Political action may seize power, but only ideas bring real change

I don’t want to change your political views, no matter what you believe.

As long as you vote, I don’t care who you vote for. As long as you want your side to “take back the country” from “those people,” I don’t have much to say about it. I might agree with you that “those people” are evil for controlling everyone, but that doesn’t mean I approve of your side, either.

There was a time when I wanted to lead this country — through political power — and make the changes that I believed were right. I volunteered in political campaigns. Then I spent years as a highly paid political consultant. I assumed that change should happen through this electoral system.

In my more naive political days, I thought “the people” would follow me when I showed them what was right. Then in my more realistic period — as a political professional — I understood that campaigns were merely about making voters believe that my candidate was on their side. For reasons that I’ve explained many times, I came to understand that this system was immoral — because it was based on forcing one group to obey another group.

Today, I know that partisan politics doesn’t matter. As evil as politics can be — and as much as I detest the narcissists on both mainstream sides who impose their will on us — I understand they’re equally wrong.

I don’t want to change people’s politics anymore. Instead, I want to cause people to examine their assumptions about human life and society. I want to create art and other works that will entice people to look at their unexamined assumptions and say, “I’d never thought about that in this way before. What if I’ve been wrong?”

I want to quietly invite you to discover a new way of thinking — a way that will make all of your old political ideas seem irrelevant and obsolete.

I don’t want to argue with you about political saviors or party platforms. I don’t even want to argue with you about how we ought to live our lives.

But I would like you to examine very simple concepts about who should make the decisions for your life — about who has the right to make decisions for every single person. Do you have the right to your own life and your own decisions, as long as you don’t infringe on the lives and property of others? Or do other people have the right to force you to obey what they believe you ought to do with your life and your property?

I’d like you to ask yourself why we exist. I’d like you to examine your assumptions about how we organize communities and livelihoods and cities. I want you to consider that different people might have very different needs and desires about how to organize the communities in which they live — so maybe we should allow people to voluntarily create whatever arrangements work best for them, as long as people are free to leave if they decide to do so.

I want to ask you to examine the role that technology plays in our lives. I’d like you to consider whether we have come to worship technology, so much that we assume any technological change must be good for our lives. I want you to see how technology has changed our relationships to one another, not just in the past decade or two, but slowly over a couple hundred years.

Is much of the change fantastic? Absolutely. Is some of it creating lonely and unhappy dots of disconnected people who are unintentionally isolated by the technology we happily accepted? Without question.

In a few hundred years, nobody but specialized historians will have a clue who Joe Biden or Donald Trump were. Even though many of you spend much of your time praising one of these men and trashing the other, they ultimately won’t matter. (Could you name the early Anglo-Saxon kings who competed for power over England? Few could.)

Politicians are simply the elite narcissists who have managed to grab power over us yesterday or today or tomorrow. They’re just like the old-fashioned bullies who seized power from one another in more primitive tribal groups. We’ve just managed to make the seizures of power less bloody.

The thing that will shape the future isn’t a politician or a party. It’s an idea. It’s actually a lot of ideas. Most ideas are probably pretty terrible. Most are immoral or evil or just plain wrong. But some ideas can change the world in a positive way over a long period of time.

Slavery was normal and acceptable in every human society that I’m aware of until fairly recently, but someone finally said, “It’s not right or moral for human beings to own other humans.” That was a radical idea at first and it took centuries for slavery to slowly be swept away as the evil which it is. (And there are still vestiges of it in a few places on Earth, but most people don’t know that.)

The idea that individuals had a natural right to their own lives was a massive leap forward during the Enlightenment. It was a radical idea that few people accepted at first. Most assumed that it was right and proper that a king should rule over everyone. But this idea of natural rights slowly spread.

Today, the idea of rights has been perverted and transformed into something entirely different. Completely evil. The most recent understanding of the idea is that groups have rights, not individuals — that any right which an individual has come from being part of a collective. We are living in an age during which  the legally recognized rights we have are a weird and artificial hybrid of group and individual rights.

But my point is that every idea which changed history — the best ideas and the most evil ones — started small somewhere. Then they grew over time until they were accepted by enough people that they changed a culture, a society and even the world.

I know better than to try to change the world through politics. That path is nothing more than seizing the means to force people to obey. I don’t want that, even if I could do it.

I want to show you a better way to think. I want to cause you to question your assumptions. I want to introduce you to ideas that will change the world for hundreds of years.

I don’t want to cause you to switch political sides. I want to cause you to abandon all politics. If enough of you do that, we can change the world — because the people who want to bark orders to us will find out that almost nobody will obey them.

We can build a saner and more emotionally healthy society, but it has to start with ideas, not with politics. And those ideas are at the heart of the art I want to create.