Consistency in Political Thought

Consistency is everything.

NO WAIT! DON’T CLICK OFF! I promise you that this essay isn’t motivational engagement-bait slop.

Mainstream political thought right now has more in common with the type of garbage you’d find in the alley behind a Little Caesar’s on a Saturday night than the high-brow idealized vision many have of what it should be. This is not a controversial statement; ask anyone you know, even the guilty parties: Leftists, rightists, or even radical centrists.

So why? Why is political thought so mind-numbingly stupid nowadays?

• Online echo chambers
• Degradation of the American education system
• The rise of Political Correctness and the ‘Thought Police’

I’m not going to rehash the discussion on these; discussing these three subjects has become very overplayed. Every NYT op-ed blames whatever political issue that crops up that day on some permutation of the prior three points (with some other inane garbage thrown in for good measure).

We can dig a bit deeper on this issue, there is fresh ice to break in the search for the North Pole, what are we waiting for?

Morals are to Politics as Math is to Physics.

Let me elaborate on this statement: One’s politics are an extension of one’s morals – applied to the real world; Physics is the application of mathematics to enable the understanding of our natural world. Just as physicists utilize experiments under a mathematical framework to gain understanding of natural phenomena beyond our base comprehension – we all use our moral framework in ‘daily experiments’ (the policy issues that confront us daily) to drive our decision-making in a way that pushes ourselves and our society into an understanding of what is ‘Good’.

The problem with mainstream political thought is very simple: many of us have detached our politics from our morals.

Can you even think of a contemporary physicist who has detached their work from an algebraic framework – relying solely on the vibes? That is what many of us are doing right now in our day-to-day political lives.

When you live without a moral framework for your politics, you get inconsistent beliefs. Having inconsistent beliefs is probably the biggest sin any good-faith politically-conscious person can commit; it is the fool’s machiavellianism: they are too clueless to understand that when their beliefs are boiled down – nothing but meaningless vapor rises.

You can see this type of thought everywhere. I rarely insert my own personal beliefs into my writings, but if you despise the United States for “imperialism” and somehow think that Iran is “innocent” – you have inconsistent beliefs.

Inconsistent beliefs are a disease; they are an intellectually lazy attitude easily spread from host to host, promoting ignorance in the form of self-indulgence. Fortunately for all of us: curing ourselves of inconsistent beliefs is pretty easy! You just have to think! Think your beliefs through, filter them through your moral system, do they match up?

If this is your first time doing this, you’d probably be surprised as to how many times your political beliefs fail your morality test. I know that once I started thinking like this, much of my politics got tossed out like spoiled milk.

This might seem counter-intuitive but it doesn’t matter what your moral system is, it is far more important that your political beliefs are interlinked and consistent with your morality than anything else.

This attitude is borne out of an assumption that many people’s moral systems are closely related to what is innately good. The edge case that breaks this assumption will be discussed in a future essay (link TBD), however, most people raised in America in the 21st century are good people who want to do good by their god, their family, and their country.

Those who don’t want to good are a different case entirely. However we are not talking about those people! The energies of well-meaning Americans cured of inconsistent beliefs will drown out the voices of nihilists and machiavellians any day of the week.

Unfortunately, we as a society are not at a point where most of us have been cured of our inconsistencies. Some of the aforementioned issues – Echo Chambers, Political Correctness – only serve to make inconsistencies more dug in. It is far more comfortable for someone to live without confronting their inconsistent beliefs as opposed to ensuring that everything passes their own moral filter.

It is this comfort that causes well-meaning people to bask in their inconsistencies. Until we overcome our resistance to confronting ourselves about our beliefs, we will not repair our political climate. We will only suffer further and further, until the small minority of our people that are nihilists and machiavellians destroy us all.

Be consistent!