Is politics an important part of your world? Should I be searching for hints about the way you feel about capitalism or democracy, or should I be looking past these things as the ’superficial’ layer of relationships, looking for a deeper reflection on civilization in general?
Political systems really represent individual beliefs, in particular how one’s beliefs impact how one should behave in the wider world and how you believe others ought to behave. Ultimately, one cannot separate one’s politics from their worldview. Since the Birth Pangs series is an exploration of worldviews, it follows that political musings will come, too. A person who derives no political implications from their world view probably doesn’t even understand their world view or doesn’t really believe their world view.
Part of the problem in today’s culture is that many people have a worldview but then political beliefs that are inconsistent with planks in their worldview. The latent idea is that one’s beliefs are private matters whereas how one feels about the government or governance is in a separate category. Of course, one’s feelings about politics is in fact a belief, so even the attempt to compartmentalize fails in the end. Somewhere, somehow, people’s politics relate back to a belief or two that they have. Much of the heated discourse today arises because people from different political bents cannot trace their political ideas back to their core beliefs and then they present their political assertions as matters of self-evidently true, which of course they are not if you come from a different starting point. Read the rest of this entry »
