Americans are radicalized, not because they care too much about politics, but because they’re bored. In our culture, stripped of meaning, community, and restraint, politics has become a substitute for dealing with yourself.
Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman, autodidact, and moral philosopher, was deeply suspicious of the hunger for belonging. In his must-read book, The True Believer, he argues that mass movements — left, right, or religious — are fueled less by ideas than by boredom, bitterness, and the desire of frustrated and shallow individuals to fulfill themselves. “Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration,” he writes. “Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.” This is about as conservative a statement as one can make.
David Foster Wallace saw this coming, too. In his 1,100-page darkly comic 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, which centers on an avant-garde film known simply as “the Entertainment,” the film is so perfectly stimulating that anyone who watches it wants only to keep watching — until they die. A character describes witnessing a man so consumed by the film that he “couldn’t even stand to be in the same room… Begging for just even a few seconds — a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn.”
The novel’s central metaphor feels all too real, especially given how many Americans are consuming politics as an immersive distraction to ward off boredom and to feel emotionally attached to something—anything.
Sadly, politics is now a major form of entertainment in America, delivered as “content.”
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