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I've been thinking a lot recently about fundamental tensions, dualities, dialectics, how these map onto each other and relate to our societies, cultures, politics and secular cycles.
Bear with me a moment, I know this is abstract. But I think it provides a useful map for thinking about many issues, no matter which side you are on.
Consider a binary that we find very much in the news, culture and politics of the day, sex. Male-female is the binary, but there's a lot of definitional games being played. This binary is the poles of a fundamental tension, with a spectrum of related tensions in complicated combinations. But just think quickly on the issues of the day, and you can map that tension onto pretty much anything. In politics, which is “male” R or D? Hot or cold? Light or dark? Gay or straight? Drugs or prohibition? Guns or not? Notice the issues do not track cleanly, because both sides of any binary have a range of variability and expression for the same aspect. So, prohibition tracks female, which tracks D, but democrats generally support more drugs (but not tobacco). And male tracks R tracks guns, but prohibition on drugs, which tracks female. One side expresses their freedom in economics, the other in sex. One side demands order for the border, the other demands order in DC. Everyone is in tension, and so are our groups.
Thesis: This duality and how it resolves onto the issues of our day and the circumstances of our lives are a good descriptor for who we are, why we believe what we do, have the politics we have. I believe this helps us to understand why other people disagree with us, when we are clearly right about everything. The failure modes of these dualities explain the suffering experienced by the sentient in virtually all modes of life, no matter how objectively comfortable.
This extends to genetics itself (nature/nurture), primal forces (life/death, chaos/order, pleasure/suffering, violence/peace) and personal psychology and philosophy. It reaches into our very conceptions of these ideas, rationality vs irrationality.
Consider the subreddit AITA. What's the appeal here? It's weirdly attractive, tons of comments, shit flying everywhere. It allows people to see two "films" and argue for their conception. We have news silos because we are all practicing to do this. To see a situation and judge it by our lights, and then go forth to do battle with those on the opposing side. Goes for social media pile-ons and cancel culture, sports talk radio and small town gossip trains.
Hey there sportsfans, how about Coach Chucky? Is he a moron or what? Phone lines are open, call now.
Hey there Conservatives, how about this tranny reading to kids, whaddaya make of that shit? Isn't that weird and creepy? Donate money to me to keep telling you how nuts Liberals are!
Hey there Liberals, how about Current Republican having the same border policies as Previous Democrat? KIDS IN CagES!!!!!
The reality is that every duality has a fundamental legitimacy to it. Individuals have different ideas about exactly which values they hold on which scales of which issues.
Let's consider the two human archetypes by pole of duality. This is in no way determinative, as there is huge variation on most of these scales, but think of it very generally. You have male, nature, chaos, violence, irrationality, pain, greatness. And female, nurture, order, peace, rationality, pleasure, mediocrity.
These tensions need each other, as people need each other. Order decays, and is renewed by chaos. Male chaos is redirected by female order to more productive pursuits. Progressives come up with new ways to change society, Conservatives try to make sure it doesn't fuck up the good bits we already have. At this level of abstraction, conservative codes female, but politically that's not how it is currently, which is an interesting way of thinking about politics. The “feminine” politics of order are largely in the service of a “masculine” political project of trying out new shit. And the “male” embrace of inequality and freedom is channeled into the conservative project of slowing down the progs. The interactions are functionally infinite, so all this is descriptive rather than predictive. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and none of this means that these current realities are permanent in any way. But the tensions are.
Now let's put in some rudimentary statistics, and start making some basic assumptions that are certainly not 100% accurate, but should be a good descriptor of reality. Within each tension between two poles or archetypes is a bell curve of human behavior. It can be tall or short, but the poles of a tension are rare. Pure archetypes always are. Most people, psychology and behavior will cluster around the average value to some degree. What is true for IQ is true for violence, income, sex and number of offspring.
This begins to explain secular cycles, Freud, political organization and horseshoe theory. It explains why marginal members of groups are often the biggest cheerleaders. The most famous German nationalist was Austrian. Shaun King is white. The richest woman in the world is a dude. The first black president wasn't “black-black” (ADOS), and the first black president was Bill Clinton. Math is not without its ironies.
If it were the case that humans had a single nature, we should not expect cycles of any sort. We should simply solve our problems the most direct way and have a smooth path through history. We see nothing of the sort, but we do see a general tendency toward higher organization, larger civilizations etc. Think of the law of averages pushing this vast ocean of human duality relentlessly toward the middle. Order is winning, at least for now, but it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and we all know it. Hence the millenial cults of the Second Coming and Global Warming as the duelling apocalypses fueling the paranoid fringe of each political religion.
We all feel within us that this level of organization can't be sustained with the number of people we are producing, and that is going to mean a lot of death at some point. Malthus has been wrong for a long time, but the heat death of the universe is a long way off and he won't be forever. The popularity of the zombie movie is a social expression of the human connection to this fear. It is our fantasy that we'd be the ones to survive.
The reality is, the world isn't ending today and probably not tomorrow. We'll keep muddling along. We are the richest and most advanced we've ever been, more people are living more comfortable lives than any time before, and in fact in all the time before added together! And we're miserable as shit.
Our dual nature is oppressed by every temporary victory of one side. All order and the very real benefits it brings are at the cost of very real oppression. Freedom is dangerous, unequal and in general a bad bet. Yet it militates within us, furious and raging at the restrictions of our social lives. We feel an injustice in the randomness of the world, the pointlessness of all the suffering, the sheer cruelty of sentience in a cold and mechanical universe. What Dillard calls the “glut of pain”.
The problem with rationality is that it is death in the end. The math of the universe says that we are here to suffer until we die, and no amount of joy we steal from relentless time will last. Following our natural instincts to reproduce our genes will only bring more people into the world to suffer until they die. Once we lose all excuses for our suffering, we find that it was within us all the time. Transhumanists and wireheaders fantasize about bypassing suffering via drugs and technology. Religious gurus variously channel and redirect it. Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something. If you want to know why there is a loss of meaning, it is because we are running out of excuses to explain our psychic pain.
But for every pole is a competing and legitimate one. Life finds a way, hope springs eternal, it's just crazy enough to work. Any good game theorist can tell you that irrationality is rational at times. It is this that Camus refers to when he says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not happy with his circumstance per se, but happy that he has his suffering laid out before him, and he is willing to meet it. In his punishment there is more time. The irrational search for another roll of the dice, a possible future, a chance at the gods. A revolt against death, against inevitability, against math itself. A sense that if we can hang in this game long enough, if we play our cards right and we get a bit lucky, we might someday escape this hellworld within our own skulls.
tbh this post and parts of its replies almost deserve a minor mention in the 'ways smart people can be very confused' museum that hosts greats like Weininger, Hegel, and Berkeley. Hopefully miy reply doesn't!
Conflicts over categories aren't driven by the existence of categories, categories are just rough labels or ideas people have that are useful to their ends, and said categories pop up and conflicts occur over them over those nebulous, fractal, and contingent ends. Republicans aren't republicans because they're polarizing around R vs D, they are so because of the atoms hitting other atoms, which at our scale occurs in thousands of different rough patterns, some of which are 'reacting to increases in crime and homelessness', 'noticing many surrounding them are failing relative to traditional religious morality', etc. Given that complexity, it's difficult to make any claims about the way such conflicts unfold that don't reference said underlying causes at all.
Not really sure what you're arguing tbh, but I think a direct refutation of it is that (and this comes from the intuition that these 'poles' are more casual terms than they are fundamental) of two poles, often one just wins. Organized christian religious institutions as a political force behind history lost to democratic, modern politics. Horse-drawn carriages for practical transportation lost to cars, swords lost to guns, etc. There's no root causes in conflict between 'poles', just the laws of physics and the complexities of human interests and contingencies acting through them.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, I'm talking about human nature and you're talking about technology. The fundamental tensions I'm talking about map onto these technological, social and political issues and innovations in unpredictable ways.
Politics may have defeated Christianity, but that wasn't a fundamental tension, politics and religion coexisted for millenia before, and will again. The tension there would be between the moralistic and materialistic human urges. So politics defeats a religion, but it becomes a religion in the process, thereby maintaining the duality. Even atheists need a god and a heaven, even if god is the president and heaven is "gay luxury space communism". This is the tension that destroys materialistic politics, it's why communism never worked and became a cult. It just couldn't get over the god-shaped hole. Politically, this tension gets generalized as "church and state", and it is generally understood today that separating the two is better for both. Render unto the one pole the things that are Caesar's and to the other, the things that are God's.
At sufficient levels of abstraction, some good advice.
Many more than this, I think. My point, somewhat garbled perhaps, is not that any group has some eternal essence, much the opposite. We all have the same conflicts within us, these are so numerous and interact in such complex ways that there's no predicting how they'll map onto the future. But if one digs into an issue long enough and defines the terms carefully enough, the basic tensions usually present themselves quickly.
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You correctly note that this is descriptive, and not prescriptive. That the data is noisy and the correlations poor—not that correlation implies causation, anyway. For a given issue it is easy to find counterexamples, or even imagine an alternate history where the constituencies might have been reversed.
Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?
Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions. Neither nature nor nurture but natural law. Rejecting both autocracy and chaos in favor of mediated decision-making. The role in your gender analogy is obvious. It is the synthesis to this dialectic. After all, the poles of a tension are rare.
This category rejects duality in favor of a triality. What if we posit another category, one that rejects all three? Meta-compromise, or perhaps meta-skepticism. Then—then—
By induction, we end up with an arbitrarily large set of skeptic positions. An infinity of signaling and countersignaling. I think this model better reflects human interaction than any proposed duality. For any sufficiently entrenched set of positions, there is alpha in claiming another level of sophistication.
Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.
If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.
In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.
Then what does it buy us?
At best, you’ve applied Principal Component Analysis to sociology. But correlation still isn’t causation, and just because you can model a position as a linear combination of some axes doesn’t imply they are meaningful.
It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.
And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.
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Yeah, that would be a giant waste of time, which is why I didn't do it.
So you have understood me!
Yes. The duality is within us. If you define things carefully and specifically enough, the dichotomy presents itself. A warm sun on a cold day is "female" because it is comforting and pleasurable, something we associate with the feminine, but hot, sweaty sun is more masculine and cool breeze and shade would be more "feminine" in that specific case. This is not about dogmatic categories, but explaining seemingly contradictory ideals.
Exactly. A functionally infinite set of interactions and influences.
Here we may disagree slightly, but it's definitional. I think it is explainable in terms of a confluence of tensions, and I think it is derivable by these methods, but that no one actually does it. This does not mean I think there is some deep essence to left or right, R or D, I merely use those because the tension between them is high and it allows us to see that as you say, there is no consistency in politics.
That's sort of the point. Take gun and drug legalization/restriction. This is a political issue, not a fundamental tension, but this can be seen in terms of different axes of tension. You have danger/safety, freedom/restriction, power/weakness, pain/pleasure, etc. Everyone looks at those issues, does their party affiliation thing and finds an explanation that satisfies them about why they think what they think. The "freedom" value is associated with the "danger", "power" and "pleasure" values here, which means that people who are really far out on the bell curve on the axis of "freedom" would probably scorn the danger and desire the pleasure and be in favor of both (i.e. libertarians). Everyone else is more toward the average of these tensions, and we get the muddy partial restriction of contemporary politics where certain guns and certain drugs are legal in certain circumstances.
Hilariously, you seem to have almost perfectly misunderstood. There is no shared symbolic content for political groups, that's the whole point. All sides have all the binaries, in infinitely complex combinations. Society, the world, international politics is so fiendishly complex because of these interactions, because every binary contains a million different binaries. Countries, corporations, cities, parties, people are not one thing. "I tried to draw the line, but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time".
Yes and no. Yes there are many factions, and in part this whole little shitpost is about how infinite and varied those factions can be. But I think there are always two sides, made up of those many, many interest groups with their own specific combination of beliefs and interests in constantly shifting coalitions with only two real sides. Roman politics had millions of shifts, reversals, revolutions and coups, but the optimates and the populares, the greens and blues. There is a binary there.
Conflict does not end, it only moves, because the tension is fundamental. When one side of a binary that became political or social "wins", what happens? Where does that tension go? Do all the constituent interests, powers, parties and people just evaporate? Impossible. The conflict just moves. After war, conflict moves into politics, war being the continuation of politics by violent means, and peace being the continuation of war by nonviolent means. Germany won a hegemony over continental Europe in peace much more effectively than they ever did in war.
The various interest groups split into constituent parts and vie for power within that binary before reconstituting with other groups in a new political reality. If one group "wins" at something, they usually split into a new binary and one side will ally with the losers from the previous conflict. So the pre-civil war national binary was slave/free, north/south, east/west. When the south seceded, the national binary was then pro-war Republicans and pro-peace Democrats. When the south lost and was reintegrated, the losing faction from the war years re-allied with the south.
Political coalitions are inherently unstable and given to shedding marginal members. The more one side wins, the more the important contest is internal. Think one-party elections where the nomination is the real contest. The more power one side of a political binary gains, the more important their internal divisions are. If one political group destabilizes the interparty binary, they will be split by the resulting tension, new coalitions will emerge and the two-party binary will return in full effect.
This can be expressed in multiple parties, or only within one party. But there will always be a fundamental division within every group.
From the subatomic to the international.
Everything is conflict.
Dillard says that death is spinning the globe, but she shaded it. She read Heisenberg. She turned back at the pass.
Math is spinning the globe, and death is just part of it. All values resolve to zero eventually.
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