Chess Games & Political Perspectives

I recently played a chess game (Blitz) where, going into the last minute and being 40+ moves deep, I was up a Knight and maybe a pawn or two and felt certain of victory. However, in the last 30 seconds, it became clear that there was no way to win -- he had two Bishops terrorizing me and two passed pawns.  It was pretty shocking how, simply by measuring the game through the most obvious thing (material), I didn't realize I was in trouble, and my perspective did not shift until it was far too late... 

Not the actual chess game but similar enough to it. 

Now, take politics -- it's not a clear game with winners/losers, nor does it  even have clear objectives since everyone can be valuing something different. Moreover, the board is a lot bigger than sixty four squares, and everything can be a "piece" and move. 

How much more uncertain we must be of being right and whether or not we are doing/saying the right thing. How much more careful we must be when assessing the situation. 

Politics should not be mutual combat & debate, but should be centered more around trying to talk about and understand a bigger problem, and to share ideas on it. Since none of us reading this completely determine the policies that are set forward, we should really feel free to discuss these things without malice... 

And we should remember that, just as how we can be surprised in a game like chess that we do not actually have the full perspective necessary to win, so, too, in politics or other arenas, we should not even pretend to have the entire picture. Instead, we should simply argue our perspective and our values, presenting them persuasively, in hopes  of receiving some  amount of validation for our concern and hoping that the public takes  into account our perspectives when they evaluate what they will advocate moving forward. 

Unnecessary Dichotomies & Narrative Thinking

We are sometimes taught to think in the direction of opposites, and that "sadness" is the opposite of "happiness," but isn't it also the case that anger or nausea is just as distant from happiness as sadness? You could say that this is an unnecessary dichotomy -- I think 'false dichotomy' would be too strong since it is not deceptive to make a comparison between the two...It's just not the fact that we have to conceive of sadness as the opposite of happiness.

I think there's actually a lot of unnecessary dichotomies like this -- for instance, Capitalism and Communism are opposing economic visions, but if we were to look at a partially planned economy from the premodern period, we could scarcely say that it is a "mixed economy," nor could we say that it either validates a Capitalist or Communist world view. Thus, while Communist & Capitalist are opposites in a sense, it does not mean that, by necessity, an economy which has property rights/ownership that would be considered "mixed" by somoene from a capitalist/communist perspective is necessarily mixed. 

Just as such, we cannot say "There are atheists who do not believe in heaven or hell, and Muslims that believe in layered heavens and hells, and Buddhists as well who acknowledge near infinite heavens & hells, so a Christian is a moderate, perhaps even closer to an atheist!, since he believes in one heaven, one hell." 

By thinking too much "logically" in a linear, graph-paper sense of the word, we come to unnecessary dichotomies. The sort of thing that school teachers would drum out of us -- the attempt to map everything out and categorize things has actually resulted in all of these unnecessary dichotomies that clutter the mind. 

We can see this as well with the "racist" and "anti-racist" dichotomy. Yes, in a sense, the opposite of someone who believes in the superiority of their race and dislikes other racists is an anti-racist, but this is not a scale that actually has to be applied to everything. It's not useful in every circumstance.  In fact, it may even be the case that it is very much not useful in most circumstances. 

Unnecessary dichotomies is one of the things that hampers any form of debate because it draws people into the practice of trying to define their enemy in unflattering ways -- ways that does not actually amount to how they define themselves. It breeds a sort of dishonesty in discussion that rarely anyone moves beyond. 

 

And this is the stuff of narrative thinking: everything that exists in the world is reuploaded into the context that the partisan thinker wants. So, for instance, gender roles in a Sri Lankan fishing village or 19th century art becomes something that is then looked at through the lens of a 21st century feminist, and the whole world rewards her as an intellectual for translating it all into the biases that she has. 

People think they are doing something objective when they literally take a foreign, independent cluster of references, meanings, and ideas, and then reconstruct them within their own framework of bias in a way that is usually unflattering. 

This isn't philosophy. It's thought terrorism.