This is exactly it and thank you for expaining it so well.
The desire for simple explanations, from an inability to understand complexity but also from fear of what seems like chaos, is also what underpins a lot of religious belief out there: life is a lot less scary and simpler if everything without an easy explanation is explained by being the will of a god or pantheon.
Hence why if you engage the populists (not just of the Right) in conversation pretty much everything boils down to a world view of black and white with no greys, “my side” vs “the other side”, no subtlety, no empathic understanding and so on.
Mind you, in some countries with voting systems rigged to enforce a power duopoly like the US, this kind of thinking has been activelly promoted as normal since forever because it justifies the power duopoly in the eyes of most people (if you think human problems are two-sided, two-sided politics looks like a reasonable way of allocating power, rather than looking like an anti-democractic suppression of most options), so it’s hardly unexpected that they’re the most fertile fields for populists preaching simple “explanations” and simple “solutions”.
This is exactly it and thank you for expaining it so well.
The desire for simple explanations, from an inability to understand complexity but also from fear of what seems like chaos, is also what underpins a lot of religious belief out there: life is a lot less scary and simpler if everything without an easy explanation is explained by being the will of a god or pantheon.
Hence why if you engage the populists (not just of the Right) in conversation pretty much everything boils down to a world view of black and white with no greys, “my side” vs “the other side”, no subtlety, no empathic understanding and so on.
Mind you, in some countries with voting systems rigged to enforce a power duopoly like the US, this kind of thinking has been activelly promoted as normal since forever because it justifies the power duopoly in the eyes of most people (if you think human problems are two-sided, two-sided politics looks like a reasonable way of allocating power, rather than looking like an anti-democractic suppression of most options), so it’s hardly unexpected that they’re the most fertile fields for populists preaching simple “explanations” and simple “solutions”.