The Impossibility of Political Understanding

and the necessity of philosophy in politics.

The main reason that, despite my interest in politics, I tend to tune out if the news cycle is that engaging in politics has become, outside the schadenfreude of watching an absurd tragedy, unenjoyable and borderline depressing. There I am sure to find bipartisan approval. Not even grandma wants politics at the dinner table.

The main reason for the sorry state of politics is that there is no real communication between the people that disagree with each other and because there is no understanding between different camps, these political camps tend to isolate themselves and start buying their own bullshit. The end of this process is movements that start resembling religions.

This process of separation is present in all places where there is a political struggle, and the result is always a sort of "cold civil war", a war fought with ideas and the occasional violence.

The sort of communication that does take place normally devolves into a self-righteous screaming match, the exact scenario that grandma wanted to avoid at the family dinner table. But why is this? Why is it so difficult to have good conversations with people who disagree with us? And is there a solution?

- Lack of understanding -

The fundamental problem with political conversations is that we do not understand each other at a visceral level. I have gone ahead and read Marx, I understand the theory in my head, but the liberation of the proletariat does not inspire any passion in me. So when I talk to a passionate revolutionary, he might as well be an alien as far as I am concerned.

Not because we are different species or have different ways of thinking, but the difference lies in our passions. Our passionate feelings; anger, joy, disgust, fear, desire, etc, are not objective, they depend on the way that we look at the world.

If you are playing a football match and your team scores, you will feel joy, while a player of the other team could feel anger and disappointment. You two are witnessing the same event, but have opposite definitions of good. Your definition of good is that your team wins and every time that you get closer to winning, you will feel good, while your opponent will feel bad since his idea of good is that his team wins.

Your emotions will be dependent on your ultimate goal, and communication with people with other goals will be as difficult as convincing a member of the other team that he should actually be cheering when your team scores.

Our passionate revolutionary has a different conception of good and as a result, we cannot directly sympathize with each other, quite the opposite, we see each other with confusion and soon enough disgust and hate.

Every single emotion, behind every single action, is dependent on our ideas about good and evil. So before there can be any communication between political opponents, there needs to be visceral empathy. I need to feel what he feels, I need to be able to look at the world with the same red tinge that he does.

This true understanding cannot come from the head, we can understand each other logically, but logic is cold and does not inspire any empathy and cannot lead to any real communication. We can only have this communication through philosophy, through understanding the ideology that another person uses to comprehend how the world works.

The main point of this essay is to address the rarely talked, but essential, connection between philosophy and political thought. And how the lack of philosophy in politics will inevitably lead to superficiality and much worse.

But first, we need to take a look at what an ideology is and how it works and that means that we have to look at the 3 components that any ideology is composed of three parts; the politics, the ethics and the core philosophy.

- The Structure of ideology -

An ideology is a set of beliefs that attempt to interpret the world through a specific group of ideas. The world is big and complex, beyond the capacity of any person to understand it all at once. In order to not be overwhelmed by this complexity, we simplify the world, interpreting reality through a specific lens.

We all have our own personal ideology, and we cannot escape it, an individual will always have a way to interpret reality and since we are social beings, we will learn how to interpret the world from the people around us. This means that ideologies not only determine the conduct of the individual, but also the character of society.

The outermost layer of any ideology is politics. Politics can be defined as the organized pursuit of power, at the most basic level it is bashing each other’s head in with a club. He who bashes the hardest wins and becomes king.

What we do nowadays is just different in execution, we have less clubbing and more speeches, we build armies of millions of voters every couple of years, count heads but never fight, but the principle remains unchanged. Politics is, and it will always be about chasing power, by any means necessary.

Chasing power, as universal a trait as it is, is not an end in itself. It always serves some purpose, it could be to serve your own goals or impose your ideology onto society. Both are always present, but using political power to enforce your ideology is what we are interested in now.

Political power is just capacity to move society in a certain direction, but like all tools, it is not an end but a means. Political power always serves our ethical judgements.

An ethical judgement is a statement that something is desirable or undesirable. For example, “X is good because it increases our GDP”, “Y is bad because it harms others” and “to do Z is evil”. All political action comes from an attempt to implement ethical judgements, whatever they might be. Maybe their aim is to feed the megalomania of its leader, to maintain the status quo or to implement great changes in society. The point is, that if we want to understand the political actions of a movement, we have to look at its ethical system.

To use a typical example, let’s take the abortion debate. Pro-death people will argue that having a child is a choice, and having the liberty to make one’s choices is fundamentally good. Anti-choice people believe that life is fundamentally valuable and, since aborting a baby is ending a life, it is evil.

This is the stage where most conversations break down because ethical judgments are not flexible. In order to stop grandstanding and actually have a conversation, one needs to go one level deeper and ask what is “good” and what is “bad”. If one side values life more than liberty and the other one disagrees, the only thing to do is to descend into Philosophy and ask fundamental questions like: “Why is liberty good?“ or “Does life have any value in itself?“.

Our ethics depend on the fundamental way that we look at the world, your philosophical beliefs will always predetermine your ethical judgements.

All honest and interesting political conversations will go from politics to ethics to Philosophy, or die trying. There lies the great tragedy of political discourse; the great majority of conversations will never reach philosophy, so most political conversations will never even get close to understanding, much less convincing the other person.

The base of any ideology is its philosophical thought that supports its ethical system, the philosophical thought is nothing more than the subjective way that this ideology defines what is “good“ and what is “bad“.

The underlying philosophy is usually the least addressed, but most important part of any ideology. Since it is rarely talked about and remains in the individual and collective unconscious.

All ideologies are large intellectual systems made up of thousands of arguments and dozens of books, but at the core, an ideology is just an attempt to define what is “good“.

So the most interesting question in political thought is, how do we define good?

- Defining good -

The world is amoral, it is just a lot of matter in motion and the people around us are just very complex chemical processes, but nobody sees it that way, instead, we see things in a moral dimension. We describe some things as good and others as bad, and it is this differentiation is the source of all our actions, we naturally strive towards the “good” and away from the “bad”.

We make the subjective distinction of good and bad based on the values that we hold. A value is some abstract concept that we accept as inherently good, for example, justice or equality.

We all have values that we care for, but some are more important to us than others. This hierarchy of values reveals itself when we have to make an ethical decision; under enough pressure, every person will compromise all of their values except one uncompromisable value that guides their lives is their definition of ultimate good.

Why can no one agree if something is good or bad in politics? Because simply put, my idea of good is not your idea of good, because my “highest value” is not your “highest value” and therefore we will interpret the world differently. This difference between the two is not reconcilable.

A socialist’s highest value can be equality, and he will interpret the world accordingly: everything that makes the world more equal is good and everything that makes it less equal is bad. How can there be any reconciliation between this worldview and one that places competence as its highest value? That is right, there cannot be any.

The highest value that each person takes depends on their personality, their experiences and their environment. But this decision is not rational, and it cannot be justified because there is no higher good to justify your highest value to. So a person’s highest value is in a certain sense irrational, a socialist cannot tell you why equality is good, he can only tell you that it just is.

All our ideologies and moral systems are fundamentally irrational because at their core they all have a subjective value judgement. This irrational core of all ideologies cannot be understood outside of talking at a philosophical level.

All political movements consider themselves rational, but understanding between people who belong to different movements can only happen when we acknowledge that all of us are irrational in different ways. A good political conversation is always about understanding each other’s subjective values.

- How to have an honest conversation -

However, it is very difficult to bring a political conversation into philosophy because in order to have a conversation with a political opponent you need to have:

1. Trust and goodwill between both parties

2. The speakers have to know what they are talking about and are familiar with each other’s arguments

3. An occasion where a conversation can develop

The reason that these 3 conditions are rare to see is that they are of no benefit. Our political systems work on a quantity-over-quality system; the number of voters is all that matters.

In order to maximize this number, political movements rely on propaganda that encourages fanaticism and party loyalty, after all, we are the “good ones“ and our opponents are literally evil.

The sad reality is that the most effective way to mobilize your supporters. You need to take complex political situations and simplify them into marvel-level narratives:

This means that to win, you have to portray your opponents as villains who torture puppies in their spare time. After you demonize your opponents, you cannot simply sit down with them and have a heart-to-heart. You cannot really have any trust or goodwill with the people who you fucking dehumanize.

As long as political parties fight for votes, they will demonize their enemies and if you think that the ideology of your enemies is something that is extracted from pure black-tar evil, then you should stay away and not engage with their ideas under any circumstances.

Finally, the occasions where political opponents do meet are not optimal for having a conversation, instead, they are optimal for having a debate. As an avid participant in my local debate team, I will tell you that, even though if debating is fun, nobody has ever changed their mind because their opponents defeated them with facts and logic in a debate.

When you are debating someone you are having a verbal duel, like a gladiator you are looking for weaknesses and exploiting them, any argument that you can strawman is a win, any chance you get to indirectly call them stupid and or evil is a win and of course, you should not expose your own weaknesses or concede a single point to your opponent. You are infallibly right and they are undoubtedly wrong. The whole point of a debate is to humiliate your opponent and win over the crowd, but in most cases you get two idiots talking past each other and their respective fans mindlessly cheering for their side.

That is of course what grandma really does not want to see at her dinner table and why politics is such an ugly business. Because the left cannot understand the right, libertarians cannot understand authoritarians and the centrists cannot understand any of them. When we do not want to understand each other, and we cannot have an honest conversation with each other, then all that we have is debate.

So what is the difference between a debate and a conversation? The difference lies in the goal, in a debate your goal is to gain political power by humiliating your opponent and in an honest conversation the shared goal of both participants is to find the truth.

What is Philosophy other than people sharing their ideas in the pursuit of truth? To have an honest conversation is to engage in philosophy, and to have a debate is to engage in sophistry.

And so we realize that we have not changed in the 2400 years since Socrates was discussing with the Sophists. The Sophists of Athens engaged in rhetoric in the pursuit of power and personal benefit, while Socrates engaged in philosophy for the sake of truth and was democratically executed for it.

Our political system is a system of organized sophistry because the goal of political action is not to find truth, but to achieve victory, to acquire power by any means necessary. The result in our world is the same as in Athens: the Sophists win and philosophers lose; debate outcompetes conversation, and honest politicians are facing extinction because they cannot keep up.

There are millions that pretend to be like Socrates, philosophers in the search of ultimate truth, but they are millions of Sophists LARPing as Socrates while they push their own ideology forward.

And I will also not pretend to be Socrates, I am a Sophist. I started this project and write these essays because I want to spread my ideas. The only difference between me and the rest is that I am honest about it and that I think that my stuff is better quality.

If you manage to find a true blood-and-bone philosopher in the 21st century, then please put him in a cage, so we can study his secrets, but until then don’t believe the bullshit that other Sophists tell you about themselves.

In a world dominated by Sophists, there cannot be any political communication and there cannot be any understanding between people with different values. So what does that leave us with?

That leaves us with the reality that political power belongs to the group with the best propaganda and the most tanks. When communication breaks down, all that politics is, is a conflict for the mind of the crowd. A conflict fought with propaganda, demagoguery, and if all else fails, with a rifle.

May we one day become philosophers, or else we will all die Sophists.