The underlying philosophical implications of political issues

[Trothan]

I have been interested in the deeper implications of complicated issues. I see beauty in politics because I wonder who I would have to be in order to set aside all bias and be as objective as I can be. On some level it is a self sacrifice for the good of humanity and the universe. I would like to point out a few deeper issues which lie just beneath the surface of every culture war. Sometimes I worry that people will think I'm weird if they know about my fascination with many horrible, brutal, and disgusting things in the world.

I have had good results with my family by sharing my thoughts on politics. They used to have a lot of fights at the kitchen table over heated political opinions. I have found a way to stop these fights through teaching them spiral dynamics, self deception, the problems with ideology, the nature of identity, and more. I planned on expanding on identity because it is the root of all self deception, but it seems that they don't need it.

I seem to be obsessed with understanding how humanity works and how all of these complicated issues overlap. It doesn't look like a horrible mess to me, but rather seems beautiful for some reason even though I know millions of people are dying and needlessly suffering. It is like the beauty of reality beyond the typical human perspective of taking survival for granted. I don't know what it is about the complexity of life that seems beautiful to me. when complexity is taken for granted, it leads to black and white thinking, tribalism, and polarization. In order to think as objectively and unbiased as possible, I would want to ride above this while recognizing that sometimes one side is right in a debate.

First of all, is it possible to be unbiased? Not really. The entire reason I am discussing this and typing this is a consequence of a bias I have. I could be talking about skateboarding dog videos on YouTube, yet my values tell me this is more significant and valuable. The goal therefore, is not to be unbiased, but rather to choose our biases consciously. Most people are reactionary and they are not choosing their biases consciously, but rather getting swept away by the latest outrage which prevents them from seeing the big picture.

The biases I choose are open mindedness, holistic understanding, and self improvement. To me, politics is not about attacking people for being selfish, emotional, and ignorant. Although these criticisms are often valid, what really matters to me is being the best human I can possibly be. What matters to me most is self reflection and self knowledge. I want to offer nothing but the highest love to humanity because I don't want people to suffer in the same way I have for the entirety of my life.

That said, I know I am not perfect. Every idea seems intelligent in the moment we think it until hindsight kicks in. Although I value open mindedness, I admit that this value was determined when I was a child as I reacted religious fundamentalism. I would like to let go of this judgement I hold toward religion because I know that I could offer an even greater love to humanity. I also see value in open mindedness, so it is not purely reactionary.

I would like to make a career out of all of this. At the moment I am working at a grocery and I don't like. I am unable to demonstrate my value because the position itself is too constraining. Lately I have been outraged because it is impossible to negotiate a raise with my boss despite my superior performance to other employees, but that is a long story. In any case, I don't want to live my life like this. I have more to offer the world and I am not being recognized for it.

I hope to expand on my interest in this thread later.

 

[Storm Hess]

Politics is simple...money talks, bs walks. Money buys opinions, favours and power. Mass movements are the only thing that changes the game. Politics doesn't favour the weak, the weak are used as leverage.

I love your outlook. Put that outlook into action...that will move people.

 

[Raggamuffin]

"I see beauty in politics because I wonder who I would have to be in order to set aside all bias and be as objective as I can be. On some level it is a self sacrifice for the good of humanity and the universe."

All you hear in the news regarding politicians is a lot of bias, bickering and self-serving and greed.

Tories & Labour in UK are different flavours of the same poison.

Feels like in the UK, anyone who wants to enact real, dramatic change in society will always be on the fringes of politics, because you can't rock the boat too much as there's too much money and power involved. Too many would risk losing out if you were to knock things down and rebuild.

Bit like the NHS for instance. That's been in a downward spiral for decades. It's chronically understaffed, bloated with overpaid positions, hugely mismanaged, waiting times through the roof, new Dr's striking because they feel underpaid and undervalued, it's a bottomless pit of problems. Yet it's this nation's sacred cow to the UK. Nobody has the stones to admit the glaringly obvious - this simply isn't working and it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Easier said than done I'm sure.

Or COVID - plenty of self-serving politicians secured contracts and made money profiting over the pandemic.

It'd be lovely to think politicians would be unbiased and selfless. But I think the old motto about power corrupting people springs to mind.

Ed

 

[Neonatal RRT]

It certainly would be refreshing if the people of the world suddenly became logical thinkers, and stop reacting to every little emotional impulse.

1. Greed and envy, and all their variants, are at the root of the evils.
2. Fear is used as a political manipulator.
3. The media uses the extremists, the "lunatic fringe", on either side of the political spectrum as tools to guide the conversations and internet "click-bait". Internet advertisers make money off it, and the more shocking and terrible the news, the more the disinformation and conformational bias falls within your personal beliefs, the more "clicks", the more advertising dollars. It's a rather sick and elaborate psychological, trillion-dollar money machine that is tearing societies apart.
4. Personal information/identification data mining and selling (A.I. corporate and criminal), meta-analysis, polls, questionnaires, "clicks", "likes", view time on literally everything, is all sold to the political organizations and then used by politicians to analyze their potential constituents. They modify their message heavily based upon whom they are speaking to, aka "pandering". Campaigning is nothing more than data-based theatre. Tell the audience what they want to hear, get voted into office, then do what the big, powerful corporations are paying you to do. There's a lot of money to be made as a career politician.
5. The human brain has a natural intellectual bias for fear and negativity, so it really is an intellectual challenge for people to overcome that, and focus upon the beauty and positivity in this world.

I don't have a clue how to fix all of that, but it WILL end us all. Being "woke", as it pertains to my life, is making myself aware of the systems and forces at play that may effect my life. There are some things I can't change, but I can be aware of them. There are some things that I can do to sort of anticipate, prepare for, and even avoid. You really can't know enough about how the political forces at play may effect you and your loved ones. Understand both sides. Don't fall into the trap of conformational bias. Be an informed citizen.

 

[tree]

@Trothan

In what ways do you suppose this interest has been
enhanced by autistic style thinking?

 

[Trothan]

@Trothan

In what ways do you suppose this interest has been
enhanced by autistic style thinking?

People with autism are commonly forced to analyze Neuro typical people like an anthropologist would. It is hard to relate to other people and understand them.
autistic thinking gives one an outside perspective from which to explore the Neuro typical ways of thinking. As I am pushed to understand humanity due to it being hard to understand Neuro typical people, it often leads to very deep levels.
This includes how people are self deceived and the implications of self deception on broader scale. People are often thinking with their emotions and their identity rather than with logic. Of course, I must appreciate the limits of logic as well.
at the core of this interest, I am trying to understand how the mind works and the consequences of failing to understand how the mind works. There are serious political consequences that arise due to people not understanding the mind. People with autism are commonly pushed to understanding the mind through studying psychology, but there are also broader political implications.

 

[LadyS]

I feel like, from my point of view, one of the steps towards becoming unbiased is akin to the autistic realm of being on the outside looking in. I think the autistic feeling of being an outsider, or an "alien on the wrong planet", could be useful in the purpose of identifying patterns in human behavior at least it has been for me. But it also takes knowing your own biases, using logic to scrutinize how you think and feel and why that is... self awareness is something so needed by everyone.

In trying to be unbiased I debate whether there really is a "right or wrong'. Those are rules that society has put in place in order to keep the peace and progress and being raised in those rules we tend to be biased in those terms. But then consider rhe laws of nature: Eat or be eaten, and you can go down other wormholes. What makes us think we are superior to other species? And is what we are doing really helping ourselves as a collective or just a select few, or both (as in nature even though we think we are separate from it).
I think this why I've always felt like an outsider, because I see it different ways but cannot justify one way over another.

 

[tazz]

Certainly an interesting topic for discussion.

My understanding is that debates about politics (and religion) are off limits. However, this seems set up as a discussion about debates about politics (and maybe religion), like a meta-debate maybe. Philosophy?

I'd like to read more.

 

[tazz]

@Trothan Do you have any major influences such as philosophers, politicians, journalists, psychologists and sociologists that have already published works on this?

 

[Judge]

In such a context, I inevitably defer to the opposing works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The former emphasizing the inevitable precarious and negative nature of man, versus the latter which espouses "inalienable rights".

Though I also find Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince and the Discourses" to also be relevant in terms of policy development that tends to reflect so much negative human behavior regardless of ideological leanings. But then this work was as well a blistering criticism of undisciplined autocratic thinking. And in particular to stress that to Machiavelli, politics is inherently an amoral process.

And in modern times I recall a political science professor who stated that all human relationships are inherently political ones, given the most common denominator- personal gain. That even the most well-intended pursuits (such as love) are ultimately on individual human need. Where she frequently reminded the class, "Everything is political!"

That for one to proclaim an optimal system to govern man, you must ultimately remove man from the equation.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

"I see beauty in politics because I wonder who I would have to be in order to set aside all bias and be as objective as I can be. On some level it is a self sacrifice for the good of humanity and the universe."

All you hear in the news regarding politicians is a lot of bias, bickering and self-serving and greed.

Tories & Labour in UK are different flavours of the same poison.

Feels like in the UK, anyone who wants to enact real, dramatic change in society will always be on the fringes of politics, because you can't rock the boat too much as there's too much money and power involved. Too many would risk losing out if you were to knock things down and rebuild.

Bit like the NHS for instance. That's been in a downward spiral for decades. It's chronically understaffed, bloated with overpaid positions, hugely mismanaged, waiting times through the roof, new Dr's striking because they feel underpaid and undervalued, it's a bottomless pit of problems. Yet it's this nation's sacred cow to the UK. Nobody has the stones to admit the glaringly obvious - this simply isn't working and it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Easier said than done I'm sure.

Or COVID - plenty of self-serving politicians secured contracts and made money profiting over the pandemic.

It'd be lovely to think politicians would be unbiased and selfless. But I think the old motto about power corrupting people springs to mind.

Ed

Your comment about Torries and Labour is what we have to say about our parties, "The Democratic Party (left wing) and the Republican Party (right wing) are “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

 

[Trothan]

@Trothan Do you have any major influences such as philosophers, politicians, journalists, psychologists and sociologists that have already published works on this?

if you want to you can look at Ken Wilber. He was a contributer to integral theory and spiral dynamics. This was discussed on a Rebel Wisdom as well. I have a book by Ken Wilber called the religion of tomorrow. I have been interested in this question since I was child. I noticed that religious beliefs change with the time and culture, so I don't want to take the religion of today for granted. If two hundred years ago Christians were very pro slavery, then what will religion look like 500 years from now? Chances are it will not look like the religion of today. period
The modern religion of any time period is always caught in a culture war. It leads to people cherry picking bible verses to justify what ever they want, and the positions they take are informed by the issues of that time. For example, why does nobody care animal sacrifices in the bible? Everybody is busy debating LGBTQ, so there is no interest in taking the bible and using it to promote animal sacrifices. Why would this position be less valid than using the bible against LGBTQ? It is the issues of the time, not what is in the bible.
People get in a lot of epistemic trouble when they confuse political and religious culture wars for the truth. They are always partial, opinionated and informed by competing values. It is not about truth, it is about survival. I know I am limited by the same survival mechanisms, but I am still passionate about the truth even though truth is also a bias. The key is to hold these positions lead emotionally. Many people are unable to do it and it often escalates to physical violence.
in the religion of tomorrow, Ken points out that our interpretations of spiritual experiences are informed by hidden maps or levels of development. I find the distinction between yellow and turquoise interesting. At stage yellow, a person might believe that everything is connected, but this is not non duality because it is not all one. Turquoise takes the next step and collapses the duality of self and God entirely.

 

[Stuttermabolur]

Thank you for this post @Trothan. I am the same way. Politics is a big interest of mine precisely because of the insight it gives into not only people, but also society and communication. I don't know if I find it "beautiful" exactly, but I do find it fascinating, even when the consequences are ugly. To me, politics is about leveraging power, and successful politicians know how to leverage the power they do have in the most effective way. What's really interesting about politics is that in large societies like we have now, essentially the only thing giving politicians (and I'm including royalty and autocrats) their power is other people. Really, there isn't anything inherent about them that makes them more valuable than any other person, yet they need to convince others that they are indispensable, necessary or better than the alternative. This goes both for democracy where you need to convince the voters, but also autocracies where you need to convince your power base that you are worth keeping.

My interest can be quite granular as I both enjoy reading political history which shows how perceptions of certain people or political parties are shaped, and also follow election strategies and polls. I think it's pretty much impossible to get a real feel for the politics and society of a different country without being able to speak the language, so I mostly follow Icelandic, UK and US politics, with Serbian politics (where I lived) and Russian politics (where I read thoughts by Russian speakers) not far behind. I would also like to get into Chinese politics as it seems fascinating, but it's difficult to break in due to the language barrier, general secrecy and strong emotions. Most of what I'm interested happens behind the scenes, so though I follow the news, I tend not to care much about the headlines.

Strangely enough, I feel like actually understanding how politics work and what strategies politicians use to reach their goals makes me much less affected by it than most people, same with news. I also get a bit tired of political stereotypes. Yes, politicians are self serving, but they sort of have to be to gain power and effect change. A job like this does draw plenty of chancers who don't give a rats ass about anyone, but I also think people often underestimate just how difficult politics and affecting real change can be when a lot of powerful people have it as a job to stop you, and how much it warps your perception. I actually don't have very strong opinions myself on politics as I'm more of an analyzer, though of course I have my biases and focal points. I wish you luck in your ventures!

 

[Trothan]

Certainly an interesting topic for discussion.

My understanding is that debates about politics (and religion) are off limits. However, this seems set up as a discussion about debates about politics (and maybe religion), like a meta-debate maybe. Philosophy?

I'd like to read more.

I didn't finish everything I wanted to highlight about self-deception, but I have a Word Document that introduces a few self-deception mechanisms. I don't cover the root of all self deception which is identity. When you are attached to any identity, it can easily highjack your emotions and logic as you fight for self-validation. The fundamental problem is that we are identified with the false self or "self" in Hindu philosophy. The human psyche is not designed for truth because it seeks the survival of a self image. It can become psychologically irresistible to latch onto a belief even if you know it to be false if it really is too self validating. You cannot separate psychology, spirituality, belief, and the consequences it has on a political level.
It won't let me attach the file, so I am forced to copy and paste everything and post it.

 

[Trothan]

Self-Deception​

I briefly discussed this issue with Granny, and I see great value in discussing it further. Self-deception is a profound topic to explore, but it can be threatening because it can undermine one’s entire sense of reality. Self-deception comes in so many forms that I cannot cover them all here. All of life is riddled with self-deception, and I hope to cover the most eye-opening insights.

Assuming self-deception is a bad thing

This knee-jerk reaction comes about when one starts to realize how deeply self-deceived, they could possibly be. By threatening to undermine our entire sense of reality, it becomes convenient to convince ourselves that we are not self-deceived. What needs to be understood is that self-deception is not necessarily a bad thing and depending on the situation, it can serve a valid function. For example, the sunk cost fallacy is a form of self-deception, but without it many projects would remain incomplete forever. Sometimes a project may bare more fruit than you think it will, but this cannot be discovered without the temporary deception. There are an endless number of cases where self-deception serves a valid function given a certain environment.

Thinking of self-deception as a bad thing can easily put us at war with ourselves. This is a mistake that I made when I was about seven. I noticed how I was deceiving myself, but I thought that this was bad for a couple of reasons. I thought that it meant that I did not love myself so long as I only love a false version of my true self. If I love a lie and I don’t love what is real, then I fundamentally do not love myself. I wanted to be free of self-deception, believing that I could only love myself through what is true.

The above reasoning, although well-meaning, is problematic. Truth is a bias, and to treat it as if it is the best is in itself a deception. Judgements such as “better” and “worse” can easily be taken for granted, but they are in fact biased opinions. Truth is not “better” than falsehood per say. Although the goal behind the mentality that self-deception is bad may be to get to the truth, the idea that self-deception is bad is fundamentally untrue. It may be true that some self-deceptions are more problematic than others, but the idea that self-deception is bad can easily become the source of inner wars. By believing that we should not be self-deceived we become self-deceived, therefore we should be self-deceived. Self-deception becomes a paradoxical strange loop. Thinking that self-deception is bad will keep you stuck in self-deception.

Logic

Logical fallacies are riddled with self-deception. A few examples include strawman arguments, appealing to authority, no true Scotsman, black and white thinking, motivated reasoning, cherry-picking, correlation and causation, confirmation bias, circular logic, and many, many more. All these logical fallacies are deeply rooted in the survival of our self-image. For example, in politics the left- and right-wing strawman each other all the time. The goal is to make your opponent seem as unreasonable as possible, and thus advancing your own ideology. Logical fallacies occur when people are partial, partisan, and biased. I will cover more about ideology later, as all ideologies are riddled with self-deception.

Logic itself can become a self-deception so long as it becomes the anchor of various ideologies. For example, rationalism and logical positivism are limited in that there are aspects of reality which cannot be accessed through logic. Logic is inherently limited by language, whereas intuition, feeling, and experiencing are not. Many of the reasons we give for a certain conclusion are often attempts to verbalize or make sense of our gut reactions. This is a common occurrence in moral arguments for instance. For example, if my core assumption is that criminals are evil people who don’t deserve our compassion, then my gut reaction may be that the death penalty is good. I would then rationalize my position through arguments like deterrence, punishment, and other positions. My position may be logically consistent in this case, but it is never the full picture because logic is used in partial ways. Logic is commonly guided by our emotions and various assumptions which are often deeply flawed and taken for granted. Keep in mind that the map is not the territory. What we believe about reality and what reality is can be radically different.

Psychological defense mechanisms

One of the core functions of a therapist is to unravel a patient’s self-deception. For example, a woman may have a hard time losing weight because she is angry at her husband and the advantage to maintaining weight is to displease him. Common defense mechanisms include rationalization, projection, denial, repression, and others. Usually, these defense mechanisms are done unconsciously and automatically. Once a patient becomes conscious of these mechanisms, the self-deception starts to unravel, healing the trauma through surrendering our lies. It is impossible for a therapist to help if you tell them nothing but lies.

These defense mechanisms commonly show up in all kinds of ideologies. Religion is very commonly used as propaganda to justify wars even when the true motives are economic. Religious war-time propaganda causes people to believe that there were more religious wars than there actually were because they obscure the geopolitical motives. People are commonly brainwashed by this propaganda when they fail to question those in power.

Clinging manifests itself in many forms. It can be to a person to use them as a psychological crutch, but even more commonly is to cling to any belief regardless of the content of that belief. The way in which a person clings to rationality is deeply emotional, clinging to any memory or past event informs your ego identity and thus creates limitations, clinging to any way of life can be a means of coping with uncertainty, and clinging to an ideology is commonly a means of coping with Nihilism. There are many other examples of clinging within any belief system. At the core of self-deception in psychology is often a dysfunctional belief which we cling to or unconsciously believe is true. This can be unconscious beliefs like “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unworthy,” or “life is meaningless.” It is through raising our consciousness and releasing these dysfunctional beliefs that trauma is healed.

 

[Trothan]

The Pre-trans fallacy

The pre-trans fallacy is the false assumption that Not Y equals X even though Not Y can equal Z. There are multiple examples of this which can be demonstrated through Spiral Dynamics. Each stage of development commonly assumes that the evolution to the next stage is a regression to a previous stage. In order of development, I will be covering red, blue, orange, green, yellow, and turquoise.

When stage blue comes in the form of a religious ideology, stage orange may come in the form of an atheistic or rationalist ideology. An even higher level of development would be the post-rational stages such as green, yellow, or even turquoise. For example, a stage green, yellow, and turquoise are open to spirituality, but it is not the same as a stage blue religion. A stage blue religion may emphasize faith while ignoring the experience of God. A stage green religion is more open to multi-culturalism and cross-referencing multiple religions because it understands the demonizing other religions through our close-mindedness and dogmatism is problematic in that it leads to religious persecution. A stage yellow or turquoise religion use various spiritual techniques to create spiritual awakenings rather than merely believing in the gospel. This is achieved through recognizing that there is some truth to religion, but it is commonly misused and misunderstood. To understand what religion is attempting to point to, it is necessary to sort the wheat from the chaff, not throw everything away. Throwing everything away because of our skepticism is a higher level of development than stage blue, but the truth is much more nuanced rather than black and white. So long as Science and Religion are pitted against each other, it will make the pre-trans fallacy more common in spirituality. Stage orange may lump all forms of spirituality together in its close-mindedness.

A stage blue ideology may also come in the form of economic ideology like Soviet-style Communism. The United States follows a stage orange economic ideology called Capitalism. It is very common for people to lump all forms of Socialism together with Communism, even though there could be a Finnish-style social democracy. Not all forms of socialism must be a black and white abolition of private property. A middle ground is possible and some countries in Europe recognize this as they integrate free medical care while making their economies even more effective. This black and white mentality concerning Socialism serves the survival of the wealthy through preventing the redistribution of wealth. I have also read about the history of Central and South America, where this pre-trans fallacy is common.

In the United States stage blue and orange commonly come in the form of conservative political ideologies. Stage green tends to be much more liberal and idealistic. Stage yellow sees the necessary function of stage green but is more realistic in its political ideas. Stage yellow is skeptical of all forms of ideology because they are riddled with biases and self-deceptions. Stage yellow also makes an even greater effort toward impartiality and open-mindedness than stage green. This can lead stage yellow to steel manning stage blue and orange to better understand the conservative perspective while making a realistic assessment of progressivism. Sometimes this can make stage yellow seem like a moderate from the stage green point of view. Furthermore, stage yellow swings the pendulum from the collective to the individual. This causes stage yellow to remind stage green of stage orange. An example of this could be in ancient Rome. Stage green and yellow may agree that slavery is immoral. Stage green argues that slavery should be abolished, but stage yellow would say that realistically slavery will be around for hundreds of years due to the current level of development mankind is at. This can seem cold and cruel, but stage yellow is cautious of how stage green is idealistic and overly optimistic in its well-meaning political arguments.

Ideology

I have always been skeptical of the way in which people get very heated over intellectual arguments. This is most prevalent in politics and religion. A few of the problems with ideology include partiality, bias, holding opinions as if they are facts, holding imaginary positions as if they are objective reality, defensiveness, lashing out, group think, holding our opinions very seriously and passionately, insisting on getting others to yield to our perspectives, dishonest debate tactics, prioritizing our agenda over truth, a lack of introspection, emotional and psychological manipulation, and many more. The more emotionally invested a person is in a topic or the more a person wants a certain outcome to be true, the more biased they will be.

A key distinction that needs to be made is the difference between belief and truth. Many political pundits will try to convince you to adopt a certain perspective. In this case you are being persuaded, but this entire act is completely independent of what is true. A human being could theoretically be persuaded of anything considering all the possible beliefs that could be held. When ideologies conflate belief and truth, it creates assumptions about what truth is. It could be the case that no ideology is the truth because all worldviews are partial. It could be the case that the truth is too profound to be incapsulated by belief. It could be the case that all representations of reality are also misrepresentations in that they are not reality itself, including all beliefs. It could be the case that “true and false” is an imaginary duality designed for our survival. If these possibilities are never considered, then ideology will certainly lead to delusion and falsehood.

Many ideologies are in some way intended to make the world a better place by getting as many people as possible to yield to a certain perspective. Ideology therefore becomes about power and control regardless of what is true. The us vs. them mentality that is created out of this power struggle discourages introspection, self-reflection, emotional mastery, personal development, and humility. The person who most arrogantly claims to have the truth tends to get the most attention and money while the most humble and objective people are ignored and undervalued.

The reason I am drawn to politics is because I see beauty in being the most objective and impartial that we can possibly be. I understand that If I along with the rest of humanity self-reflects and learns to master our emotions, then many lives could be saved. When I think of the greatest good for the greatest number, I see the beauty in self-sacrifice for the good of humanity. If more Americans focused on educating themselves, self-reflection, and understanding bias, then it would solve much of our polarization and political violence. This society needs people who are open-minded and willing to set their biases aside for the sake of what is true. Our current society appears to value entertainment more than truth, and this in turn affects how our news stations behave, creating a feedback loop and an echo chamber of constant lies and deceptions.

There is much more I could write about self-deception, but this paper will be endless if I try to explain all of them. I hope this gives you the tip of the iceberg as you start to understand self-deception. Good luck.