The poison of perceived objectivity

The last time we discussed the tendency of polarization in our society. I will try to exemplify this by the Swedish election now.

In Sweden we, like much of the rest of the world, have parties that are generally agreed to have positions along a left-right axis.



The left-right scale is widely accepted and most politicians use it for implicit or explicit reference when they communicate policy. If you are not on the left-right scale, which none of the new "parties" are, you are not considered to be very serious. And when you think about it; how on earth would the debates look like on TV if the politicians were not placed on the panel accordingly to their political positions? Did you ever see a round table on a political debate? The viewers would for sure revolt such a complicated political structure. The political left-right establishment is also helped by this as they gain high ground in any debate just by living on the "serious" left-right scale. The most effective way for a new "party" to escape "strangeness" seems to be to paint its political symbol with either "redish" (FI) or "blueish" (SD). This is apparently almost considered to be serious enough by most, although it doesn't help the Pirate Party who in the pirate spirit has to paint its symbol black, forever preventing any kind of seriousness to the party.
One strength of the left-right system is that although people may question the relative position of every party to a certain degree, once it is established you can scientifically tell how different the parties are. We only have one scale, and although no one knows or accurately can define the left-right axis, it is presumably linear. Linearity helps us understand how different parties are. As an example: M is much more different to S than C because they are further apart on the scale. This makes social clustering a simple task as it doesn't require much nasty own thought.

There have been suggestions for an updated political landscape by adding at least another dimension. Like here: Political compass. In short they claim that the left-right scale may be expanded into something like this.



We hence added a dimension to the picture and can now place parties both by traditional social scale, as well as an economical scale. The problem comes when I now ask which of the parties S, FP and SD that are closest. The problem is now that we have set up set up a two dimensional "orthogonal" basis set. Orthogonality roughly means that no matter how you try to describe X with a portion of Y, you will fail if they are orthogonal. Apples and Pears are sort of orthogonal since they are both fruits but no matter how hard you try you will never be able to objectively describe one with the other.

Now we freak. By introducing this scale we have made the art of politics subjective. And since we (wrongfully but never the less) consider everything subjective (like "flum") with great suspicion we have created chaos. Imagine if the political commentators are caught being "subjective" in their analysis. And what about the social clustering? How on earth do we know if we "should" cluster more with SD or S if we are FP? Imagine the confusion of the anarchistic kids who enjoy throwing rocks at the racists if they cannot objectively "know" if they are closer to V or SD? In short, by introducing this new model of politics, we have destroyed the collective subjective reality of political ideas which we earlier could use as a basis for objective rational analysis, since it was not objective but at least collectively subjective. It may be possible to build a new collective subjective reality in time, but it would take much time and effort. Why did we frek? For the same reasons that we had issues with morals the last time: subjective reality needs to be collective in order to make objective analysis, and by introducing an arbitrary orthogonality to ideas it is up to everyone to come up with an approximation of how to translate apples into pears. As long as we had a totally flawed model like the left-right model, it is at least collectively subjective, and possible to do objective analysis on.

So let's stick with the left-right scale for now, so that we don't rock the boat too much.

Why Objetivity-Subjectity is poison to society

Objectivity and Subjectivity are fundamental inventions of how we perceive reality. Most people believe that there is an objective reality which we perceive subjectively. Not all people believe that there is an objective reality, but since we still behave like there is one this doesn't matter (The fact that you are making an effort to walk around a parked car instead of walking right through it is seen as evidence that you strongly believe it is "really" there objectively"). The popular view from this is that "things" are either subjective or objective, where the Eiffel Tower is clearly objective, while thoughs, feelings and morals are subjective, and this is loosely what Ethical subjectivism claims.

If I were a paid philosopher I would be troubled by this, as it means that my morals are just as good as any persons. And if that is really the case (if a matter is totally subjective, how do we know who is "good" and should get paid) I would be worried. I will go back to what could happen here in a moment but first lets review two professions who had this issue and were in trouble because they couldn't produce any "good" results:

The physicists (me, and what I do) who were having calculational issues with interacting electrons and decided to make a model where they didn't interact (sort of) to make things easier for them. Job saved!
The economists who were having calculational issues with people being unpredictable and hence decided to make a model where they didn't interact (they were greedy and only wanted to maximise their own wealth) and were not limited by non-local phenomena (they knew everything and there were not any uncertainty). Job saved!

In the first case the result is that we can calculate more electrons.
In the second case we got a lot of new economic models.

The difference between the examples are that while Physicists are always in danger of getting bad results, we know we did something wrong when we compare with reality. In no way will our models bullshit the real electrons to behave differently. Economics is a social science (my claim, since it involves people) where perception of reality is actually able to change reality. If people are taught in business schools that reasonable people are maximising their own wealth, it will soon be impossible to know whether this was the case to begin with or not. If you don't apply what you learned in school; why go there?

So we haven't proved anything, but we have seen.
If things are complicated: simplify
If you are simplifying perception of reality in physics, reality will not change. We know for sure
If you are simplifying perception of reality in social sciences, reality may or may not change. We don't know for sure.
Philosophy is a social science

Now as going back to philosophy there was a perspective called moral subjectivism which, if "true" (note that "true" here would just mean "considered to be true by most people") would erase every persons high ground in fashion, politics (at least the moral part of it), law, or any other man made subject. Our culture would be similar to that of the lions, plus mathematics and out knowledge of natural science. We (Philosophers) really needed to be able to reject moral subjectivism to stay in business.

Fortunately some philosophers were up for the challenge.
More about this can be found here:


In short it says that although for example headache is a subjective reality, there are plenty of ways to make it an objective science. Most drug companies are hence building valid objective knowledge and reality on a platform of subjective knowledge and reality. The analogy from a drug developer to an art critic should be straight forward. The analogy to morals should be similarly straight forward.

This is not true. The reason it is not true is this:
Headache is a subjective reality but since people share over 99.9 % of their genes; this subjective becomes a "collective subjective" reality. With this I mean that people respond subjectively but similarly to pain. And since they do; collective subjectivity is a close approximation to objectivity. But you cannot give a pill to a Dolphin, as he is not defined as part of your collective.

Here comes the take home message. Ethical subjectivity can only be eliminated when people think or function alike. This often works as we like and dislike many things collectively, giving rise to ethics. But many people claim subjective knowledge to be objective mainly by experience. This is in not guaranteed by philosophy without a proper collective platform. Even though our genes are 99.9% the same: our thoughts are not. Our collective subjectivity probably emerged as a consequence of evolution (People less prone to murder was on average more likely to reproduce). But there is no collective subjectivity in matters of whether or not Israels blockade on Gaza is moral (correction, there are plenty of collective subjectivities but each fraction has its own, all of them stating moral superiority). The question of the whether the blockade is moral can hence only be answered with "mu", which is Robert Pirsigs way of answering neither Yes or No but that the question is Ill defined.

(Edit: this came to me while out running later)
This matters because it removes focus on the answer (since it is neither yes or no but "stupid question") of the polarizing question and shifts it to the question itself. And when focus is put on the question we see that there is much more room for debate. We can for example discuss what morality means in this context to us and explore similarities and differences. Now comes the climax: we find that what was polarizing with the question was NOT the question but rather the answer! We are so formed in our thinking about objective reality that we suppose that every question and statement is either Yes/No or True/False regardless of context. The logical (which is a trap) step from there is that anyone disagreeing with me (saying False when I say True) is then as far away from my values as philosophically possible , which will lead to a mental blockade in which no knowledge is generated.

We see this all the time. One example is if you are going to vote left-right, which leads to mental blockade in a debate or at least to competitive argumentation (I do this all the time: if someone is left i pretend to be right just for sports). No truth or knowledge is generated by this unnecessary (illogical) focus on the answer. Now it should be said that most people in these debates are not knowledge seekers more than a soccer mob are really soccer enthusiasts. But accepting focus on polarizing answers only engages the mob to scream and throw bottles. The question of whether the blockade on Gaza is immoral is mu, let's discuss and rephrase the question to see how different our version of collective subjectivity is.