Human Nature

[Belacqua]

Take climate change for example.  In a sane world, all political parties would acknowledge the facts and offer different policies to deal with the various problems involved.

Denialism is a problem with human nature, a problem with confronting the facts honestly.

I suppose we could say that human nature manifests and shows itself in politics. 

If it's human nature to deny hard truths, then our politicians will get votes by denying hard truths. 

It's also easier to talk about political policies and personalities than it is to talk about general human characteristics, probably. Like if you're looking for examples of greed and mendacity, the stuff that gets reported in the news every day become our go-to examples. 

There's a saying that "politics is downstream from culture." This was popularized by somebody we don't like -- a MAGA type avant la lettre. But it makes sense that these things work at least in dialectic. Political movements may encourage certain human traits, while natural traits make these political movements possible. 

Marxists (I think I mentioned before) claim that human nature is far more malleable than we usually acknowledge. They say that our social conditions (especially economics) cause us to behave in certain ways which then become "reified" as "second nature." Not really nature (like needing to breathe oxygen) but so deeply a part of custom that we find it hard to imagine anything different.