The Connection Between Politics and Personality ($)

The sacred is not supernatural, it’s all around us. You only need to learn to see it.

“I looked in temples, churches, and mosques, but I found the divine within my heart.” — Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

Open and Shut Thinking

Politics works to establish a definitive direction and a unified narrative, while a scientific approach considers all alternatives. The scientific approach is more successful, and for that reason politics tries to appropriate science, but it cannot. Their methods are in conflict.

Our dominant personality, which we call our ego, tries to dictate and control when under pressure. When people are relaxed, they are open-minded and flexible. Open-minded people consider alternatives and revisit issues. They are less reliable, from a political point of view. Politics does not like relaxed people. Politics aims to create factions whose opinions are fixed.

When people feel pressure, they seek the protection of their group. In today’s society, the largest group is the state, while others are political parties, communities, cultures, and religious congregations. Most of these groups, even groups of scientists, operate on the factional, political model. Groups are biased even when the subject is scientific. And while bias is rarely warranted, our egos prefer it. Limitations make things simpler.

Beyond Open and Shut

There is a third way of understanding. These first two are rational, discriminating, and pragmatic. The third was doesn’t have a name, which is odd because it is the fundamental path we take in coming to decisions. We might call it dramatic, emotional, or instinctive.

Reason is a gloss on top of instinct, and we tell ourselves we are free willed, rational, and in control of our circumstances. The truth is, we are only weakly rational. Our reasons have their own reasons, and these underlying reasons are not reasonable at all, they’re emotional.

Let’s call this third way of knowing transcendent. It provides new understanding and new reasons. Transcendent knowing is not necessarily irrational or unreasonable, though it feels that way at first. You may eventually come to a new, rational understanding of things, but such conclusions are not necessary. Explanations are never a goal, they’re only a means. You don’t need an argument in order to act successfully or feel you’re doing the right thing.

The only way to a new understanding, aside from having your old memories knocked out of you, is to discard some old structures. Transcendent knowing is a process of mental reformation, and you can never be entirely ready for it. We may be open and attentive, but new perspectives take more than that. They require the ability to recognize and find meaning in new patterns.

Yourself and Others

I recently spoke to a woman concerned about the mental health of her son. I never met her or her son. All I know comes from her report, and you should never believe what people tell you. You should not believe what you tell yourself, which is more to the point.

This person wanted to understand in a way that was neat and predictable, and things were not working. As is often the case in relationships, her son sounded like the perfect argument against her view of the world.

I told her that we could work to change her view of the world—which is to say her view of herself—or we could work to change her view of her son. But we could not work on changing her son’s view on anything. Only he could do that.

She was adamant that she was looking for an understanding that would change her son, or an angle that would give her the power to make these changes happen. I told her that was not how things worked, and I could tell she was not listening.

In truth, you can change other people when those other people are figments of your imaginations, and everyone we know is, to some degree, who we imagine them to be. But even in this case, changing “them” is changing you, and the program is circular.

All reasoning ultimately comes back to undermine itself. This is why mathematics works and physics doesn’t. Math never explains anything, it only establishes identities between things. Physics aims to explain something but, in the end, it always rests on imaginary things. Mathematics is a fourth way of knowing, and we can make a useful personal mathematics when we know ourselves better.

This mother’s problem was that she could not envision a reality that her son could share. Her need for control and understanding was leaving her empty-handed. She was looking for an authority who had the dynamite to blast a tunnel through the mountain to the clarity she wanted. It wasn’t going to happen because she was tunneling through the wrong mountain.

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