American Politics has a Dimensionality Problem

Reality is more than just left and right

I don’t consider myself a part of either side. Principally speaking, I probably could be considered conservative. But the Republican party in America today is not defined by principles alone.

I used to consider myself a progressive liberal. The most excited I ever got about a politician was Andrew Yang. I liked his fresh new ideas which were not revolutionary, but instead felt like they could be implemented into our current framework relatively seamlessly.

I don’t think America needs a revolution — at least not the typical kind, involving fire, destruction, and replacement of government with a supposedly “better” one.

I don’t believe in communism or socialism as a panacea, nor do I blindly agree with free market capitalism.

I didn’t vote, not because I didn’t agree with one party more than another, but because I don’t think what voting symbolizes in this country is something healthy for our society.

I have a rule that I’ve made for myself: I refuse to take part in arguments with people who hold beliefs I’ve held before but grew out of. This is a sign, to me, that this person is still on their path of spiritual development. They may or may not stagnate, but either way, you cannot force someone into consciousness, just as you cannot, after becoming conscious, regress into ignorance.

The reason America is falling apart is not because one party or another is evil. It’s because they are both at a low state of consciousness.

The thing that constantly bothers me about American politics is the low-dimensionality of it. Why do we insist on compressing all of our beliefs, values, and ideologies onto a one-dimensional spectrum. Why do we believe that reality only consists of a left and a right? If you have all your senses, you can at least see three of them, and philosophers throughout history, let alone modern day scientists, have hinted that there are many more than that.

Okay fine, a two dimensional spectrum is not too uncommon — the one with “social freedoms” on one axis and “economic freedoms” on another. But that’s still insufficient, because we already know reality is at least three-dimensional, right?

What would a three-dimensional political spectrum look like?

That’s the wrong question. The answer that we’ve been looking for is: the third-dimension is not political. It’s personal. The third-dimension is the one where you decide as an individual what’s right for you in your life, not based on laws or ideologies, but instead, based on your spiritual nature. The more you progress spiritually, the better you’ll be able to make decisions that politics has attempted and failed to solve. These are problems which exist in societies which neglect their spiritual nature and reduce the dimensionality of reality.

A symptom of this reduced dimensionality problem is that we’ve come to rely much too heavily of science and logic, that by this point we are literally neglecting several invisible forces which are acting upon our everyday reality at all times. We want to be able to quantify everything. And while that’s a noble goal to strive for, we haven’t yet accomplished it, and we’re still pretty far from doing so. So the next best thing is to follow the wisdom passed down through the generations, alluded to in philosophical writings for thousands of years. Simply put, we have to trust our primal human intuition, which exists without having to be proven or quantified by science.

Not to say science is useless; it has its place. But that place cannot and will not supplant spirituality. Humans are made of consciousness. All the deepest questions of life and the universe cannot be found under the microscope but within our spiritual nature. Various substances have made these answers clear for several people throughout history. The fact that the answers are consistent despite being at different times throughout history by people on different sides of the world means what they’ve described is fairly accurate. Let’s learn from these people and their experiences. Let’s open up our consciousness to the potential of being more than a one-dimensional spectrum.

If we raise the consciousness of that spectrum as a whole, then many of the problems we’ve been fighting about — and which are getting worse by the day — will slowly start to evaporate. The more we try to compress everything we believe and stand for onto one side or another, the worse it will get.

We have a choice — continue fighting partisan issues with rhetoric, shaming, and antagonism. Or accept that we are missing something, and something big. We need to start to take care of ourselves, to have faith, to trust the universe rather than fight it. Because to fight it is to fight ourselves.

A good place to start is meditation. Conveniently, there are several apps for that these days. Try it for a month or two and come back to me and tell me you haven’t become less politically triggerable. I think you might have a hard time with that.