Meta-politics: The War Between Progression and Regression

“If you follow the crowd, you will likely get no further than the crowd. If you walk alone, you’re likely to end up in places no one has ever been before. Being an achiever is not without its difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt… You have two choices in life. You can dissolve into the main stream, or you can choose to become an achiever and be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no one else but you can be.” ~Alan Ashley-Pitt

Forget bipartisan fuckery. Forget right-wing left-wing circle-jerks. Partisan politics is old hat. Republican versus democrat is parochial and outdated. It’s high time we moved on from this utterly adolescent and intellectually dismissive mindset. It’s time we found a more mature and responsible way of looking at politics that goes beyond petty prejudice and whiny scapegoating. It’s time to go meta on politics.

Meta-politics is politics without adjectives. It’s taking politics by the ear and dragging it kicking and screaming into a heightened state of perception. It’s going cosmopolitan with it. Meta-politics puts conservatism and liberalism on the back-burner and watches them both burn. It roasts some marsh mellows over that fire while kicking its legs up and having a good long laugh at the despicable, egotistical seriousness of it all.

From the ashes of this bipartisan campfire the meta-politician creates a phoenix. This mighty phoenix has a birds-eye view of the political landscape. It sees the morass of it all. It susses out the disingenuous hypocrisy of the political status quo, the cow-eyed ignorance, the dead-mackerel stare, and all the congealed animosity working on dead patterns caught up in the ignorant whimsy of a fundamentally unhealthy and unsustainably divisive system. It sees all this and then realizes that it all comes down to three vital concepts: regression, stagnation, and progression.

Regression and stagnation (outdated bipartisanship):

“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is an age of advertisement and publicity. The age of the great and good actions is past. The present age is the age of expectation.” ~Kierkegaard

Don’t allow your life to become a bureaucracy centered around expectation. Bureaucracies are inherently divisive. Don’t allow the bipartisan human centipede to turn your life into a circle-jerk of tautological reasoning. Don’t allow your propagandized conquer-control-consume-repeat mindset to destroy the world. It was planted there by others, but it can only be ripped out by you. You have a choice. You can act, despite comfort, rather than remain inert, out of fear of discomfort. Otherwise, there is regression. There is devolution. There is backward reasoning that leads to unreasonable backtracking and lazy stagnation.

Mere knowledge of bipartisan power constructs is not enough. It should be followed by appropriate action that leverages freedom, despite the lure of divisiveness that leverages comfort. Whether that means creating something new that replaces this outdated and unhealthy way of doing things, or planting seeds in the corrupt machinery of the two-party monopoly on politics that will grow and eventually dismantle all the cogs in the unsustainable clockwork. Appropriate action is embracing the courage it takes to leverage empathy over apathy, independence over codependence, self-education over political spoon-feeding, and self-empowerment over the hand-me-down power given piecemeal by corrupt party lines.

Continuing to live under the boot of myopic and hyper-paranoid bipartisan authority is allowing stagnation and entropy to win. Continuing to live a fear-based lifestyle that kowtows to this unhealthy state of affairs is allowing the age of expectation, advertisement and publicity to win. It’s giving up. It’s willfully flattening out, ignorantly remaining inside the box, and cowardly throwing in the towel. It’s allowing stagnation at best and regression at worst, to win out. As U. G. Krishnamurti surmised, “Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.” Indeed. It’s high time we broke the mold.

Progression (meta-politics):

“In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.” ~Ed Catmull

A positive understanding of failure will embolden you to attempt something new. You will become innovative rather than derivative. It will encourage you to think outside the biased box, stretch your political comfort zone, and question the mental paradigms that keep the talking-heads of bipartisan politics pantomiming bollocks from their bully pulpits.

Don’t conform –reform through preemptive self-education. Don’t kowtow –overflow through proactive self-overcoming. Don’t just be another talking head for the establishment –reestablish clearheaded thinking that leads to spearheading new ways of being a political animal in a hyperpolitical world.

It really does come down to a war between regression/stagnation against progression. Sure, progress is outnumbered, but that’s always been the case. It didn’t stop those in the past who had to adapt and overcome those who would stagnate and regress in their time, and it shouldn’t stop those of us who seek to adapt and overcome today. As Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

At this point, any talk of democrat/republican, left-wing/right-wing, liberal/conservative is nothing more than stopgap red herrings that seek to divert our attention from what really matters: progressive evolution. Don’t be distracted. Don’t allow the idiot talking heads to divert your attention. Fuck the strawman! Set it on fire and move on. Leave it to the bullies in their pusillanimous pulpits to hem and haw over outdated reasoning and parochial politics.

You’re over it. You’re a meta-politician now. While they are playing their narrow-minded finite games, you are playing the broad-minded Infinite Game: the only game that really matters –the game of life. You are focused on future progress despite all regressors and procrastinators. You have dedicated your life to freedom and health, despite the culture of violence and ill-health that emerges from divisive politics. You have dedicated yourself to the survival of the species, knowing that the healthiest way forward is a progressive evolution that plows its way through the regressive talking points and stagnated regurgitations of the bipartisan establishment.

You’ve risen above the whiny, woe-is-me bipartisan fuckery of it all. You politically crush out. Your meta-politics is so flexible and adaptable that their outdated ways are merely subsumed, reconciled, and smeared out into lessons learned toward the overall goal of healthy, progressive evolution. Paraphrasing Albert Camus, “You rebel –therefore we exist.”

Image: TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay.