If you can imagine yourself to be a human from another planet who had arrived to observe the denizens of the "Western" civilization on earth; I think you would be amazed at the amount of mental time and effort that we expend on having (strong!) opinions on geopolitical matters.
So much of our public discourse is occupied by political and social issues, national and international - which are remote, second-hand (to put it kindly), and over which we can have no conceivable influence.
It is a spell cast over almost all of us; and from which we only seldom and briefly awake to be astonished at ourselves... Before lapsing back into the bizarre world view in which "my opinion" on something geopolitical is supposed to be crucially important - both to the world and to my own identity and moral status.
What is strangest of all, is the inbuilt expectation that - not only must we all have the "right" understanding of... everything; but also we are each supposed to have some sort of plan or blueprint for "fixing" the world!
Indeed, the expectation is that we are not really entitled to an opinion unless we also have a plan to fix it: not only are we required to consider all the questions, but we are expected to know all the answers...
Not only should we have a plan to fix everything; but we ought to be doing something about fixing it. That "something" may, objectively, be of ludicrously trivial - like participating in an election every few years - but it is nonetheless believed to be morally mandatory, and causally linked to all that happens in the world!
We are defined by that microscopic act - defined, I mean, in our own minds.
More exactly, we must subscribe to, subordinate ourselves to, be loyal to; some kind of ideology (if not religion) that claims to be coherent and comprehensive: to have all the answers to all the questions - because any gap in the Qs or As is supposed be be a fatal deficit!
That loyalty is (supposedly) what makes us a responsible human being.
And if our ideology doesn't have a viewpoint on everything that happens to be in the news today - then it's no good, and we ought to change it!
I do not exempt myself from membership of this obviously-delusory way of living - it's just that very occasionally, such as the past few minutes; my mind clears of the smoke, I come-to-my-senses, and realize my insanity.
Before lapsing back into the morass.
