Most politics
starts with an expression of loyalty and a pinch of conviction.
A pinch of conviction, much like salt,
becomes an extraordinary accelerant on an individual's behavior,
so any faint cognitive dissonance that used to come up now and then
gets thoroughly ignored under the banner of family wellbeing and proof of loyalty - that small pinch of conviction mentioned above.
That anxious self-justification needs to be upgraded from a subjective compromise into something more objective - and this is exactly where word-of-mouth starts to work.
And just like that... what used to be an awkward self-rationalization of one's cognitive dissonance gradually hardens, until it gains command of the local common sense.
That's how good people start to play bad politics.
Maybe expecting business ethics, non-cowardice, and a non-thuggish life is already the naive attitude of a scholar who doesn't know how the world works, but...
..yeah,
it looks like I should just mind my own business.
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Slow Days·말로만 듣던 마흔
Why do good people play bad politics?
This English version was translated by Claude.
