Have we crossed the event horizon, and if we haven’t yet would we even know when we did?
When I was in elementary school I read an article in Scientific American about what it might look like to watch something or someone fall into a black hole. In other words, what does the event horizon — the point beyond which light cannot escape — look like to an outside observer? The article concluded that at the surface of the event horizon, you would be able to see a flattened image of whatever object had fallen into the black hole. Therefore that moment would be frozen in time.
Looking at the political situation in America I can’t help but wonder if at some point we fell through the political equivalent of a black hole. The sociological and economic issues we argue about are all the same ones that we were arguing about 100 years ago. In virtually all of these cases there is an obvious correct position and obviously wrong positions. Perhaps 100 years ago some of them were up for testing but the results have since come in and somehow we continue to spiral round-and-round the same debates. It is like looking at the event horizon on a political black hole. We see all the issues laid out just how they were, with the questions, conclusions and consequences all on display. Yet somehow we’re not moving forward.
Let’s take the issue of price controls, which have been introduced by Kamala Harris as a solution to high prices. When the progressive movement was first introduced to America, state-controlled prices were a staple of their economic planning. Even at that time, economists had sufficient mathematical models to show that all forms of price control (minimum wages, rent ceilings, price caps, etc.) distort the market and lead to either shortages or over-supply of whatever was being controlled. However, maybe in the 1910’s, one could argue that wide-scale price controls had never been tried. But who can claim that excuse now? No one. It’s a closed issue in theory and in practice.
Let’s take the issue of gun ownership. Early progressives made numerous arguments that a civilized society does not require armed citizens. In many countries gun confiscations and buy-back programs were instituted (fortunately not America) and the results have not been a decrease in crime. Moreover, accusations that people who own guns must have a secret violent desire to hurt or kill have been proven false. Countries with high gun ownership are safer, with much lower crime rates — including violent crime — thanks to the deterrent factor of gun ownership. In the case of America, gun owners are preventing twice as many violent crimes as those successfully committed. Tragically, forfeiture of guns has led to tyranny, genocide, and general abuse by autocratic governments. Even where direct government abuse is avoided, criminals still acquire firearms and the citizens are outmatched. Once again, this is a closed issue in theory and in practice.
The same thing can be said about virtually every topic that we currently consider a “hot-button” issue: Immigration, welfare programs, free speech, school choice, healthcare, homelessness, the free market, socialism, etc. Pick any issue you can think of, and you will find a myriad of books, studies, and real world examples throughout the twentieth century, in some cases even the 19th or 18th centuries where the results are definitively on one side. There are no grey areas on anything we regularly discuss, and we know exactly what each side will say on every topic — hence you can summarize every one of them in one word. Every issue is crystalized. The debate has run dry but we’re still acting it out. Why?
Another observation made about falling through a black hole is that you might never know if or when you did. Space and time being connected, it might be that the event horizon looks like an infinite space from the inside with no discrete boundary. I think this is the kind of dynamic underlying the issue with our politics: we allowed progressive ideas into our dialogue but we never had the will to put them to the torch when they failed. Consequently, we’ve allowed new generations to be born and exposed to old ideas as new, and then to repeat the same debate again until it’s the next generation’s turn. That’s the political equivalent of space warping back in on itself — every generation thinks it’s bringing new perspectives when in reality they are giving lesser versions of old insights.
There are a few indicators that we’ve fallen into such a vortex. The first is that books written on these topics today are far inferior to those written decades ago. Compare Hayek, Popper, or Mises to any modern writer on economics and you will find that the modern writer conveys a shallower sense of the issues. Truly, they are only good for getting some updated numbers, but there’s nothing new to be learned. The only current economic writer worth reading for new insights is Thomas Sowell, but even his work is starting to feel recycled (in fairness he’s given more than we deserve already). Compare Saul Alinsky to any modern radical writer — at least with Alinsky you’re getting some originality of thought rather than parroting. Even things like AI, which are now a subject of the real world, have been thoroughly dissected in science fiction for so long that any ‘serious’ socio-political issue connected to it has already been hashed out in theory. We can’t even be robust about these smattering of new issues because we’re sunk waste-deep in the quagmire of their old, unresolved, uninteresting counterparts. This might actually be what the end of history looks like, to use a Marxist phrase.
A second sign is the increasingly ludicrous sub-positions taken by those on the left. I’m not going to deny that when I said before history has settled these issues that it’s settled them in favor of conservative positions. This is becoming more and more transparent with every rehash of these debates, and so the left’s positions are devolving to their more base versions. For example, all leftwing positions can be summarized as a means to achieve population control. For the left, power is centralized and therefor the population over which it is exercised must be controlled. This leads inevitably to positions against social & economic self-reliance, family bonds, child-rearing, or even conception in the first place.
When the progressive movement first came to America they could openly state, as Fabians did, that fewer children should be had; that the purpose of having children was to advance the state; that certain people were undesirable and should have no children. Time has proven the immorality of these beliefs, so they’ve been obfuscated by sub-positions like gender-identity. Other than the truly delluded, nobody actually believes there are more than two genders, let alone 47-and-counting. Progressive leaders certainly don’t believe that. What they care about is that a person who identifies as a trans-squid is not having babies or forming meaningful relationships. They have no stake in the world and are therefor easily controlled. Saying so directly wouldn’t keep the debate alive though, and that’s the case for everything now — what is said is not the true goal, it’s just the facade.
So how do we get out of this loop? I can’t really say that there’s a good answer because you don’t get out of a black hole by “going faster.” As long as we refuse to assert that reality is reality, and continue humoring these settled debates, we’re going to remain trapped inside this event horizon with the left pressing harder & harder against us with positions that are evermore splintered into preposterous offspring. The unfortunate truth is that we may have to look at more ‘radical’ solutions — those things that are the political equivalents of worm holes.
The most aggressive version of doing that would be to have a second American Revolution, in the true sense. Our founders obviously felt that they’d become trapped in a negative loop with the British when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, wherein they state multiple times the right of people to alter and abolish their current political bonds or government. In other words, sometimes to settle a debate you have to throw a punch instead. So maybe one way out of this whole mess is a big, bloody, war. Clearly people have worried about this since you do hear concerns about a second Civil War. Is that the only way though?
The funny thing is that what I’m about to say is somehow going to be more triggering to a lot of people than the idea of an actual war. Maybe what the American people really need is for conservative politicians and conservative people to act like the left for a change. That is, to go outside the rules as Saul Alinsky advocated. In the political arena, we talk about a president’s first 100 days in office like its a metric dropped from heaven above rather than reflecting on where it truly came from. The answer is that when FDR took office, he immediately and aggressively imposed programs that had no precedence in American history regardless of the constitutionality of his actions. For him, all that mattered was that those programs would support the progressive agenda. Those first 100 days then became a benchmark — if a president can’t get it done in that time (whatever it is), then he won’t get it done at all. It’s a rule now, even though it originated with FDR going outside the rules.
Perhaps what we need is a president and supporting political parties who will go outside the rules in turn. It sounds aggressive to say that a president should defund, de-staff, or entirely abolish agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Education, and Environmental Protection Agency, but that’s exactly the kind of action that falls outside the modern laws of political physics, which would break the endless cycle we’ve been in. Remember, all of these issues are settled. Every excuse a person can give can be irrefutably countered.
For example, if you say to abolish the Department of Education, there are those who will say that low-income families will be deprived of educational opportunities. But literacy rates have done nothing but decline with the growth of the DOE, it is vastly outcompeted by private & charter schools, parents time and again prefer school choice options that give them a way out of the public school system, and administrative costs impose a tax burden of $10,000+ per year per student on citizens — with nothing to show for it. The average citizen was more well read, more inventive, and more productive in the 19th and early 20th centuries without any aid from the DOE, which didn’t exist. So really, why not abolish it?
Ultimately, this is the least-intrusive way to get out of our black hole. It’s almost undeniable that we fell into it when we began to accept progressive ideas as equally-grounded in reality rather than as failed theories predicated on prejudice & a thirst for power. Reality needs to be reasserted. Progressive programs and the assumption of their validity forms the event horizon trapping us. So the way out, is to change that false world for a real one — we shouldn’t be squeamish about this either. The progressives imposed their worldview without a care for our traditions, values, or what the real world had to say about their views. If we’re going to reverse that course to finally move forward again, we shouldn’t worry about their rules either. It’s certainly better than a war or continued stagnation.