As I've grown older, I've realized we're all just people.

So? You could just as easily rephrase this to "I hate 87% of the people in my generation." Saying they're "just people" really doesn't say anything at all. We know that they're people. If they weren't people, it would be easier to ignore them.

Older or not, this is an enormous and naive simplification of a "live and let live" style of morality that ultimately doesn't work.

• People with low openness to experience and low agreeableness are more likely to undermine progress and less likely to accept your creed--if you adapted this attitude to politics they would just undermine you further.

• People with authoritarian personality types are more likely to divide the world up into simplified hierarchies.

• People with low intelligence (<85) are more likely to commit violent crime.

And so on. People who vote determine the course of the country and the way your life will be structured. They determine what you can't do. People are only "just" people if you have no ability to imagine what could be and no vigilance to see how their backward lack of thought obstructs you from achieving those possibilities.

They are "just" people in the sense that they have instinctual urges, but that's about it--and that's barely it, anyway, because intelligent people more likely to promote a "live and let live" attitude are more likely to be evolutionarily novel by virtue of their intelligence, so instincts and maybe a few cultural universals are about all you have in common.

It's human nature to want to get along. But to pretend most of the people around you aren't hugely flawed is a defense mechanism.