This image reprised from a year ago, when there was still dim hope at the level of presidential politics. I’ll detour briefly to say that left and right matter less and less to me, and anti-authoritarianism means more and more.

In the current context, we’re looking at a picture where the manufactured consensus all takes place in one-quarter of the spectrum, labeled here as right-wing authoritarianism. There is a difference, between Trump and Biden, but it is in no way a fundamental difference. They have almost perfectly aligning views of the world at this macroscopic scale, and the same can be said about nearly all of the also-rans.

Warren appears here as the best possible right-wing authoritarian. Yang leans right of her, but is still very attractive on the basis of the other axis, the one that matters more, and this is even more true of dear Marianne.

My real point today though has little to do with the narrowly political.

If you were to expand the scope of the diagram to include everyone in the country, and if you were to change the question to how (for example) people think about “race” … you would find a very similar kind of clustering–the pattern of manufactured consensus would be the same. Almost all discourse, especially in the mainstream, would fit into a small section of the possible ways of seeing the question.

Almost everyone would agree that race is a real thing. Within the consensus views would differ, on how much black or brown or blue lives respectively matter, and how much can be justified in the name of keeping foreigners on the other side of the river. There would be arguments about whether we should call them illegals, or undocumented, but almost no one would take the position that “foreigner” or “white” are fictions from a waking nightmare, born of both a broken system and a fundamental error of perception.

You could do the same with gender. In the hive mind (a term which is probably insulting to bees), everyone is born a boy or a girl, and for some people any thinking will end right there. Others will say that we have to account for a little girl who is a boy in her heart … but almost no one, not even that little girl who might grow up to be seen by herself and others as an FTM man, will question or challenge the universally accepted Truth of the gender binary. The range of opinions are once again mostly limited to a single quadrant, and anything else will be marginalized as eccentric, at best.

Sometimes I’ll hear an author say that they “can’t not write”–that some fact of who they really are made it impossible for them to be anything but a writer, no matter how much that fact costs them. Sometimes the tone is quite rueful, even.

I can’t say the same, and some part of me is jealous when I hear it.

What I can say is that I never had much choice about seeing things differently from the way the consensus sees them. It’s true that the years have tried their best to erode that seeing-differently, and that the world writ large has tried its best to incentivize me to get on board with the common dream, with limited success.

But when its cool and quiet, and I’m less vulnerable to those temptations (by virtue, let’s say, of not having to go and interact with them at work every day), I still see, the way I’ve always seen. The different way. I think this is partially something I can be proud of personally; a ground-out victory over the way of the world.

But partly and maybe mostly … this is the way Jesus deterministically flang me.

I can fight that and try to conform. Far too often I’ve done just that.

But now I don’t want to go away from who I am. I want to go deeper into it.

I want to grow into the person that I am uniquely qualified to be, and to live it softly but out loud, no matter the cost.

I am still a long way from realizing that dream, but I am on the road, and this is the first vehicle.