Politics and Living Your Best Life

Too much politics is bad for your mental health. But if we want to live lives based on rational values, we must engage in politics—in a certain way.

Political discourse today is an embarrassment. What was once a debate about proper governance has degenerated into an emotional cussing match in which principles are all but forgotten. It's become so emotionally charged that many people are simply giving up on politics altogether. The low turnout at the last UK general election and the popular disdain about the US election and its “bad or worse” choice of candidates bear this out.

Unfortunately, if we want to live lives based on rational values, we must engage in politics. If we don't, we risk losing the freedom to identify and pursue those values.

I recently took part in a panel debate titled “Does Britain Need a First Amendment?” at the Battle of Ideas conference in London. It's not the kind of event I normally do—I much prefer talking about how to pursue and achieve a happy, flourishing life—so why did I do it? 

I did it because politics, deprived of rational principles, can restrict our ability to pursue and achieve happy, flourishing lives. As I have said often on this blog, a key part of living fully is using your rational mind to identify and then pursue the right values for you. Your ability to discover, discuss, pursue, and achieve those values is greatly diminished by a political system that suppresses free speech and free trade.

Whereas my fellow panelists focused their arguments on such concrete issues as Britain’s recent protests, how free speech protection developed historically in the United States, and what is and is not an acceptable thing to say, I focused on a broader question of principle: What is the purpose of a political system? The legitimate purpose of a government, I argued, is to create a situation in which every individual in the governed territory is free to use his or her mind to learn about the world, choose the right ideas for living a full life, work to produce values to that end, and trade those values with others. In short, a government should uphold and defend our right to use our minds to choose and pursue our goals by creating a society in which no one may initiate or threaten force against others. A proper, free society would have a constitution limiting government to that one function.

In a society like that, politics would become pretty unimportant day-to-day. Questions about how industries should run, how we should be educated, transported, cared for, and such would no longer be questions of politics—we would be free to get those services as we pleased. The only political question would be, “Who is going to look after protecting our rights?”

Unfortunately, in today’s world, every government on the planet fails at protecting rights to some degree. They fail to protect us from thieves, fraudsters, and foreign enemies. Worse, every government on the planet violates the very rights they should be protecting by limiting our freedom to work as we choose, keep what we earn, and, in most countries, to freely speak our minds and freely choose what to watch, read, and discuss with others.

In regards to free speech, the UK government is actively using force to limit discussion, online and in the street, of such issues as religion, gender, sexuality, and even criticism of the monarchy, as was seen in the arrests of people for posting tweets calling the Southport attacks as an act of Islamic terrorism (a claim which subsequently turned out to be true). By restricting speech in this way, governments prevent individuals from engaging with ideas—good or bad—and using their own minds to evaluate them and determine what is true and false. Engaging with a wide range of ideas, including bad ideas, is essential to developing one’s mind and discovering what’s true and why it’s true. 

Governments that restrict any nonviolent speech (speech other than fraud and credible threats of force) are preventing people from doing what makes us human—living by the use of our reasoning minds—and are thereby preventing us from choosing and pursuing our values freely and non-coercively. (The government properly should act to prevent anyone initiating force against others, such as rioters—using force against the innocent is not a valid form of protest.)

The debate also gave me the opportunity to highlight the underlying cause of virtually every problem in our society today, from rights-violating governments to widespread depression to the degradation of art to the decline of innovation and entrepreneurship: government-enforced “progressive” education. For around a century, public education (especially in the United States, but also to a lesser extent in Britain) has focused on teaching students not to think independently in order to thrive in their lives, but to accept foregone conclusions and become a “good citizen” in society. In my own education, I was not encouraged to actively engage in and debate such issues as “diversity” and climate change, but simply to accept what I was taught about them. 

This is just one of the many ways in which schools suppress students’ use of their reasoning minds. Others include making learning monotonous, banishing individual expression, and subjecting children to peer pressure to conform to an anti-intellectual culture. I wrote a little more about my own experience of this last week. If we want to move toward a more rational society in which more people use reason to create values and achieve wonderful lives, we need to ditch this kind of schooling.

I use this blog primarily to write about the principles for an individual to flourish in his or her own life, but the effectiveness of those principles can be limited greatly by politics—whether through government forcibly limiting speech or trade, or through government intervening in education and media to shackle our minds from an early age. That is why, although I often recommend limiting one’s involvement in politics from a mental health point of view, we can’t afford to disengage from it altogether. It’s vital that we bring the principles of rationality and independence into the political arena to remind politicians and bureaucrats what their job really should be—protecting our right to live freely and use our minds. We needn’t get stuck in the weeds of who’s-in-who’s-out party politics—rather, we can bring it back to the principles that matter.

Don’t let the dire state of politics get you down—focus on your own life when you catch yourself thinking about it too much. But equally, don’t lose sight of its importance, or one day, it might hold you down for good.