Keeping your identity 'small' is really easy when you're rich and don't need to team up to effect change. Identities are what form motivated groups, and groups

Keeping your identity 'small' is really easy when you're rich and don't need to team up to effect change. Identities are what form motivated groups, and groups -- or parties -- are, for better or for worse, what our form of democracy runs on. Rich dudes can keep small identities and still make shit happen; poor everyone-else has to form teams, and with a diversity of levels of education, talent, intelligence and common sense, that will invariably mean pandering and WOOOOing a bit. Why? Because not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rhetoric. Ex hypothesis everyone else has already been 'taken', i.e. has considered opinions, so by elimination it's the aggressive, passionate idiots who play kingmaker. Thus explaining US politics. So, Paul Graham, keep your identity small, but please enlarge your perspective. People are getting irrational because they're getting riled up, and they're getting riled up because riling-up is what gets the Irrational Vote, and that's the only one that's not already either bought or reasoned into passivity. It's game theory, in other words. Like most human suffering.