Thinking about personality characteristics as dimensional points of view, and the fact that they match the dimensions we live in got me thinking about the binary nature of our decision making processes, in particular our political processes.

Most clearly in the US political structure, the two party system provides two choices as solutions to a given problem and tries to declare one of them correct and the other one not correct. At the extremes this becomes: one answer is good and the other one is evil. (of course each side thinks their idea is good and the other guys idea is evil)

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that, like the different personality traits, the two political points of view are actually orthogonal, like the different personality traits. They are completely different dimensions of the political environment. There is confusion about the oppositions point of view because, as a group, each is considering different dimensions of the problem and contributing apparently conflicting components to the solution, while the opposition may have a completely different set of unrelated dimensional components under consideration in the same fashion. Neither side is arguing Apples or Oranges, but some number of unrelated and unconnected objects, ideas, or points of view.

So, looking at personality traits as a possible map for political dimensions, it seems there should be three with the fourth trait (conscientiousness) being of relative interest to each of the other three points of view.

First and most obvious, the Openness Neurotic dimension in political terms would have strong and possibly diverse interest in Defense and Immigration. Those personalities on the openness side of the line would pull these issues in one direction and those with more neurotic personalities would pull the issue in the other direction together eventually reaching a balance.

Second and not as clear, the Extroversion Introversion dimension might have an opposing view on issues of Privacy and maybe things like Public funding of Sports Stadiums. (and maybe someone with subtler thinking can come up with other examples)

Last is the Agreeable Disagreeable dimension this would seem to apply to all political dimensions, but I’m probably not looking at the trait from the right point of view. Maybe this political dimension is about the degree to which rewards and punishments can be used to regulate social behavior. Law enforcement issues, traffic regulations, building codes, tariffs on imports, behavior regulations in general.

While it isn’t clear that even now I have it straight, it still seems to me that I’m on the right track.

By my analysis the current political left and the current political right are not opposing points of view in a single dimension, but are instead composed to varying degrees of Up, Down, Forward, and Backward pretending to be randomly either Left or Right as they are the only two points of view.

If you can identify each problem as having properties in each of these dimensions, then the tug of war can be done within the proper dimensions and each solution value can be determined independently, possibly using values determined by the other dimensions to see where the correct value lies in this one.

Maybe I can give an informative example. Consider the economic problems involved in steel production and steel consumption. The producers of steel are looking to produce as much steel as they can, but there are physical and financial limits to how fast they can produce the product. Consumers of the product want to have available as much as they need. The Egyptians had a similar problem with grain production. In good years when crop yields were plentiful there were no problems, but in the years when drought or other disasters devastated crop yields starvation was a real problem. They solved the problem with the earliest form of taxation. In good years they took a portion of the grain produced and stored it for the future.

The steel production cycle has the same sorts of problems. So a third component of the problem is stockpiling or savings management.

There are now three dimensions to the management of the steel cycle.

So, if the producers want to produce more steel than their consumers then the stockpile managers part of the solution might be to charge a small tax on the steel the consumers wanted and use it to pay the steel producer for their excess production and stockpile the unused steel. At some future time, when consumption needed more steel than was being produced, stockpile management would sell it to them with the proceeds being used to capture other excess production. It seems pretty clear that the stockpile management would be done by a government agency and then the devil is in the details.

It isn’t clear that looking at the problem from this point of view will give any of the participants a better idea of how to behave politically, but for me it explains some of the reasons for the inability of the current political situation to actually resolve issues.

I look forward to comments on this posting.

Phred