Political Distance

A bit of musing on the lack of real choice in the 2012 election, trying to make sense of the choice we face.

With the election’s temporal location quickly converging with our own, this post examines the political proximity of the two major candidates. One way of picturing the difference is conceiving of a Cartesian plane, one which a society moves around in. It may be roughly similar to the so-called political spectrum (Wikipedia: Political Spectrum), or maybe not. Maybe instead of a plane, it’s a linear space, a motion picture, showing society’s position at each frame, which is animated over time. In reality, that space is simply a set of nodes representing the various states of society. We have a graph. The graph interacts both with our actions and the natural world, constantly producing new states of reality. There are small decisions, like sipping water, or one human’s life (compared to the scale of society). Big decisions, like spending whatever portion of our resources on devices of war compared to devices of exploration. In any case, what direction and distance each candidate wants society to walk in, and where they would like us to end up, is one measure of their political distance. Not that they could agree about where we are in the first place. In wilderness survival, a lost person is meant to seek out running water. A stream flows to a river. A river flows to a larger river, and eventually to an ocean. Society tends to build up around water. Follow the water down, and you’ll find your salvation. Not to mention people need water anyway, and running water tends to be the best place and form to get it as clean as possible in the wild. Maybe there is a political equivalent to streams and rivers? Maybe we could tell our leaders to follow them down? That’s maybe a topic for another day. Today I find interest in the unexplored terrain. The fact that both major candidates agree that so much of the land is not worth visiting. And that we must stick close to familiar ridge lines. For example, the mass incarceration of humans. For example, the laws governing copyrights and patents. Military budget. Energy production. Transportation and population densities. So there are some differences. Or, take one where the gap is wider, the laws governing immigration. Even for the more sensible candidate on that issue, it is not a coherent idea of where we are or can go. Economies are the aforementioned streams and rivers of this landscape. People emigrate for economic reasons. They already follow the flow. Without ending the flow caused by poor conditions at the source, and the desire for cheap labor and contraband at the destination, the dams will not hold. Improving the aqueducts will only reduce the flow so slightly. Neither candidate will stand to eliminate the war on drugs, which is akin to using forced human labor to carry the water, at gunpoint. Increasing the contraband production locally would reduce that economic stream, but at the price of increased pollution in the local economic water supply. Reducing the vigor of the local economic waters, too, would make them less appealing to the laborers that immigrate unlawfully. But it again harms the lands here. So, even though one candidate is quite ahead on the issue, he is equally unwilling to take the real, full path to the destination. At best, he calls for better aqueducts, will will prove inadequate. Still, slight progress is plausibly better than regress or stagnation. The closer we approach real solutions to our problems, the more likely we will gain a vantage of the true destination.

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