For some people what matters is which songs are # 3 and # 4 on the Country and Western charts. Is there something defective about these people? Obviously, because what really matters is, What’s better, an Eatmore or an Oh Henry bar? Okay, so what matters is what matters to the person to whom it matters. And at that, at and only at the moment at which it happens to matter to her. Scan the brain of a prisoner at a random moment. It’s far more likely that he’s guessing which Price is Right than he’s thinking about how much he misses his freedom.

So when some political or moral crusader is asking climate change or reproductive rights to matter to me, she can’t be asking me to replace music or chocolate bars or the price of a furniture set with what’s on my mind at the moment. She’s asking climate change or reproductive rights to matter to me for those two or three minutes when I’m voting in some federal election two or three years from now. And she’s asking me to remember that it’s this party rather than that one which, if elected, will better attend to what matters to me.

This isn’t so much of an ask, is it? Actually it is. Especially when the one thing I can do about many of the things I might care about – climate change, reproductive rights, immigration, funding for health care – would split my vote. For example, I’d vote liberal – NDP in Canada, Democrat in the States – were it not for their position on academic freedom. 

So for me, at least, there’s a two-dimensional disconnect between what’s occupying my mind at any given moment, and what the crusader would have it be occupied by instead. And even if she’s only asking that it be put in my mental storage until being called upon at the appropriate time, it’s competing for position on that shelf. 

Crusaders know this, even if they don’t know they know it. In fact there’s a whole science to it. The human mind is capable of abstraction, but it’s work. Images are easy, and they stick. Hence don’t talk to me about a woman’s right to control her own body. Show me a picture of a late-term aborted foetus. That’s how the Christian right is winning the abortion debate in America. They have better cognitive scientists on staff.

So it turns out that people for whom what songs are # 3 and # 4 on the Country and Western charts aren’t defective after all. Songs can be, and often are, all the things that matter to a whole lot of people, compressed into a three minute video. That one song could be enough to put Donald Trump back in the White House. If that matters to you.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask

Tags: abortion, cognitive science, Jason Aldean