Politics is not just nonbinary, it’s nonlinear
This is an excerpt from my first book, Phoenix Afterlife
“Most of the time, people try to understand each other using a linear scale.”
“Like IQ, for example,” Alice suggested, more animated now. “That’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. Anyone who studies the brain realizes how absurd it is to try to measure intelligence using a single number. As if it made any sense at all to say that person X is smarter than person Y. It doesn’t. There are many dimensions to intelligence, and you can’t rank people along a line of who’s smarter than whom. Looking at people that way has caused a lot of damage in the education system.”
“You’re right. That’s a great example,” Eliot said. “But actually, I was thinking about other things, like political thought. People want to know if you’re liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. When people ask me that I tell them something like ’47.3’.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“If politics can be reduced to a position on a linear scale—left to right, say—then that means the entire complexity of a person’s political philosophy can be represented by a single number. That’s ridiculous, so I give them a ridiculous answer. Discussions are more interesting when you don’t start with absurd premises.”
Alice laughed. “You must be great at parties, Eliot.”
“Well, nine times out of ten, people find an excuse to walk away and talk to somebody else. But those tenth times make it all worthwhile.”
“So do you think there is a meaningful framework—multidimensional, of course—for categorizing something like political thought?” Alice asked.
“It’s not just a matter of multiple dimensions,” Eliot continued. He’d thought about this quite a bit. “The problem is finding orthogonal ones. When you talk about two dimensions, like the surface of a paper, you can use two numbers—x and y coordinates—to locate any point. But that only works because the two dimensions are perpendicular to each other, so you can measure against one axis independently of the other. I don’t think that’s true for political thought. Any dimension you can come up with—economics, liberty, centralization, taxation, defense, foreign relations—has interdependencies with the other dimensions. When your attitude moves along one of those dimensions, your position on other dimensions tends to shift, too. In fact, I think most rational people end up in clumps around the center of the coordinate system. To get to the extreme end of any one axis, you have to ignore or suppress a lot of logical inconsistencies on the others, yet the political parties stress the extremes. It’s like some warped version of the Platonic ideal—an abstraction never seen in the real world but believed in more strongly than reality.”