Could you please stop using the terms "smarter" and "stupider"? It's not an intelligence thing, there's no learning involved. It's about our ability to process choices. We process one at a time and have a hard time deciding between more than three choices, and it's even easier to decide between two. That's just how we are. If you have more than this number of choices, you will pare it down until you only have this number of choices. In the US, this has manifested as a nation-wide two-party mentality which extends beyond just politics. This is a result of our culture. In other places (but not every other place), it has distilled in a different way, but the mentality is still present subconsciously. It's the "with us or against us" mentality, by the way. It is ingrained into our DNA, so every person has this. The number of political parties has no bearing on it. When a country has more than two political parties, this is an indication that they have more than one, not that the people are smarter or have better brains or anything. They still distill their individual choice to two or three. And no, this is not contrary to my argument. Again, I have always supported having more than two parties. I have always said that more parties generally equals good. This is an explanation as to why we have two parties, and why breaking it will be hard. And as for the supposed contradiction: When you decide between 500 things, all of reasonable worth, and whittle it down to two or three and then make a final decision, you are not deciding between 500 things. You are deciding between a successive 2-3 things that when added together equal 500. Each decision is still made between two things, it's just a way of getting around that limitation. Even the people who decide between multiple things at once are still doing this, it's just quieter, and sometimes faster and sloppier. Does that make sense? Continue with this and you can have more than two parties in politics, because some parties won't count as the decision for some people, and others for others.
I have not once said "I want a two party system". I think that would be bad. I did say that I want a multi-party system where the parties don't all suck. The issue I took with your remark is that it was absolutist. You claimed that simply adding parties to the system would help. I've been trying to point out that the type and quality of the party matters. If you add a ton of terrible parties that no one will vote for to the system, they aren't really doing anything to alleviate the issues of the two party system. The thing that needs to happen is that people VOTE for other parties. Simply existing will (and does, since there are a ton of parties right now) do nothing.
Well, I never said stupider, since that's not really a thing, but your implication is that those in countries with more parties are better at making choices than Americans.
As to your overall assertion that people ALWAYS distill things into two choices, you are actually wrong. Most of the time people actually make decisions unconsciously. People simply decide without thinking much about the decision making process at all; mainly because it takes too much effort to go through the process for every choice. So people really aren't distilling to two, they are just picking the best option that's available for them and running with it without thinking about it much. This feeds a two party system in that they can vie to be the only candidate on the ballot and most people aren't interested enough to find out why they only have two choices.
but even when talking about people who do go through the decision making process, distilling to two choices is only one technique among many:
-Elimination by Aspects is the formal psychological name for the distilling down technique you describe
-Pros and Cons: decision-making based on listing the advantages and disadvantages.
-Simple Prioritization: Listing the choices and ordering them based on utility
-Satisficing: examining all the alternatives until a viable option is found
-Acquiescence: Submitting to the decision of a person in authority
-Rebelling: taking the opposite course advised by establishment or authority
-Flipism: just flipping a coin or randomly choosing
-Prayer, tarot cards, astrology or other forms of divination
-Opportunity cost analysis: the benefit of one choice weighted against the cost of not choosing the second best choice
-Bureaucratic: choosing a criteria upon which to make automatic decisions
-Political: negotiate choices among interest groups and choose the compromise
These are just the major techniques people use to make decisions. You may only be able to make choices by distilling to black and white(or maybe just black), but its only 1 out of 11 of the major decision making processes used.
Of course type and quality of parties matter, my point is, if you have two power-broker parties that crush or absorb all newcomers, you crush the good with the bad. I'm not happy with any other person(or group of people) making the decision for me as to what party(s) I can choose. Sure I'd hope that all new parties were viable and awesome, but we don't live in a perfect world here, and some are gonna be bad. You don't get to pick for me, nor do I get to pick for anyone else which parties are the good ones and the bad ones; we just have to let them live and grow on their own merit.
Right now if a new party is good it gets marginalized, if bad, it gets marginalized, and that is the wrong answer.
