Weasel words

Modern society, as described by Tainter, has reached the pinnacle of complexity. That is to say, there has never been a more complex society than ours. Yet, for all of our societal complexity, there is a serious lack of complex thought. Trudeau’s mainstream majority seems incapable of reasoning in more than two dimensions. Parsimony, say, is quickly becoming the enemy of rational discourse and leading to a situation where everything, including people’s identity, is defined as either left or right. People, positions, and even lines of thought are being pushed into these arbitrary and ill-defined categories to achieve a militaristic uniformity that can only lead to the most pathetic of all dystopian futures: An Idiocracy.

The freedom convoy, as an example, has from the beginning been called a right wing protest despite the fact that nothing about their plight clearly identifies themselves as such. Their viewpoints have been generally accepted principles from all angles of the political spectrum until recently. The major themes of the protests include freedom of movement, bodily autonomy, and a disdain for segregation. The only addition to that list which may be relatively new is a loss of faith in institutions, which stems from two years of governmental overreach, judicial neglect, sweeping censorship, opaque data, and a wide range of other forms of institutional rot. The idea of institutional rot is not have a one-sided position, and all sides of the political spectrum, except by those that lack any sense of circumspection, recognize the specter of decadence in one form or another.

Even the anti-Trudeau overtones do not denote this protest as particularly political. Need I remind you that Trudeau’s “clear mandate” was based on less than 15% of the population in Canada actually casting a ballot for him? The same people that claim 80% of the population being vaccinated means 80% of the population agrees with vaccine mandates really do not see the irony here?

Yes, they think he is a petulant child, but that is not a right wing position. Nor is it even a political position. I personally have never cast a vote that was not in protest of the mediocre to downright terrible candidates on the ballot, and I will protest vote until the candidates improve because I do not believe in a system of voting where all the choices are identical. Is that a political statement or an apolitical statement to make? In the sense that it is political, in my mind, one could only argue that it identifies me as a potential dissident in the eyes of the political class much like those that cast blank ballots in Soviet times (albeit, they were in far more danger in doing so, though one cannot predict the future with certainty).

In fact, it occurs to me that the most ardent supporter of the protests that I know would be considered, for all intents and purposes, a man of the left. At least, those individuals that think in strictly binary terms would have to quantify him as such.

• He is an environmentalist in the truest sense of the word and organizes protests for that cause. Mankind’s unmistakable footprint on the world troubles him.

• He believes there are serious and systemic issues that create barriers and disadvantages for certain individuals in this society, and considers income inequality to be one of the great follies of late-stage capitalism.

• He considers the government war machine to be wholly unethical and big corporations, for the most part, morally corrupt.

• He believes that a robust public health care system (at least for those that cannot afford private health care) and solving the homeless crisis are a part of government’s mandate.

• He is worried about the impact of the cost of housing, particularly in British Columbia, and the increasing generational divide when it comes to being able to purchase a home.

• But he also supports the freedom convoy and recognizes that many of the tactics the media are employing against the truckers, they have used against protests on issues that he holds dear.

By chance, he also happens to be an intelligent person that is willing to have a conversation on these issues and agree that many of them are deeply in gray areas as to how we come to solutions. Some of these issues, he agrees, may not have solutions or may need to be weighed against competing interests. Because he doesn’t see the world in binary terms, he is able to dissociate what many would consider his groups’ views on the protest from his own personal views.

The problem is many people have literally made thinking in binary terms their identity, and when the media labels the protests as right wing or far-right or even if the perception is there, certain people will be unable to see beyond the event horizon of binaryism, which will cause them to miss the actual issues at play, which are clearly moral tenets that keep our society functioning and not some binary hogwash. And if the media keeps pushing those tenets into binary terms, it may shape the meaning of those terms to everyone’s disadvantage. I truly still believe there are some that identify with the left that, if they were able to escape their own binary line of thinking, would agree that the message of the protest is just.

The fact of the matter is that these protests do not align with the political right at all, even if many of the protesters may individually identify themselves as such. This misalignment can be seen in the fact that the organizers have completely ignored the opportunist right-wing Conservative Party of Canada’s pleas for them to go home; instead of making this political and counting on help from the same people that literally just ran on Justin Trudeau’s platform (with minor variations) a few months ago, they have strictly stuck to an apolitical strategum. In doing so, they have taken the risky gambit of angering the political apparatchik, who are used to taking credit for other people’s legwork, and yet, it has given the protesters a legitimacy among dissidents perhaps never before seen on the Canadian stage. I truly hope that, once the dust settles, people will be able to understand that fact as understanding the message is a defense of society, not some political ploy, may be the only thing that saves Canadian from collapsing under itself.