The Culture War Problem
Throughout most of my life, politics has never particularly interested me. I know that this might come as a surprise to people who only know me from my Twitter presence, where my attention is often devoted to the realm of political issues, or the overbearing “culture war” as it’s come to be informally referred to. The short story is that I was more or less dragged into the fray against my will, because about four years ago I found that my lifelong interests of academic science and “nerd culture” (video games, anime, etc.) were experiencing an ideological attack from an ideological faction that was quickly gaining relevance in the zeitgeist. Of course, I quickly discovered that these were just individual battles of the larger culture war, and once I started paying attention, it was clear that none of these symptoms would get resolved until the central cause of the issue was addressed. While I would like nothing more than the ability to study evolutionary biology and play video games in peace and just ignore “politics,” the ability to do so has become eminently impossible ever since these cultural domains have become embroiled by the emergent polarization that has engulfed the political landscape. So for better or worse, I’m stuck here until we can de-escalate the culture war, and I’ve become more or less obsessed with the issue.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how many prominent people (that I respect immensely) from within what Eric Weinstein has coined the “Intellectual Dark Web” have been trying to solve the problem. The oft proposed solution is to get people to actually talk to one another instead of shouting each other down, de-platforming, or dismissing other perspectives with moralizing slurs designed to end conversations rather than start them (racist, sexist, etc.). This solution makes sense, on the surface, because it would allow for a reasonable sharing of perspectives, is consistent with the idea that speech should be countered with more speech, and that the proper application of a “marketplace of ideas” will allow for bad ideas to be criticized and good ideas to be forged and promoted. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that this solution is roundly rejected by the very people it’s aimed at, in a Catch 22 scenario where if they were amenable to such discussion then we wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.
The first problem that needs to be solved is that we currently lack the ability to properly identify and describe the reason why such things are happening, or to bridge the comprehension gap between people of different perspectives. In my experience, one of the biggest causes of this problem is that we’re all stuck using an outdated, imprecise, and inherently flawed paradigm to understand the political landscape. This paradigm is often used to define our own beliefs and political positions, as well as to attempt to classify and understand the beliefs and positions of our political opposition. If our basic understanding of the political landscape is flawed, then our categorization of our own beliefs, and especially the beliefs of others, will be flawed as well. These flaws can make it feel like we’re talking past each other, and that is more often than not exactly what’s happening. The problem isn’t simply that we’re not talking to each other, but rather that we can’t talk to each other even if we tried. We’re essentially speaking in completely different languages made up of inherently broken grammar. What follows are my thoughts about why the current paradigm is flawed, and my proposition for what the replacement paradigm should look like.
A Flawed Paradigm
I’ve often railed against the overly reductive and outdated paradigm of “left vs. right,” especially in the way that it’s usually employed in the context of “us vs. them” polarized discussions. The problems with this paradigm are that it takes a complex system and oversimplifies it down to one axis, and the labels that define the axis are inherently relativistic in nature (especially temporally). In practice, the combined effect of these two problems is an incorrect representation of a political spectrum, where there is an implication that the framework can be understood through a one dimensional essentialist lens, and therefore ideologies that are placed closely on this dimension can be reasonably approximated with one another regardless of other possible dimensions. In other words, that there is a singular, inherent property that best describes all political ideologies, and that these ideologies can be organized along one axis based on the relative degree to which they possess it (or don’t). It should be quite obvious that this doesn’t represent reality particularly well, considering that it tends to lump in very disparate ideologies as “similar” or “close” (such as anarcho-capitalist libertarianism and ethno-nationalistic fascism both being labeled “far right,” for example). Despite all of this, it isn’t a surprise why it continues to be popular across the board, especially as different ideological factions try to justify their usage of the paradigm by overlaying whichever essentialist property onto the “left vs. right” axis that makes their faction appear the most virtuous and their opposition appear the most vile (anti-racism vs. racism, authoritarianism vs. anti-authoritarianism, etc.).
To be fair to most people who care about such political classifications, these issues tend to be widely known in some capacity, even if they aren’t regularly articulated as specifically. As such, it’s extremely common to see representations of the now standard “political compass” landscape that add a “libertarian vs. authoritarian” axis to the spectrum, creating a two dimensional plane. This injects some sorely needed nuance with an additional dimension to separate some extremely dissimilar ideologies that were incorrectly classified as close together in the one axis system. However, this representation comes with its own suite of problems. To start, it incorrectly essentializes the “left vs. right” axis into one of purely economic concerns. This feels misleading in some capacity, as though this is the chief lens through which “left vs. right” should be understood because everything else that is loosely understood or intuited as “left vs. right” can be approximated or derived by this metric. At best, this is a crude representation that fails to fully capture the intended complexity. At worst, this orphans a lot of what people intuitively refer to as “left” or “right” beyond economic sensibilities. This system either relegates it to the second axis of “libertarian vs. authoritarian” where it doesn’t seem to map correctly, or steadfastly maintaining it to the “left vs. right” axis under everyone’s noses despite glaring incongruity with the asserted essentialism of economic concerns. The “left vs. right” axis seems to intuitively imply something that it doesn’t explicitly represent, and relies on a non-essentialist understanding of the categories to make sense of how the axis is used in practice despite the essentialist labeling.
Taking all of this into consideration, there’s a case that the political landscape is incorrectly represented as a two axis measure of “economic left vs. economic right” and “libertarian vs. authoritarian” ideals, and is therefore unfit for the function that it is tasked with. In other words, it may accurately represent a specific ideological landscape in terms of its two axes, but inaccurately depict the real world political landscape that it is supposed to represent, especially in terms of what most people intuit as “left vs. right.” My final criticism of the “political compass” representation, which I find difficult to put into words, is much more specific to my personal experience. The “libertarian left” quadrant that I find myself regularly sorted into, while accurate to the best of my knowledge and self-identification, has increasingly started to feel like an inadequate, incomplete, and ad-hoc description. I don’t know how to describe it better, but most of my recent political agreements/disagreements haven’t seemed to align well with this representation, which has indicated to me that there’s more to the story, and partially served as impetus to begin seriously thinking about these ideas.
Most of my confusion regarding the political landscape seems to be caused by incorrectly specified axes. When non-essentialized, category distinctions are ill defined and hinder rigorous or accurate communication of ideas between people who have different understandings of those categories. So those who are far apart on the political landscape are unlikely to agree on the framework of any single representation. When essentialized, the properties are chosen just well enough that they loosely correlate with what people intuit about the political landscape, but almost always poorly enough that the rigorous definitions per se are unable to accurately capture what they’re trying to describe. What I want is to find better defined, essentialist categories to represent the political landscape in a way that adequately approximates the more intuitive and non-essentialist understanding that many people have of the ideological categories that they are part of or interact with. That might seem strange considering how much I’ve grown to generally dislike categorical essentialism. I find it most usually utilized by people who are refuting intuitive, non-essentialist categories with the mere existence of a minority of elements that don’t fit an incorrectly applied essentialist lens in order to ultimately knock down a strawman of their opponent’s position. I’m frequently faced with this issue when arguing about sex and gender categories (though that’s a topic that deserves its own in-depth discussion, perhaps in a separate future blog post). Despite this, I recognize that essentialism is often necessary when formulating rigorous definitions, and is often useful for identifying and approximating non-essentialized categories for the purposes of understanding general patterns as opposed to rigid rules.
I came to the conclusion that I would need to invent my own system. After searching through a multitude of other organizational systems, I realized that most of them have the same flaws and problems as the ubiquitous “political compass.” Many newer systems take pains to introduce more dimensions for greater specificity and accuracy, but these dimensions tend to be highly domain specific variations of what are generalized by the standard “political compass” axes. They fail at capturing the essentialism that I’m looking for, in addition to having the standard multi-variate analysis problem of being utterly impossible to graphically represent in a meaningful way to our human brains, which are attuned to our specially three dimensional universe. This multi-variate problem is shared by other sorting systems that organize traits, but aren’t explicitly politically focused, such as the Big Five personality traits and Moral Foundations Theory. I like that people are using them as a new way to try and understand the political landscape, and I appreciate how they’ve uncovered correlations between what they respectively measure and generalized political alignment. They may be very accurate in that sense, but I’ve grown to dislike how they’ve almost exclusively been used in this context to just map back onto the flawed paradigm that I’ve been complaining about, correlating personality or moral considerations with the quadrants of the standard “political compass.” The long and short of it is that these systems have failed to provide the insight that I was looking for.
My goal was to find this insight, and hopefully to get people to think about the political landscape on different terms than the ones that we’ve been unquestioningly and uncritically using. Many people, many of whom are smarter than me, have been thinking about this brand of problem for longer than I have without finding a better solution than the largely ubiquitous “political compass.” This is why I’ve needed to spend so much time thinking about this problem. Whether or not I’ve wasted my time has yet to be seen, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Like I said, I was dragged into this fight, and I have the kind of systematizing brain that doesn’t let go of something until it’s satisfied. And it’s been really unsatisfied. The hypothesis that follows is the result of over three years of intensive observation of the political climate, over a year of proactive disagreement with the current paradigm, and about two months of being unable to think about anything else even if I had tried.
A New Paradigm
To be honest, up until a few months ago I had completely discounted the idea of essentialized descriptions for political axes or categories. There were too many exceptions and too many problems with an essentialist thinking style, as I’ve mentioned above. What changed my mind was an idea that I was keyed into while listening to some of Sargon of Akkad’s podcasts on his “The Thinkery” channel. The idea that was discussed (briefly) in podcast #21 and (extensively) in podcast #22 concerned this concept of an essentialist difference between the political “left” and the political “right,” and the one that Sargon posited was a difference in considerations of hierarchies. That the “right” tended to view the existence of hierarchies as natural and legitimate, and the “left” tended to view the existence of hierarchies and unnatural and illegitimate. I’ll admit that I immediately dismissed this first time that I had heard it, but the second time around I decided to think more about it, and to my surprise it started to make a lot of sense to me. It wasn’t perfect, but the more I thought about it the more convinced I was that there was something to this, and that a better essentialist categorization was not only possible, but related in some way to this idea of hierarchies. After thinking about this concept extensively, I finally arrived at what I think are sufficiently accurate essential categorizations for the purpose of organizing the political landscape. My big innovation is the utilization of these essentialist descriptions to capture what the broader public tends to intuit about the reality of the political landscape without being able to articulate. I only needed to make relatively minor conceptual modifications to the standard axes that we’re familiar with, but I hope that my hypothesis changes your understanding of the political landscape and where you or others may fall on it.
Whether one views a hierarchy as legitimate or illegitimate is based on the legitimacy of the organizational rules of the hierarchy. The supposed legitimacy of these rules tends to be based on where one believes the rules comes from, and how immutable or plastic the rules are. So I hypothesize that the essential difference between the thinking styles of the “left” and the “right” is related to the conception of these rules that dictate hierarchy. This horizontal axis, tentatively labeled the “order” axis, measures how people understand the organization of the universe, its structure or inherent nature, and where they believe that truth, values, and meaning are derived from. The poles of this axis are best encapsulated by the concepts of “endogeny vs. exogeny,” where endogenous thinkers tend to believe that order and meaning originate from within the human experience and are relatively mutable, and exogenous thinkers tend to believe that order and meaning originate from outside of the human experience and are relatively immutable. This axis is somewhat related to other concepts, and can sometimes be loosely correlated with different labels for mapping specific contexts such as “subjective vs. objective,” the tendency to understand the universe through those lenses, “equality vs. hierarchy,” the aforementioned tendency to approve or disapprove of hierarchies, and “cooperation vs. competition,” the tendency to find that value is increased more through either cooperation or competition.
Once I was able to establish an idea for the horizontal axis, the vertical axis was a much easier process. If the horizontal axis maps the perception of the static order of the universe, then the vertical axis should map the dynamic order of the universe. Or in other words, the perception of how actions propagate through the universe over time. The vertical axis, tentatively labeled the “causality” axis, measures how people understand the direction of organization, and where agency and causality is applied to produce an observed effect. The poles of this axis are best encapsulated by the concepts of “teleology vs. emergence,” where teleological thinkers tend to believe that causality happens from above and propagates through a system down the levels of organization, and emergent thinkers tend to believe that causality happens from below and propagates through a system up the levels of organization. This axis can alternatively be described through the synonymous concepts of “top-down vs. bottom up,” the tendency to view that a problem is caused by and best solved by action from either the top or the bottom of the affected system, and is somewhat related to and can be loosely correlated with the concepts of “orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy,” the tendency to operate under a homogenous or heterogeneous worldview, and “collectivist vs. individualist,” the tendency to view groups of people as demographic blocks or assemblages of separate persons.
Chaoskampfism: Top Right (Cartesian quadrant I)
The ideologies of this quadrant are based on adherence to teleological exogeny—or the tendency to believe that order and meaning exist outside the subjective experience—and are applied from a top-down direction. Tentatively called “chaoskampfism,” (a belief system centered around the struggle against chaos through the willful imposition of order,) these ideologies are commonly expressed through the forms of religious orthodoxy, nationalism, a hierarchical class or caste system, and justification to rule based on strength of moral character, lineage, or divine right. Common beliefs include the idea that order must be imposed by a strong leader (divine or otherwise), that the system will fall to chaos and degeneracy without the imposition of this leadership, and whoever can impose leadership is justified in doing so, in a very “might makes right” sort of way. Adherents tend to respect the way that things are, and follow tradition and codified morality or etiquette based on a scripture or historical account. At its best, teleological exogeny produces stability, safety, and a strong sense of meaning for those under its protection. At its worst, it results in ossified systems of conflict, inequality, and militant tribalism, stifles curiosity and freedom through orthodoxy, and ends with little progress or improvement over time.
Cosmologicism: Bottom Right (Cartesian quadrant IV)
The ideologies of this quadrant are based on adherence to emergent exogeny—or the tendency to believe that order and meaning exist outside the subjective experience—and are applied from a bottom-up direction. Tentatively called “cosmologicism,” (a belief system centered around the natural order of the universe and the struggle to survive and thrive within that order,) these ideologies are commonly expressed through the forms of empiricism, capitalism, success through effort and hard work, and justification to lead based on talent, intelligence, and overall merit. Common beliefs include the idea that order is formed by emergent organization based on the application of universal rules of nature, what is right or true is determined by what succeeds in this system, in a very “survival of the fittest” sort of way, and distrust attempts to change the system through the top-down application of authority. Adherents tend to relish competition and a “by your own bootstraps” attitude, and revere empirical facts and the light of scrutiny and truth. At its best, emergent exogeny fosters improvement and strength through competition and merit, and uncovers truth through skepticism and empirical observation. At its worst, it disregards human concerns of morality and ethics, and justifies suffering and poor opportunity with deterministic thinking.
Stigmergism: Bottom Left (Cartesian quadrant III)
The ideologies of this quadrant are based on adherence to emergent endogeny—or the tendency to believe that order and meaning exist within the subjective experience—and are applied from a bottom-up direction. Tentatively called “stigmergism,” (a belief system centered around the inherent equality of individuals and a bottom-up social order obtained through the positive feedback of behaviors associated with the exercise of individual freedoms,) these ideologies are commonly expressed through the forms of natural rights, democracy, equal treatment under the law, and justification to contribute based on universal human dignity, rationalism, and discussion of ideas. Common beliefs include the idea that all men are created equal, that people should not be discriminated against or disadvantaged based on arbitrary characteristics, in a very “equality of opportunity sort of way,” and that authority should always be questioned and held in check. Adherents tend to have respect for liberty and individual choice, so an inequality of outcome is not considered unjust if equality of opportunity is maintained. At its best, emergent endogeny encourages self-determination and individualism, freedom from tyranny, and prosperity through cooperation and understanding. At its worst, it promotes unhealthy idealism, unrealistic views of collective human nature, and ignores the benefits of collective cohesion or supposedly restrictive or oppressive traditions.
Identitarianism: Top Left (Cartesian quadrant II)
The ideologies of this quadrant are based on adherence to teleological endogeny—or the tendency to believe that order and meaning exist within the subjective experience—and are applied from a top-down direction. Tentatively called “identitarianism,” (a belief system centered around the identification and elimination of identity based oppressions and causes of inequality that are inherently present in frameworks of society and thought, through the application of authority,) these ideologies are commonly expressed through the forms of “social justice,” socialism, a focus on systemic oppression, and justification for control based on commitment to doctrine, victimization status, and progressive stack hierarchy. Common beliefs include the idea that people are inherently equal and that all inequality is the result of undesirable social constructions or mismanaged authority, and that they should be eliminated through top-down changes in planning, management, behavior, and intended results, in a very “equality of outcome” sort of way. Adherents tend to base their actions on the collective opposition to a singular enemy of the people, such as a history of oppressive structures that persists into the present, and identify oppression along intersectional identity or economic class lines. At its best, teleological endogeny enforces ethical standards, and improves the overall human condition by devoting attention and resources to those who may be the most disadvantaged and in need of help. At its worst, it operates under ideological orthodoxy, ignores human nature and emergent or empirical explanations for apparent problems, and causes individual injustices in the pursuit of implementing supposed collective justice.
I’m aware that this model is mostly limited to describing contemporary western political philosophy, but I was surprised by how useful it appeared for gaining some insight into its modern history. For instance, the “top right” quadrant sounds a lot like a loose description of most of human history before the concerted implementation of empiricism. The expansion of the vertical axis downwards probably corresponded with the scientific revolution, and was soon followed by the horizontal axis expansion leftwards that corresponded to the enlightenment. While the “bottom right” and “bottom left” quadrants became populated, most of the “standard” or “narrative” political conflict that occurred since then has been between the “bottom left” and the “top right.” It wasn’t until relatively recently that the “top left,” previously a relative vacuum in the conceptual landscape caused by the expansion of the horizontal axis, was populated in any significant capacity. The recent and accelerated population of this quadrant seems to be behind the contemporary rise of what is loosely referred to as political “postmodernism” and “social justice,” and the apparent de-emphasizing of bottom-up thinking in contemporary political discussion. This de-emphasizing has reframed the Overton Window so that the only acceptable thinking styles, identified problems, and proposed solutions are top-down, creating the conditions for reactionary, positive feedback between the “top left” and the “top right.”
The effects of this change seem obvious once they’re understood from this lens. The enforcement of top-down thinking has predicated the rise of the neo-traditionalist “alt-right,” as well as reinvigorated the “top right” quadrant in general, as evidenced by everything surrounding Donald Trump. In academia, evolutionary biology was always the enemy of the “top right,” but now it has found a new enemy in the gender studies of the “top left,” possibly because it relies on empirical observations and offers a bottom-up explanation of human behavior and social organization rather than the diametric opposites that gender studies tends to rely on. In the media, consequentialist thinking has started to dominate how news is reported, leading to narrative focused journalism, clickbait headlines, tribalist activism, and what people have been calling “fake news.” Compounding this issue is the existence of supposed incongruities and hypocrisies present in the “top left” ideology, which make little sense to those outside of it, and allow for the “top right” to justify their own incongruities and hypocrisies. The “top left” ideology is supposedly built on the idea that hierarchies are illegitimate and the postmodern principle of questioning meta-narratives, yet the ideology consistently employs the hierarchy of the progressive stack and the meta-narrative of “The Patriarchy.” (I refer to this as the “progressive paradox,” and the idea will probably be the topic of a future blog post.) Taken together, the effects that we’re seeing of polarization and the rise of contemporary neo-traditionalism are the direct result of the current reciprocal dynamic between “top left” and “top right,” in the absence of bottom-up thinking. Hopefully, this formation and upheaval of the political landscape is captured by my paradigm hypothesis, and demonstrates why I believe it to be superior to the old “political compass” one.
Hyperbola Hypothesis
While almost complete, there’s a little quirk about the political landscape that I’ve observed many times, but haven’t seen consistently replicated in representations. In fact, the only representations I’ve ever seen that incorporate this behavior are the terrible “left vs. right” spectra that I was complaining so much about before, ironically making them better in certain respects than the “political compass” that I had previously said was preferable. What I’m talking about is what is commonly referred to as “horseshoe theory,” or the observation that the extreme ends of a political spectrum appear to resemble each other more than the space that is equidistant between them, most commonly applied to the “left vs. right” spectrum. While thinking about “horseshoe theory,” I asked myself on a whim what it would look like if applied to the two dimensional plane of the political landscape, rather than just the one dimensional line of the spectrum. It turns out that I stumbled upon something that I already knew, which is that people closer to the extreme end of one axis tend to conflate everyone along the other axis the closer they are to the opposite extreme. This “endpoint conflation” is more or less a generalized “horseshoe theory,” and underlies why people on the far “left” refer to both the “top right” and the “bottom right” as “Nazis,” why people on the far “right” refer to both the “top left” and the “bottom left” as “SJWs” or “leftists,” why people on the far “bottom” refer to both the “top left” and the “top right” as “totalitarian,” and why people on the far “top” refer to both the “bottom left” and the “bottom right” as “centrists (derogatory).”
I had previously regarded most of these as separate phenomena, and dismissed the inability to accurately represent a disparate ideology relative to one’s own as the result of distorted ideological lenses. However, now that I was viewing them all through this framework, it seemed more than a coincidence that there was this consistent agreement concerning the experience of this phenomenon across the political landscape. My hypothesis is that this is actually an inherent feature of the political landscape, and it indicates that we’ve all been thinking about its structure incorrectly. Perhaps it’s because I have more background in math and physics that the average political pundit, but it occurred to me that this distorted relativity and endpoint conflation quite resembles the relativistic geometry and conformational infinity of a hyperbolic space, analogous to the representation of relativistic space-time often depicted on a Penrose-Carter diagram. My hypothesis is that our incorrect thinking rests on the flawed assumption that we all inhabit a Newtonian style political landscape, where translations between ideological inertial reference frames can be mediated through Galilean transformations. But whether we’ve consciously realized it or not, almost all of us should have noticed by now that Galilean transformations don’t seem to work consistently. It’s likely that, rather than a “landscape,” we actually inhabit an Einsteinian style “political spacetime”, and the extreme disparity between the ideological inertial reference frames is causing relativistic effects, requiring Lorentz transformations to translate between them. So the farther away along one axis a difference in ideology is, the more that the perpendicular axis is compressed. This would explain the “horseshoe theory” behavior (which should henceforth be referred to as “hyperbola hypothesis”) and why it can seem utterly impossible for people occupying disparate ideologies to talk to one another, let alone understand each other’s perspective. I don’t know how to solve the problems that this causes, but I’m confident that a more accurate understanding of what’s happening is the first step towards finding a solution.

Communication
Despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much productive conversation going on between whichever sides have pitted themselves in opposition to each other, I still believe that the best way to resolve the problem is through opening up dialogue wherever possible. One commonality that I’ve noticed about the people within the “Intellectual Dark Web” is that they tend to be bottom-up thinkers, and that might explain the pattern of trying to open up lines of communication and trying to reach mutual understanding. Regardless, I think that it’s very necessary in a time where top-down thinking seems to do nothing but add fuel to the already raging inferno that is the “culture war.”
Following that example, the reason that I wrote this was because I wanted to get people to think, and to start trading ideas with each other. Did I make you think? What did you like or dislike about my ideas? Why do you agree or disagree? Do you have better suggestions for names or labels that I used? Do you have your own paradigm hypothesis that you think is better? Share it with me. Share it with anyone who will listen. I want this to serve as a springboard for you to build your own ideas off of, and hopefully we’ll all be intellectually richer for it. Find me on Twitter here @M_Methuselah, and you can tell me what you think.
(Edit, March 13, 2018: An instance where the “left” was incorrectly labeled as the “right” when describing the quadrants of the political landscape was corrected in a subheader.)
