Political Ideologies are Inaccurate Equations

They fail to describe the real state of reality

Our political views are defined by our life experiences. Someone who grew up in a wealthy family will favor the political party that doesn’t want to increase taxes on the rich. Someone who grew up in a poor family will want rich people to be taxed more.

The crux of politics is to define a framework which allows for the most equitable flow of money and resources. All political ideas beyond that are abstractions (aka, man-made conceptions built off of previous man-made conceptions).

In the hyper-politicized environment of society today, we have become so absorbed in these abstractions that we have failed to keep in mind the simplicity of that original goal: resources, money, fairness.

We fight for socialism, to end capitalism, or vice-versa, and so on. But each of these political systems are not scientific fields. They have no fixed laws.

Anyone who has studied college chemistry is familiar with the ideal gas law. The ideal gas law is a generalized equation which allows one to make approximate calculations about the properties of gases. While it can be used for some practical purposes, the ideal gas law is far from reality. It’s just that — ideal. It involves a plethora of assumptions, and in doing so, neglects much of the real forces that are at play in the physical behavior of gaseous substances. For many real-world purposes, the law fails to provide any meaningful results, and as a result has to be supplemented with a series of corrections — a set of equations which reflects reality better, but are much more complex and difficult to derive. These equations are never ending, — they are still being derived to this day — and some are impossible to solve; they can only be solved by approximation.

Political systems are exactly the same. They represent an ideal state of the world. They require assumptions of human behavior and of macro-systems. But once you get into the real world application of them, they fall apart.

Clinging to political ideologies is thus like saying the ideal gas law is all you need, and a rejection of any further equations to describe reality more accurately.

We’ve gotten so caught up in this abstraction, that we’ve prevented ourselves from understanding the actual state of reality.

Instead of making decisions based on real world situations, we make our decisions based on what our preferred ideology says is right.

But, again, the ideology is ideal. By definition, it doesn’t, and will never, take into account the real world situation.

If we want to be political at all, which for many people, is totally unnecessary — politics should be reserved for qualified individuals who have dedicated their career to studying the flow of money and resources , and not hobbyists who only see things from their individual life perspective — we should be willing to adjust our views regularly, adding in those supplementary equations on a case by case basis.

If a capitalist system is not working, that doesn’t mean capitalism is BAD! It just means that a certain implementation of capitalism is dysfunctional, and that certain aspects of reality have not been accounted for by that ideal framework. Add some supplementary equations.

By being so rigid with our beliefs in certain political systems, we prevent ourselves from making any progress whatsoever. We close ourselves off to discussion, from learning anything new. We insist on jumping to an opposite extreme, the opposite side of the one-dimensional political spectrum.

But reality is not one-dimensional.

The reason political frameworks fail to fully capture the dynamics of reality is the same reason that science cannot fully explain the workings of nature. It’s because we do not fully understand reality and nature. And we never will. These concepts are beyond the understanding of any human being. Trying to understand them is like trying to get to the grocery store by running on a treadmill.

But that’s fine, because we, as humans, are not responsible for solving reality. We are only responsible for our own lives. Let nature take care of itself. We can do nothing but work within it. Working within it means being flexible, constantly adjusting our beliefs in according with the changing dynamics of our environment. Constantly growing, and being open to learning new things so that we can have productive conversations and empathize with other people’s views. And most of all, striving for success in our personal goals through persistence and hard-work… to have a good life.

Let’s drop the desire to come up the that one God-equation to solve all of mankind's problems. Ask any scientist, and they’ll tell you it’s impossible.