Many Issue Politics
Oct. 28th, 2023 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorI think one of the core difficulties I have is that I can't view politics as a hierarchy of issues where one issue takes precedence over all others for me. While I don't think everything is equally important, I think there are a lot of equally important issues.
I also think issues are interlinked, and not all ways of resolving one problem are equally laudable, even if they were to resolve that issue to the same degree, if their effects on other, equally important issues are very different. This is the weakness I see in single-issue politics.
At the same time, I know why so many people take this approach. Human limitations make it to some degree impossible to take an adequately thorough approach, and single issue politics greatly simplifies what a person needs to attend to, even if it often still can't simplify things enough. The world is just too vast and too complex.
But I cannot devote attention to only one thing and shut everything else out. I cannot even focus on only one thing while devoting some more limited energy to others. I cannot help but think about how one thing invariably links to all others. And that limits me in its own ways, because I will never be able to hold all the understanding and skills necessary to attend to all that.
But I can't shut it out, either.
I also think issues are interlinked, and not all ways of resolving one problem are equally laudable, even if they were to resolve that issue to the same degree, if their effects on other, equally important issues are very different. This is the weakness I see in single-issue politics.
At the same time, I know why so many people take this approach. Human limitations make it to some degree impossible to take an adequately thorough approach, and single issue politics greatly simplifies what a person needs to attend to, even if it often still can't simplify things enough. The world is just too vast and too complex.
But I cannot devote attention to only one thing and shut everything else out. I cannot even focus on only one thing while devoting some more limited energy to others. I cannot help but think about how one thing invariably links to all others. And that limits me in its own ways, because I will never be able to hold all the understanding and skills necessary to attend to all that.
But I can't shut it out, either.