My friends have described me as liberal although I think of myself as conservative. I have argued about this extensively and have concluded that the prevailing political models and theories simply do not provide for misfits such as I. Now if this were science instead of politics, I’d say that the anomalies to the theory are golden. By exploring the anomalies, science has made its greatest breakthroughs. For example, it was a simple experiment which contradicted our basic assumptions that led Albert Einstein to formulate his theory of relativity. To understand the dilemma arising from the experiment, consider a gun capable of shooting bullets at 1000 mi/hr (1600 km/hr). Now mount the gun to a jet moving 500 mi/hr (800 km/hr). Don’t ask me how to mount the gun to a moving jet; that’s not the point. Now fire a bullet from the flying jet and it would then hit a stationary target at 1500 mi/hr (2400 km/hr). The speed of the jet would increase the speed of the bullet. When two physicists, Michelson and Morley, measured the speed of light moving in the direction of the earth’s motion, they expected that it would move faster than light moving perpendicular to the earth’s motion. In other words, they expected rays of light to speed up like bullets fired from a moving plane. Instead, they found that light traveled at the same speed regardless of the velocity of its emitter. It was one of the most important discoveries ever made.
I think that our political models utterly fail to move us in the direction of progress. If I were more cynical than I am, I would say that the “left” and “right” ideologies are inventions of politicians to inflate our sense of their value, like that which diamond producers accomplished when they associated their product with love and commitment. We accepted the diamond lie and told them to take our money. The inflated value of politicians also creates a sense of urgency because we know that if the wrong candidate were elected, he or she would encroach on our lives and our values. Well, I despise both the left and the right. One thing I like about Trump is that he is hated by both wings. I will admit that I especially abhor the left because I feel that they choke the spirit of innovation and silence dissent through political correctness and the mind police. They make promises that they can’t possibly perform on, as any sincere review of history will aptly demonstrate. For instance, they promise to relieve the poor, but they only make the poor poorer while blaming the phenomenon on their opposition. Nevertheless, my intention is not to attack the left. I really want to see a comprehensive overhaul of the entire system. I want a theory of politics that opens up our understanding like Einstein’s theory did for science.
Government claims to establish law and order. The underlying assumption is that, left to ourselves, we would plunder, murder, and rape each other. We need government to restrain us from the evil that lurks within us. I hope that the flaw in that assumption is obvious. If we need government because we are inherently evil, then we’re relying on evil people to prevent us from being evil. If you are most cunningly evil, where better than the ranks of government to oppress your fellow creatures? So we still plunder, murder, and rape each other, but at least we feel safe because big brother is looking out for us. Government as presently constituted in every country (that I am familiar with) is really about control.
Imagine nine assorted blocks made in triples of wood, plastic, or clay and printed with the face letters A, B, or C in the colors of blue, green, or red. To establish law and order, government must arrange these blocks. There are 362,880 ways of doing it. Now who decides the proper order? Do the Reds band together against the C’s? Well, that’s a problem because one of the Reds is a C. That creates conflict, but most of the blocks have accepted that a few blocks must suffer for the greater good, and now we have oppression. Moreover, the plastics feel underrepresented with all of this emphasis on face letters and colors, despite the fact that every plastic block also has a face letter and a color. Plastic is the unique property that identifies them. The A’s have always had it good, and the clays have had enough! Somehow, the blocks eventually work through their differences, but no one is happy except one or two big blocks who benefit most from the arrangement. Once an order has been established, how does their society punish the blocks that fall out of line? Is there inherently anything wrong with a block being out of place? Well, the big blocks think so, although the others wonder what the fuss is really about. The big blocks put the squeeze on the little blocks who then compel the dissenters to stay in line or suffer.
If it seems that I’m proposing anarchy, I’m not, even though I believe that control is evil. In a righteous society, anarchy is heaven. I know that I’d get there much sooner by holding my breath indefinitely, but in the meantime, I plan to live here, in this world. The left and the right both seek to control and they pit us against each other so that we will build their ivory towers and big red buttons that they may use to blast their opponents out of existence. The right seeks to exercise control over social issues such as abortion and immigration. I’m not crazy about the idea of ripping a baby out of the womb, but the conservatives would climb up onto God’s throne and define life in order to impose their views on others. The left seeks to exercise control over economic issues such as wealth and goods and services. They disregard the second amendment to the constitution, the supreme law of the land, to pass laws restricting our purchase of guns, somehow dancing around the cognitive dissonance of their position while telling us to trust that they would never oppress us. Meanwhile, both sides want more law enforcement, because, well, you know, they’ve got to stuff their great ideas down our throats at gunpoint.
Obviously referring to government in terms of left and right is an oversimplification. Nevertheless, we need to simplify this mammoth machine as much as we can. Models help us make sense of complex systems. They enable us to make powerful predictions, like Einstein’s theory has done. A one-dimensional linear model is the most common for politics: left and right, liberal and conservative. However, this model suggests an insipid middle with infinite extremes. I dislike this model because it implies that we must either compromise with the evil on both sides or dive into a particular brand of evil on one side. Political theorists have suggested that the political continuum is really more like a horseshoe. This model suggests that the further an adherent departs from center, the more he looks like his political opponent. This model was probably developed to explain how Stalin and Hitler could be so similar in some ways and yet so opposed in others. It really falls short of capturing the phenomenon, however. Bending a line into a horseshoe in order to depict similarities between opposing extremes really just establishes two perpendicular axes, left and right being one axis, and libertarianism and totalitarianism being another axis. Axes are polarizing.
These two dimensional models abound, but some completely contradict others due to the biases of the people making them. For instance, they disagree wildly on where to place fascism and anarchy in relation to other political ideologies. Simply Google “political spectrum theory” to see how many different and contradictory models there are. None of these models solve our problem, though. I feel that they are like the false assumptions that physicists made about light prior to the Michelson-Morley experiment. Furthermore, some models use completely different axes which means that it’s really a many-dimensional problem. Eventually you’ll need as many dimensions as there are aspects of human life, and that’s staggering. Here’s the startling realization that I had after noticing that it would require more and more dimensions to unify all of these different political theories. The higher the number of dimensions, the closer together things become. Let me demonstrate using circles and spheres to represent entities like people. In two dimensions (like on a piece of paper), we can draw three circles that all touch the others without overlapping, like this:
There’s another one that we could draw in the middle (area shaded in green), but I’m going to exclude that because it’s tiny compared to the others. I’m aiming to show how political opponents get closer together in higher dimensions, so I want to put them on an equal footing. Now, if we bump it to three dimensions and three dimensional spheres, we can arrange four spheres in like manner–all touching each other without overlapping. (Again, there’s another tiny one in the middle which I’m going to exclude.) Now, if we continue this process to ever higher dimensions, let’s say n-dimensions, then we could arrange n+1 spheres which all touch each other without overlapping.
So what does this have to do with politics and political models? In our simplified society using blocks, if we defined each configuration of material, face-letter, and color to be a political dimension, all nine blocks could stand in a circle with each block standing next to every other block. And what about that tenth (n+1) position? Well, it could be occupied by God above, in his rightful place. In this political framework, order becomes irrelevant. So much for the role of government to establish law and order.
So I guess this is the model that I am proposing. Let’s allow for seven billion dimensions in politics. All it requires is a shift in thinking, like Einstein had when he realized that light travels at the same speed in all reference frames. I’m not saying that government should be extinguished. I’m saying that government needs to stop ordering people’s lives. It needs to stop punishing people who step outside of the lines. The individual needs to be holy in politics. The whole is also beautifully integrated with the individual in this model. Why do some countries experience much less crime than others despite having similar laws? Is it because they are stricter? No, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with respect. My visit to Japan taught me that. They have much less crime than the United States. Their country is highly homogeneous whereas the U.S. is highly diverse. We’re at each other’s throats over race, religion, and economics, and the list goes on endlessly. Japan simply doesn’t deal with a lot of those dimensions. The only true crimes are those actions which maliciously or negligently (as with children) violate the sanctity of the individual. Government should be about protecting that.
Ariel Hammon
Author of JACK
Image of Trump and Clinton taken from here.
Image of circles take from here and image of spheres taken from here.