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I am a man of reason; politics is not a subset of the domain of reason. Though politics does share much in common with professional sports, it is no facility in which to be rooting for your favorite team. The nature of our universe is too complicated for any one, two, or a party of persons to comprehend, analyze, and instigate action that will somehow make us all happy and secure, which is, in itself, the ultimate goal of any human… or is it?

The United States has a wonderful structure in place that is designed to deal with the fundamental flaws of all individuals and invokes a system based on distribution of knowledge and responsibility. That isn’t to say the system can’t fail, it absolutely could fail if the responsibility and knowledge becomes homogenized, such as when one party composed of like thinkers obtains control in all positions of the distribution. Under this condition the system becomes unbalanced, and though more decisions can be made per unit time, more bad decisions can be made per unit time.

Republican, Democrat, Republicrat, it doesn’t matter. everyone wants happiness, security, life, liberty… you know the rest. No one wants to be ill and without medical availability, no one wants to see people die in war… no one who is a mainstream member of either party that is. So, if you’re following me on this, then you acknowledge that everyone is human, we all share the same basic needs, many of which are not quantifiable in words. How is it that we have annealed to two, disjoint parties, each believing the other is completely different in ideology? The republicans view the democrats as a communist Marxist fans, and the democrats view the republicans as war mongers chasing the oh-mighty dollar.

It is natural for humans to break problems down into two distinct items. That is the basis of most computer algorithms that can solve problems in a timely fashion. A problem may consist of thousands of pieces, but people can only really deal with two or three pieces at a time, so they simplify, solve, repeat. It seems, what we have here, is a situation in which people have incorrectly simplified the problem of, “what do we do next?” into two distinct pieces, republican or democrat. What does that even mean? Republican and Democrat are just words that represent a fundamentally flawed summation of a group of people’s ideas.

Let’s talk math here. Quite often, it proves fruitful to represent a state of affairs in real life on paper and look at objectively. It seems to me that what we have here is a hyper-dimensional space R(n) where the dimensions are possible opinions and the values plotted on those dimensions are the values people have. Let’s say N = 300,000,000 people, the number of people in the United States. So there will be N points on this plot, each point located in this hyperspace by their value on each opinion. If you sum up the opinions on every dimension and divide by the number of opinions then you will find the average opinion of everyone in the United States.

This average point is where the layman (or laywoman) draws the line between the two major parties of the United States. Because we are dealing with more than two dimensions, it is actually a hyper-plane instead of a line, with a normal that faces in a direction such that the sum of the average distance from the surface of the plane is minimal. This is an ambiguous assumption however because there is more than one way to find the normal of a best-fit hyper-plane.

Now that we have the situation represented in a hyperspace (much in the same way eharmoney.com finds your perfect match… if you were ever curious) we can evaluate what is causing this disparity between the opinions of ‘opposite parties’. It seems to me that once the plot has been sliced in half by our hyper-plane and we dropped each person into two disjoint buckets, we would then take the average of the disjoint buckets to find the ‘opinion’ of the bucket (The bucket is a political party here). It also seems to me that the averages of the unique buckets would also be close to the average of both buckets.

Because I know you can’t picture what I’m picturing, I’m going to roll it up into a 3D graph of the plot of people’s opinions and plane separating the parties.

The blue dots in front of the green plane represent the Democratic Party and the red dots behind the plane represent the Republican Party. The plane runs through the average of these three opinions plotted on the three spatial dimensions we can comprehend. The opinions themselves don’t matter but for the purpose of example they are “National Defense”, “Abortion” and “Welfare”. As you can see, most members of both parties see eye to eye on at least one dimension or opinion. However, there are also a few outliers that are very far from the face of the surface, we call these people extremists in statistics and in politics. 

It seems to me that most people only look at one dimension (or opinion) at a time when making decisions in life. They look at the extremist from the other party on that sole dimension when looking at the opinion of the opposite party. This yields an incorrect assumption that all republicans are warmongers and all democrats want to tax your hard earnings and give it away to lazy people.

The fact of the matter is, we are all human, we all want and we all need the same things with minor variances across the board. My proclamation here is to drop the idea that some magical ‘party’ is the correct answer and take up the idea that we need to be vigilant in our actions, our decisions and our allegiance to the superset that is the United States of America; Not put all of our faith into some subset party that we artificially created out of the need to comprehend the incompressible state of affairs of our world in a binary fashion.

The previous ranting had little to do with actual implementation of current political players or policy, and I acknowledge this. However, I submit to you that there is no way to come to a rational accord between people, on what to do for people, without first understanding people.

If you enjoyed this little lesson in epistemology, then I invite you to leave me on the mailing list and furthermore, I encourage you to counter my opinions and give me yours. If this excerpt from my mind was unwieldy or otherwise offensive, then go ahead and make sure my email address doesn’t find its way onto a CC.

Respectfully,
~Stuart

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