The Book of Principles
How Principles and Politics differ, and why it's important to separate the two!
Long-time readers of this series may remember a series I did called “One Daily Thought” that I wrote back in 2019. In it, I tried to convey one concept every day in around 300 words or less and ended up with about 100 posts before moving on to other things.
In deciding what to do with these, I have been weighing whether or not to tie them closely to the political posts that I will be making here.
Instead, what I’ve decided to do is to dedicate a section of The Human Optimization Project to principles, which will absorb most of that content eventually.
Much of what falls into Principles does relate to the political world. Without principles, anyone’s politics are sure to devolve into crude assessments of power. Imagine what a mess that could create!
So as a quick advertisement for Principles, let’s look at how they are differentiated from politics and why they deserve their own space.
There is an important delineation here that caused me to parse out my writings on principles from this political blog. Specifically:
Principles are the core or foundational beliefs that define our worldview.
Politics is what happens when we are forced to make tradeoffs between principles.
Let’s look at an example: one can (quite easily) believe in principle that everyone should have healthcare AND that as a nation we should be fiscally responsible. Indeed, I fall into this bucket as I suspect many of you do as well! Our principles don’t actually differ all that much across various political persuasions.
But where I am sure we all do differ is in terms of the tradeoffs and relative weighting of those principles. A Bernie Bro would value healthcare high enough to offset any fiscal concern, and I’d lean the other way, at least with where our budget is right now. Still, that debate could become incredibly heated, even though we both hold the similar principles.
That is why it is important for me to separate the principles out from the politics! These principles should be a higher level of truth and an area for common ground that should be separate from any political bombs I may drop around here.
That said, I also write about principles because they are often not taught in a traditional sense, nor do we put as much thought into them as we should! Most people hold their principles relatively loosely for the simple reason that they haven’t really given them enough thought to really defend them.
So as you might expect, I will often reference pieces from my Principles series, and I’d love it if you took a look and followed along with those as well. The new home for the whole series is here: The Book of Principles.
So again, please check that out, especially if you enjoyed some of those One Daily Thought pieces from a couple years ago. While some of the content may be familiar, I am going to be updating each piece and trying to order them in a way that continues to build on itself.