To ponder: how “compressible” are your beliefs? If most of your political views can be guessed from 1 number (where you fall on the left-right spectrum) your views are highly compressible. If it takes 2 numbers (an economic axes and a social one) then slightly less so.

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If using your average score on those 2 numbers would still mispredict many of your views though, then you have a much less compressible perspective.

What does that mean?

Most likely it implies that your opinions are less socially influenced than other people’s, and that you are more likely to form opinions based on (a) first principles or (b) your own experience.

If you have incompressible views, people will still attempt to label you as “left” or “center” or “right” or “libertarian” or “communist” or “left of center” or whatever. Since your views are incompressible, any of these labels will be very inaccurate.

People will want to assign these labels to you, in part, because they want to figure out what “team” you’re on. Politics is a social sport.

Since your views confuse them, they can tell you are not on their team, so they may accuse you of being on the “enemy” team.

But if your views are incompressible, you aren’t on a team of PEOPLE.

Instead of a team, you have a mix of intrinsic values. Perhaps:

•societial happiness
•truth
•stability
•longevity
•honor
•fairness
•etc

Plus principles about what’s true, and your own experiences.

The only way I know of to explain so many’s people’s views being so compressible is as a social phenomena.

Based on reasonable principles, values and life experiences, I don’t think you can get to any of the standard political views.

But it’s easy to get the standard views if you are copying the opinion or identity of others.

If you’re on a team, of course your views are compressible. To first approximation your views are just your team’s views.

Those on a team tend to implicitly assume everyone is on some team.

Those who base their beliefs on deeper principles and values will sometimes pragmatically support one team as the least bad of 2 (or 3) options. This is not the same as being on a team.

To them, it can feel baffling how so many people seem to come to the same simple conclusions on incredibly complex topics.

The answer is simple: politics is social and we are social animals. Politics is copying, and we are copiers.

If your parents are X you’re much more likely to be X. More generally, if you’re US “left”, your social group is more likely to live in cities, be more internationally diverse, be less religious, not own guns, be less patriotic, believe the world is less fair, value fairness, etc

On team “right”, all these trends tend to be reversed, plus the people you know will be more likely to believe in having a strong military, to dislike big national government, to view the world as just, to value “just” hierarchy, to want to avoid “sexual impurity”, and so on.

If you want to have a group of people to be part of, and an enemy to hate, pick a team.

If you want to see the world as accurately as possible, remember, NONE of the teams are actually about doing that. That’s only what teams pretend to do. In actuality they are social groups.

To see the world more accurately and make it better:
• reflect on your intrinsic values
• study the world carefully to see how it actually works
• develop your principles
• support policies (not teams) that you believe, based on evidence, will create more of what you value!

It’s simple yet hard: replace teams with values and evidence.