Part Four of Pain: Done

Ah. Yet another pain point/milestone has been completed, and I can breathe a little easier.

Just a little, mind you.

November is reaching the second-third, and different things have started heating up. For instance, I really should be practising some of the more challenging parts for the contrabass flute for the upcoming gig on 2024-11-24, but I'm just feeling all tired and am trying to recover from... I don't know what. Burnout?

🤷‍♂️

Aaanyway, let's talk politics. No, not US politics, just the philosophy of politics as a whole.

To me, politics is the art and science of making big decisions that affect a disproportionate number of people, given the actual number of people who are directly involved in the making of the said decision. To be apathetic in politics is a declaration that one simply does not care about the decisions that are being made, and there are only a very limited number of sets of people who can get away with that---the really privileged whose personal circumstances make them more or less immune to the consequences of the big decisions that are made, and the misled who are convinced somehow that they belong to the really privileged set of people who are somehow immunte to the consequences of the big decisions that are made, without the necessary personal circumstances that can make that a reality.

The rest of us though, we need to pay attention to the politics.

Since politics is the art and science of making big decisions that affect a disproportionate number of people, it naturally contains big entanglements of different types of questions that need decisions to. There are no easy win-win decisions most of the time, and there are also as many possible decisions to be made for a single problem as there are people.

But this complexity cannot be used as an argument to stall any form of decision making---the longer a decision (any decision) is delayed, the more confounding and unpredictable the consequences.

So as humans, we start taking shortcuts. In the modern version of things, we create sub-sets of people with broad political ideologies that attempt to articulate some general principles from which their decisions (should they be in power) will follow. Think of it as some kind of ``axiomatic schema''. We tend to call them ``political parties''.

Here's the thing about political parties---it is but one way of having like-minded people (with respect to principles in the setting of policy) to band together to give enough heft behind their bid to advance their idea of how the big decisions are to be made. Political parties tend to be more... rational in some sense, because one needs to subscribe to the overarching principles in order to be a willing member of the said party.

But political parties are not the only way to organise like-minded people, least ways not in the modern age. And the reason for this, is the increasing ease for anyone to communicate with anyone else on their ideas, and to create virtual communities.

Now, there is nothing ``fake'' about virtual communities---they are as real as the pain one feels when one stubs their toe. However, there is still a qualitative difference between virtual and physical communities---the former requires a lot of heavy-lifting from logos, while the latter can rely on the tried and proven firmware of pathos that has been refined over the existence of humanity as a species. Thus, I am claiming that the ``increasing ease of communication'' is paradoxically not a good replacement of what we have done for aeons through face-to-face communications in meatspace. This is especially true when one takes into consideration the current political infrastructure---only political parties have the right (and legacy-driven capability) to actually rule after they become the government, and not any virtual-only communities.

This becomes a problem in that the virtual communities: as they increase in generated communication content, they start to think that they are amassing a more clout/followers/disciples, and eventually they will, as Biggie might say in dismay, ``get high on their own supply''. The echo effects make the virtual communities think they are really strong, but without much of the accompanying actions within the physical reality that conforms to the current political infrastructure, the only thing that currently counts in this iteration of the rule of politics.

It's not about left-wing versus right-wing. It's not even about liberal versus conservative. It's not even about immigration. It's literally about not paying attention to the actual rules of the processes involved to get into the position where the actual decision-making can be made, only because of one's hubris.

``MT, are you criticising the US election?''

No, I'm not. I'm criticising all elections that have a very vocal online presence about wanting change, without the physical support ``on the ground'' to back it up. And no, I don't think trying to co-opt an existing political party to advance one's causes that have traditionally not been a part of that party is the right thing to do either. Mostly because of the way humanity's firmware is run---those who are in earliest and the longest will tend to hold much more sway on the direction than might be initially seen.

As we beware the old who exist in a profession where many die young, we should also beware the veteran politician who stays in a political party that has tried to remake itself many times. Johnny-come-lately may have the piss and vinegar for change, but it is the grandees who give the final call on direction, and those types do not always have the patience nor wherewithal to think otherwise than their own counsel.

Till the next update.