This is an open letter to our Western civilisation.
Dear world, I primarily wanted to address the younger demographic of America. As you age and become older, you become wiser. You are being told that this election marks a bifurcation point in history, that to vote for the other side will be the end of humanity. Or so we are told.
In reality, that is not going to happen. Life goes on.
In most modern and Western democratic countries, politics generally swings from one side to the other through time, a bit like a pendulum. First it goes to one side, then the the other. No side ever seems to hold more than two or three consecutive election cycles.
We each vote for and society elects one of the political parties that we think, overall, best represent us as a nation state. However there are more than one or two separate issues in the world to think about today. There are multiple. ‘Left’ or right’ doesn’t really accurately describe most people’s political persuasions anymore. Only having one or two main parties (“progressive” or “conservative”) to choose from is a bit of an outmoded concept. One person may be an environmentalist, but also having something to say about migration. Who does he vote for? The green party? The nationalist party? Or a central party? The voter is conflicted.
Even so, politics has polarised to a great degree in the last decade here the West. It has become a bimodal frequency distribution, where sometimes it seems that everyone around you is either on one side or the other. What should be happening in the modern world is that we should be holding more frequent referendums on individual issues, so the majority is truly represented for each individual decision. That way, the bulk of the people can vote on the things that they care most about.
Even so, I don’t think the swinging pendulum model is accurate depiction of how things are anymore in the world of politics. I think a better analogy of where politics in the West today is something akin to that of a spinning top. A precarious wobbling and balancing act, wandering all over the place through space and time. It leans this way on certain issues, sometimes too much, then has to lean back the other way as it overcompensates itself. [Read more…]