The antimemetics of politics

In politics, imperative-based arguments are the easiest and laziest to make, which is why they are preferred by everyone. The average person lacks the will to observe reality,  which is necessary to think well. The most difficult thing is seeing what is in front of your nose. This is also the most essential. Since politics is multidisciplinary it requires the greatest amount of observation in order to come up with successful policies, since these observations must come from multiple fields, and primarily economics. Economics itself has antimemetic properties since it is the study of a counterintuitive machine and by nature the human mind resists fully understanding it. A thing is anti-mimetic when it resists its own understanding, when it resists allowing the thinker to form memories of what they are thinking about. Politics is highly anti-mimetic due to being highly emotionally triggering.

The most likely outcome of any moral policy is failure. Not because the policy is moral but because the policy is NOT strategic. Actual success in any endeavor requires careful observation of the physical world. Morally motivated actions are a great way to fail in politics. Some humans cannot hold two opposite concepts in their mind at the same time. These people cannot understand how one would first work to understand the world, then come up with moral imperatives, and then implement strategic policy. For them, any understanding of the world leads to jadedness and the abandonment of principle. For others any understanding of principle leads to the abandonment of strategic thought. This is almost universally common behavior among people. The ability to marry close observation and moral imperative is actually incredibly rare in the political field with most people choosing sociopathy or hysteria (right or left wing) instead.

A principal, once understood escapes the mind. Therefore the most essential principles are the most difficult to articulate. The ability to retain a principle in the mind and then to think with it, and then to communicate it, requires mental self-control. The more naturally understanding of a principle or a piece of mathematics comes to a person, generally the more trouble they have communicating what they know to others. Natural talent is the enemy of becoming a good educator. It is those who struggle to acquire knowledge who are generally the best communicating what they know, because the special effort involved in learning it. 

A person has a moral imperative to think, but even more importantly they have a moral imperative to observe. Making a political argument with no strategy for success is both normal and foolish. Millions have died in bloody revolutions where the revolutionaries never fully thought through the strategic implications of their own ideas. Communism was an example of hysteria overriding observation. Nearly 100 million people died and the ideology had no chance of success to begin with, not because it is communist, but because the emotional reactivity of people means that all those who understand become sociopaths, and all those who refuse to become sociopaths become hysterical. The nature of politics creates a split in the personality of individuals where they choose one path or the other. Something like communism, or any kind of utopian project, would require both a deep understanding of the nature of reality and also a refusal to give up on principles. The trouble is that to understand one is inevitably to abandon the other. This tendency is so deep in humans that only a conservative could make communism "work" , and a conservative would never want to do that. Those who are most equipped to work out a Utopian project are the least interested in achieving it. A deep understanding a political consequences requires a deep understanding of human nature, which produces a deep disgust, which destroys the motive for the Utopian project. Propaganda works because there is a market demand for it, there is a market demand for it because people refuse to think. From the perspective of the powerful, to give the common man economic fairness is to cast pearls before swine.

All societies at all times are ruled by the most intelligent members. Asking for economic justice is asking the most intelligent members of that society to engineer conditions that benefit less intelligent people. That is not significantly different than asking the most intelligent people to marginalize their own genetics, since intelligence is a reproductive strategy inherently tied to out-maneuvering the stupid and insane for mate access.