That is a problem. I also feel part of it is that people may not be so easily willing to make it personal if they were better informed of the ACTUAL civics and government roles, boundaries, and responsibilities. They would know how silly it was to blame a President for something that happened in a local school or for something that happens in another country where OTHERS had authority. If people understood the Presidents limits and boundaries and the chain of command does not START at the top but ends there AFTER those under the President absolve their own responsibility, perhaps these 'scandals' would not fly so well.
100% with you on this part. Civics (HOW the government works, in detail) supposedly was taught in the "olden days." I got some of it when I was in school, but even though I directly studied History and Political Science through college, I STILL had to do a ton of work on my own, in order to understand who does what, and even more important, who DOESN'T do what.
One of the big problems we have, is that there are a lot of people in high positions and in the business of PUTTING people into high positions, who actively work to fool people into MISUNDERSTANDING how things actually work. And since it has now been almost directly written into constitutional canon that lying about everything in order to get elected is protected speech, I don't know what can be done to balance the lies with facts.
There are millions of dollars being spent daily in the US, specifically on promoting falsehoods, from what kind of flyswatter works best, to whether or not the President can declare a crime to be legal or not.
Sometimes I wish I could harness the paranoia and the belief in conspiracy theories so many people seem to have, to get them to be equally paranoid and investigative of the people who are feeding them their comforting theories, as they are of the people the theories are aimed at.
I know that some how I personally managed to realize that NO ONE can be blindly trusted, a long time ago; and that assuming everyone is actively lying, is identical to assuming that they are telling the truth, in terms of getting a cleat picture of reality. But I'm not sure how or why exactly I did that, or how to get that sort of thing across to enough other people to make a difference.