This is my political retreat.

(This is not a very appropriate Easter/Passover post, but here it is).

There has been little time for posting of late. Between apartment searches, gig preparation and that thing I do M-F 9-5, I've had little time to bestow my wisdom on the world.

I will say that lately I've been a little disheartened, politically speaking. Some conversations go very well, and some don't. In any case, being an apple in the midst of oranges can be very difficult, no matter how sweet and agreeable the oranges may be. Sometimes people are open to foreign ideas and sometimes they're not (myself included). Often times, I've encountered people who talk past each other, or try to convert each another to his or her own point of view, rather than listening and learning.

I've often maintained that it takes an immense external influence to get a person to change, and I still believe that most of the time. An extension of this idea is that I don't think most people want to change. I think people form their intellectual arguments and philosophies to reinforce what they feel inside. To elaborate, I don't think we are political blank slates who look at the world around us, weigh the intellectual arguments and then form a belief. I think the process is more instinctual, and thus reversed.

Right now I’m speaking only of the grey areas. The fundamental truths are things that all but the fringe members of society agree on: murder is wrong, love is good- these kinds of concepts. But before we know anything else, we know what feels right and what feels wrong. This is the stage when a person adopts or rejects religion, environmentalism or any other belief. After this adoption, when confronted with a moral quandary, we use that foundation of belief (the fundamental truths plus the personal truths and adopted beliefs) and surround these beliefs with an intellectual argument, rather than the other way around. Put more succinctly: our arguments fortify our beliefs, rather than the other way around.

If correct, this would mean that people are more automatic in the way we embrace our beliefs. Thus when critics panned Letterman during an interview with Bill O’Reilly for saying, “it just feels wrong,” they were really criticizing him because he had not yet researched the stats and facts which would appropriately bolster his beliefs, like they had already done. Granted, this kind of laziness is repugnant. But it seems Dave is just demonstrating my thesis here.

Those rare moments of change occur when logic influences belief; when all other arguments seem moot, and the naked intellectual truth is staring you in the face. During these rare moments, our beliefs align with our intellect and we adopt them into our personal theology- the seemingly irrefutable.

But the world is as polarized as ever, and we will continue to research the facts that sit well with our beliefs, to eschew the ones that don’t, and we will argue more fiercely than ever before. Well, most of us will.