The most politically focused people tend to be the most miserable, assessed Dave Rubin, host of the Rubin Report and author of Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, offering his comments on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.
Rubin advised against the placement of politics as one’s primary paradigm of experience.
“I think we have to try to separate every little [political] belief we have from how we are as humans,” Rubin urged. “I don’t want people to be permanently political. Right now — especially because of the coronavirus, I’m sure you’re seeing this on Twitter — the people that are obsessed with politics all the time, that can’t write about anything other than politics, or their whole worldview is consumed by politics, in many ways are the most miserable people, because politics is not a winning game.”
Rubin continued, “Politics is about controlling people, ultimately, and if you come from a … more libertarian perspective, where your goal is not to control everybody, I think there’s a way to be happier in life through that, because you want to free people, not control them. But if you’re if your goal is to control people — if you get off on controlling people — you will only be endlessly miserable.”
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“Conservatives seem to be much happier, right now, where leftists who are sort of drunk on steroid-laden secularism or something have nothing to believe in anymore,” stated Rubin. “So when the government’s run by a guy that they don’t like — or that they think is Hitler, as absurd as it is — they think the world is just coming to an end at all times. I don’t view politics as everything. It’s important, but it’s not everything.”
Pollak asked why conservatives are more reserved than leftists in terms of political sermonizing.
“Why is it that people on the left feel comfortable confronting people on the right about their views, but you almost never … have conservatives trying to get liberals to change their views in ordinary settings?” inquired Pollak. “Why is it okay for people on the left to do it, but people on the right feel like they’re overstepping a boundary if they do the same?”
Rubin responded, “There’s a very clear answer to this … Broadly speaking, if you’re on the right, you sort of have some live and let live, and you realize that politics isn’t everything, and you kind of want to live your life and hope that other people will live their lives. The reason for that is because people on the right basically believe in individual rights, meaning that if you’re a conservative or you’re a libertarian, you basically believe that everyone in the country should have the same rights, regardless of skin color, race, the rest of it. That’s a bedrock principle.”
Left-wing rejection of separation between realms of government and private life drives the ideology’s adherents to view all things through the lens of politics, explained Rubin.
“On the left, it’s different. There is no bedrock principle other than, ‘Government should do this,'” Rubin remarked. Leftists are “always in that race to out-government themselves,” he added.
Rubin went on, “Their business is everyone’s business, and everyone else’s business is their business,” noting that left-wing people are more likely to try to “jam their worldview down your throat” than those on the right.
“Their whole existential being is wrapped up in how they feel, and I think that’s why they’re constantly pushing this stuff on people,” concluded Rubin, describing leftists’ worldview as myopically political. “It’s the totality of how they view the world. They don’t view it through some other lens.”
Breitbart News Sunday broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.
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