On dialectical monism...

A new political paradigm has emerged within the past 10 years or so that all of us are struggling to define, much less deal with. Forget “paradigm shifts” - that's SO early 2000s. You probably already know what I'm about to refer to - but I believe that precisely who to point the finger at as the source of the problem will vary according to the reader.

Traditionally - and by that I mean for the last 200 years or so, all the way up through the 20th century and into the 21st - the political spectrum has been depicted as a continuum (or spectrum) with conservative/liberal on the terminals. Today we have two more descriptors for phenomena that do not exist on that continuum in any meaningful way at all. They hover above it, contact it in some points, and change at the will of the observer, depending on expediency of the moment. They are a pure manifestation of a dialectic, as each seems to morph and define itself (based on who is its proponent at the moment) almost entirely in contradiction - or contradistinction - to the other.

On one “side” of the -- yin-yang -- is the “alt-right”, and the other is “wokeism”. Both were named by their opponents, so neither is probably a term either would self-identify as. And names change, as do faces and representatives of various aspects of each … 'ideology' is not the right word... but then that probably should be expected. Neither can be defined as a true movement or be said to have any particular manifesto. “Users” of any given iteration of them can pick and choose from various ranty aspects or memes they identify with, within some boundaries of identification. But even that depends on who they associate with. Most of the time, apparently, individuals can cheer a 140 character blurb from some “influencer” with whom they may share very little else in common... unless that person is part of the not insignificant portion of “followers” who seek out beliefs, or seek mainly just to share beliefs with others. In that case, the “content” isn't so much of a draw as the “community” is.

Of course, the concept of two identities defined in opposition to each other is as ancient as human religions, and probably emerged soon after homo sapiens started worshipping things and identifying themselves by their beliefs. The part that really discourages me is that 21st century humans are still so eager to conceive of themselves that way. I am just as guilty as anyone else in that respect, and I am only now in middle age beginning to sense the true profoundness of its meaning.

Neither alt-rightism or wokeism make any significant claim to Truth, and both can accomodate “post-truth” nihilistic sentiments without any problem. Some people even define either or both as being exemplars of an attitude of “post-truth” in general.

So if you've been paying attention in any of the medias - social or “lame stream” or even specialty media - probably nothing I've said in the past few paragraphs is revelatory. You can find much more thorough treatments of the topic elsewhere. But the thought I'd like to impress upon you is to reconceptualize the nature of the relationship between the two. They are nothing like any true ideology that humans have fixated upon in the past 10,000 years. They are not even truly belief systems - think of them instead as pools of resources for ideologues to draw upon. When you consider them both together as an overlapping or amorphous singular entity - like the yin-yang symbol - reality starts to make much more sense. Trump is not so hard to understand in this context. He just taps into one “lobe” of the duality (either light or dark depends on how the observer is initally oriented in the ideaspace) and feeds off of the interaction.

There is one more very important aspect to this situation that every human being alive today must try to understand, and that's the initial conditions that led to the emergence of this new thing to begin with. Conspiracy might actually be the right word here - in a certain sense anyway. But it wasn't a conscious conspiracy, and it wasn't done in secret. It happened before our very eyes. Some call it a “perfect storm”. Without going into too much detail here (again, more thorough treatments of the topic exist), it must be observed and noted that without the combination of technology (social media, ubiquitous screens, and more people to use and enjoy them), economic mass delusion (certainly nothing new to market economies, as examples can be seen throughout the history of the modern world), and concentrations of vast power in the hands of a few who have ridden the wave of “wealth creation” (a misnomer, but we'll go with it for our purposes here), has created not just an opportunity, but has also endowed the opportunity with the necessity for well-funded companies to be formed expressly for the purpose of influencing the populations of denizens/voters/consumers of the world. That's correct - “Psyops”. But a more accurate term is “influence operations”. An entire industry began to form in the early 2000s around the concept of “cool-hunting”: finding out what people were into and then marketing stuff to them. It evolved over the years into a political tool which various groups with lots of money (read:power) to protect could not afford to ignore. And so the psyop was born. Now we truly are living in an ideological battlefield that exposes us to all sorts of “triggering” stimuli that monopolizes our attention and exacerbates our natural biases and fallibilities. Additionally, all of that makes us feel like somebody is pulling the strings, even though it is in actual fact a chimera of sorts, consisting of diametrically opposed powerful interested corporations that are striving for self-preservation and dominance over all other competing entities. Stray bullets, ricochets, and “splash” damage are wreaking havoc in our mental worlds due to the chaotic “war of all against all” as Hobbes put it.

What we can do right now, and it is extremely important for us to do so, is to be aware of the nature of the conflict surrounding us. The more we can detect, the less likely we'll be to accept simple solutions, scapegoating, etc., all of the irrationality that is ripe for manipulation within the human mind. If we think for ourselves and avoid “groupthink”, that would be a vast improvement in the world at large. Of course, our systems are constantly trying to drive us the other way, and that's why we must invent new systems. It's a long process, but it can be done. Think of it as an opportunity. (wink-wink) I’ll be here to help.