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I've been thinking a lot recently about fundamental tensions, dualities, dialectics, how these map onto each other and relate to our societies, cultures, politics and secular cycles.
Bear with me a moment, I know this is abstract. But I think it provides a useful map for thinking about many issues, no matter which side you are on.
Consider a binary that we find very much in the news, culture and politics of the day, sex. Male-female is the binary, but there's a lot of definitional games being played. This binary is the poles of a fundamental tension, with a spectrum of related tensions in complicated combinations. But just think quickly on the issues of the day, and you can map that tension onto pretty much anything. In politics, which is “male” R or D? Hot or cold? Light or dark? Gay or straight? Drugs or prohibition? Guns or not? Notice the issues do not track cleanly, because both sides of any binary have a range of variability and expression for the same aspect. So, prohibition tracks female, which tracks D, but democrats generally support more drugs (but not tobacco). And male tracks R tracks guns, but prohibition on drugs, which tracks female. One side expresses their freedom in economics, the other in sex. One side demands order for the border, the other demands order in DC. Everyone is in tension, and so are our groups.
Thesis: This duality and how it resolves onto the issues of our day and the circumstances of our lives are a good descriptor for who we are, why we believe what we do, have the politics we have. I believe this helps us to understand why other people disagree with us, when we are clearly right about everything. The failure modes of these dualities explain the suffering experienced by the sentient in virtually all modes of life, no matter how objectively comfortable.
This extends to genetics itself (nature/nurture), primal forces (life/death, chaos/order, pleasure/suffering, violence/peace) and personal psychology and philosophy. It reaches into our very conceptions of these ideas, rationality vs irrationality.
Consider the subreddit AITA. What's the appeal here? It's weirdly attractive, tons of comments, shit flying everywhere. It allows people to see two "films" and argue for their conception. We have news silos because we are all practicing to do this. To see a situation and judge it by our lights, and then go forth to do battle with those on the opposing side. Goes for social media pile-ons and cancel culture, sports talk radio and small town gossip trains.
Hey there sportsfans, how about Coach Chucky? Is he a moron or what? Phone lines are open, call now.
Hey there Conservatives, how about this tranny reading to kids, whaddaya make of that shit? Isn't that weird and creepy? Donate money to me to keep telling you how nuts Liberals are!
Hey there Liberals, how about Current Republican having the same border policies as Previous Democrat? KIDS IN CagES!!!!!
The reality is that every duality has a fundamental legitimacy to it. Individuals have different ideas about exactly which values they hold on which scales of which issues.
Let's consider the two human archetypes by pole of duality. This is in no way determinative, as there is huge variation on most of these scales, but think of it very generally. You have male, nature, chaos, violence, irrationality, pain, greatness. And female, nurture, order, peace, rationality, pleasure, mediocrity.
These tensions need each other, as people need each other. Order decays, and is renewed by chaos. Male chaos is redirected by female order to more productive pursuits. Progressives come up with new ways to change society, Conservatives try to make sure it doesn't fuck up the good bits we already have. At this level of abstraction, conservative codes female, but politically that's not how it is currently, which is an interesting way of thinking about politics. The “feminine” politics of order are largely in the service of a “masculine” political project of trying out new shit. And the “male” embrace of inequality and freedom is channeled into the conservative project of slowing down the progs. The interactions are functionally infinite, so all this is descriptive rather than predictive. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and none of this means that these current realities are permanent in any way. But the tensions are.
Now let's put in some rudimentary statistics, and start making some basic assumptions that are certainly not 100% accurate, but should be a good descriptor of reality. Within each tension between two poles or archetypes is a bell curve of human behavior. It can be tall or short, but the poles of a tension are rare. Pure archetypes always are. Most people, psychology and behavior will cluster around the average value to some degree. What is true for IQ is true for violence, income, sex and number of offspring.
This begins to explain secular cycles, Freud, political organization and horseshoe theory. It explains why marginal members of groups are often the biggest cheerleaders. The most famous German nationalist was Austrian. Shaun King is white. The richest woman in the world is a dude. The first black president wasn't “black-black” (ADOS), and the first black president was Bill Clinton. Math is not without its ironies.
If it were the case that humans had a single nature, we should not expect cycles of any sort. We should simply solve our problems the most direct way and have a smooth path through history. We see nothing of the sort, but we do see a general tendency toward higher organization, larger civilizations etc. Think of the law of averages pushing this vast ocean of human duality relentlessly toward the middle. Order is winning, at least for now, but it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and we all know it. Hence the millenial cults of the Second Coming and Global Warming as the duelling apocalypses fueling the paranoid fringe of each political religion.
We all feel within us that this level of organization can't be sustained with the number of people we are producing, and that is going to mean a lot of death at some point. Malthus has been wrong for a long time, but the heat death of the universe is a long way off and he won't be forever. The popularity of the zombie movie is a social expression of the human connection to this fear. It is our fantasy that we'd be the ones to survive.
The reality is, the world isn't ending today and probably not tomorrow. We'll keep muddling along. We are the richest and most advanced we've ever been, more people are living more comfortable lives than any time before, and in fact in all the time before added together! And we're miserable as shit.
Our dual nature is oppressed by every temporary victory of one side. All order and the very real benefits it brings are at the cost of very real oppression. Freedom is dangerous, unequal and in general a bad bet. Yet it militates within us, furious and raging at the restrictions of our social lives. We feel an injustice in the randomness of the world, the pointlessness of all the suffering, the sheer cruelty of sentience in a cold and mechanical universe. What Dillard calls the “glut of pain”.
The problem with rationality is that it is death in the end. The math of the universe says that we are here to suffer until we die, and no amount of joy we steal from relentless time will last. Following our natural instincts to reproduce our genes will only bring more people into the world to suffer until they die. Once we lose all excuses for our suffering, we find that it was within us all the time. Transhumanists and wireheaders fantasize about bypassing suffering via drugs and technology. Religious gurus variously channel and redirect it. Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something. If you want to know why there is a loss of meaning, it is because we are running out of excuses to explain our psychic pain.
But for every pole is a competing and legitimate one. Life finds a way, hope springs eternal, it's just crazy enough to work. Any good game theorist can tell you that irrationality is rational at times. It is this that Camus refers to when he says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not happy with his circumstance per se, but happy that he has his suffering laid out before him, and he is willing to meet it. In his punishment there is more time. The irrational search for another roll of the dice, a possible future, a chance at the gods. A revolt against death, against inevitability, against math itself. A sense that if we can hang in this game long enough, if we play our cards right and we get a bit lucky, we might someday escape this hellworld within our own skulls.
You correctly note that this is descriptive, and not prescriptive. That the data is noisy and the correlations poor—not that correlation implies causation, anyway. For a given issue it is easy to find counterexamples, or even imagine an alternate history where the constituencies might have been reversed.
Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?
Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions. Neither nature nor nurture but natural law. Rejecting both autocracy and chaos in favor of mediated decision-making. The role in your gender analogy is obvious. It is the synthesis to this dialectic. After all, the poles of a tension are rare.
This category rejects duality in favor of a triality. What if we posit another category, one that rejects all three? Meta-compromise, or perhaps meta-skepticism. Then—then—
By induction, we end up with an arbitrarily large set of skeptic positions. An infinity of signaling and countersignaling. I think this model better reflects human interaction than any proposed duality. For any sufficiently entrenched set of positions, there is alpha in claiming another level of sophistication.
Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.
If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.
In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.
Then what does it buy us?
At best, you’ve applied Principal Component Analysis to sociology. But correlation still isn’t causation, and just because you can model a position as a linear combination of some axes doesn’t imply they are meaningful.
It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.
And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.
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