From “Are We Over-Politicized”: But what I genuinely don’t like about politics taking over our lives, as the world has become bisected in the last few years along political divisions, is that it makes us discount our shared humanity. It’s hard to love, and easy to hate.

I just wrote that sentence to see how it sounded. And I don’t like it. Because I think it’s false. It’s easier to love, and hard to hate. You have to work at the latter. Or rather, you have to get worked up by outside forces to practice hate. It’s natural for us, as fellow humans, to want to find affinity. We all basically want the same things: love, affection, security, safety. Politics, too often, introduce the opposite of that. They break down our universality into specificity. My interests aren’t quite the same as yours, and therefore, you are not only my competing interest, but my “enemy.” If I’m a rich white guy who needs more tax breaks, and you’re a poor black guy who needs Medicaid (even if it’s mostly poor white guys who need Medicaid), I’m supposed to distrust you, according to our current politics.

It’s zero-sum. But what if we re-engineered it as some for all? What if we chose to see each other as fellow humans again? All plunged into the human struggle, whether we like it or don’t? (The human struggle conscripts, it’s not a volunteer campaign.) How much more generous would our politics be? Thus, not exploiting fault lines in every area of our lives? Reminding us that we don’t have to hate the people we disagree with. That even if we think they’re mistaken, they’re just trying to gut it out, too. And sometimes, their fears and suspicions of people unlike them, get the better of them. And cause them to support ungenerous policies, and to punish their enemies, even when it spites their own interests. As an old political knife-fighter friend of mine used to say, not incorrectly: “Hate is a stronger motivator than love.”