Elections and the "Crow Epistemology"

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis has asserted that

"[t]his election is not about issues. . . . This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

Of course, Davis is right, and not only for what I thought was the obvious reason. To me, the obvious reason Rick Davis is right was put most pointedly by Bertrand Russell:

Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.

The less obvious reason, I have come to conclude, is that people literally don't have the brain space to deal with all the issues they're asked to decide about in a given election.

Have you seen the Democratic and Republican Party Platforms? They're 56 and 67 pages long, respectively. There are 19 substantive issue areas featured at the McCain campaign website, and 23 on Obama's website. I mean, really, who could read all that stuff? And once you read it, how could you keep it straight in your head long enough to make a voting decision based on that information?

Ayn Rand often referred to a famous experiment that endeavored to see how high crows could count. Here is my (likely bungled) description of the experienment.

Researchers hid near a clearing frequented by crows. A man would cross a clearing and vanish into the trees, and then come out of the trees back across the clearing. When the man came into the clearing, the crows hid, and would not reemerge until the man retraced his steps back across the clearing. The same actions were repeated with two men, and then three men, and in each of these cases, the crows would hide and then reemerge only when exactly the same number of men who had crossed the clearing had retraced their steps. However, the crows could not accurately count above three men. Five men could cross the clearing, and the crows would come out of hiding after only four men had retraced their steps.

Ayn Rand said that men shared this same "crow epistemology," in that we can only hold so many concretes in our head at a given time. If we don't condense the concretes, we overload and lose track, and often simply shut down.

Conceptualization allows us to hold vast amounts of data in our head at one time, through the principle of "unit economy." But conceptualization is not automatic, and it's not easy. It takes effort, will power, thought -- in fact, it's downright taxing.

Every four years, the American electorate is bombarded with politicians' positions on issues. But not just one or two, as when they're polled and can come up with a ready answer. They're bombarded on every single issue. And their crow brains have a cow -- so to speak.

That's why a party's narrative is decisive. When Obama says that the American public expects candidates to talk about the issues, he's not wrong. Americans probably do think they want to hear about issues. But actually, dealing with the issues is too hard; it is literally too much to keep in our heads.

What we really need to hear from our political parties is their philosophy, reduced to a few clear sentences. That's clearly too much to hope for. But the Republican party grasps that the message has to be simple, simple, simple, and that simplicity is far more important than substance. There's actually a book out there called Don't Make Me Think. It's about web usability, but the point applies in presidential politics, too. The point is: DON'T MAKE ME THINK. Give me a pre-packaged reason I can sell to myself about why I should vote a particular way, so I can make my decision and be done with it.

For better or worse, the narrative's the thing that will make our king.