``What Makes a Man Turn Neutral?''

``What makes a man turn neutral... lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?''

As said by Zapp Brannigan from Brannigan Begin Again. As asinine the quote may sound in the beginning, a slightly deeper meditation applied to it reveals its innate profoundness, even though it was uttered by one of the dumbest characters within Futurama.

``Neutrality''. It sounds like a great idea in principle. The only problem is that it is actually not a practical principle to be applied in reality, for the simple reason that things in life are discriminative in nature. I posit that all decision processes are, at the end of the day, a system of discriminating between two or more choices.

Any decision process that does not end up with discriminative effects has failed its primary objective of reaching a decision.

Now, before the pitchforks come up, allow me to remind all that ``discriminative'' and ``discrimination'' as used in this context refers to the property of drawing distinctions, a means of separating a set of things into two or more sets. So in the context of a decision process, the outcome of the said process separates the world states where one choice was made, and another where the other choice (assuming a binary choice situation) was made instead.

``Neutrality''. It suggests a sense of balance, a position that neither contributes nor takes away from the other positions that it is neutral to. True ``neutrality'' isn't likely to exist---all things are according to the will of God, and if you are not a believer, at the very least you may agree that the physical concept of neutrality, equilibrium, is usually fleeting at a universal scale, but may be found in sufficiently localised sub-spaces only.

This balance then, is illusionary. Like all choice-related principles, the introduction of ``neutrality'' itself creates a new option whose consequences need to be addressed. In the short term, it may appear that one has wisely stayed away from the contested responses of all the other participants who are not neutral; but in the long term, the price to neutrality must be paid---that non-participation (at easiest) or active maintenance of being in the balance (at the most adaptive) will bring forth new contradictions that would not have occurred had one picked a side to begin with.

In politics, the price of neutrality is either the superficial aloofness (likely with some serious behind-the-scenes horse-trading to maintain that veneer of aloofness), or living in the gray area of simultaneously entertaining multiple perspectives/sides of any particular problem, an action that is best described as whoring out. The first form of neutrality may end up alienating the particular state from regional/world politics; aloofness means that the state practising it has accepted the position of being treated like a backdrop to not interact with, which means that in situations where the state may need assistance from other states, not helping it is a legitimate and ethically defensible position.

As for the second form of neutrality, the state practising it will likely to enforce a blanket of vagueness over its foreign policy, discouraging people from scrutinising too hard to reveal the innate contradictions that are necessary to keep that ``support multiple/all perspectives'' neutrality narrative. And when the scrutiny gets too intense, a deliberate nit will be shown as the reason why it is possible to maintain both seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously, claiming that the state does not discriminate on ideological lines but work towards a singular goal of problem solving.

To address Brannigan's quote, what makes a man turn neutral isn't about lust for gold nor power, nor was he born with a heart of neutrality. It's greed in the general sense, or more specifically, the lust for as many options made available as possible without committing to any of them until a decision must be made. Neutrality in the sense of taking no sides in a conflict sounds great in theory, but is rarely applicable in practice---consider it a momentary phase of unstable equilibrium as sooner or later, one will be forced by circumstances to literally pick a side.