Many Possible Outcomes Collapse into One Polar Choice

We make decisions by first of all collapsing a large number of possible outcomes into a single polar and binary choice that then becomes the outcome of a free choice. After all, this is the same way politics among people allocates otherwise public resources by making more or less transparent decisions. When governments first form, there are many initial choices that can be quite contentious, but eventually a government of one sort or another does form or there is another government and the process begins again. Likewise, people first learn how to choose from many possible outcomes by this same process of collapse of possible outcomes.

After a government forms, it matures and develops to limit individual freedom in lieu of social responsibility and choices become more and more trade offs and compromises with near equal benefits to polar factions. With near-equal trade offs, though, there are invariably very vocal factions on both sides of each polar choice. People argue that it is necessary for there to be transparency in the decision-making process to inform people who must accept the inevitable compromises. Political decisions invariably mean that there are two or more different precursor actions for the same outcome and so the polar factions must compromise or stalemate.

However, transparency in a highly informed culture necessarily results in incremental collapse from the chaos of many possible choices into the order of increasingly polar factions for any choices collapsing into a binary decision point. People naturally make decisions by incremental collapse from the chaos of many possible outcomes into the order of a binary choice of action or inhibition. The initial chaos of many possible choices about an issue eventually condenses into a binary decision to incite or inhibit some action.

The electronics of our information age allow people to participate in many more of the incremental compromises than in the past that are all part of each polar decision. As a result of these incremental choices, people tend to end up in one of two polar extremes associated with each decision.

While issue polarization is then a necessary part of any decision making process, the information age has exponentially increased the number of people entangled in political decisions. We share our consciousness by bonding or conflicting with others in the dynamic of civilization. We will not always agree with other narratives and we may propose a narrative of our own or we may adopt another person's narrative. More likely, we simply acquiesce to another narrative despite our not agreeing with that decision.

However, when one faction includes a virtue signal in their narrative, the outcome many degenerate into fanaticism instead of free discourse. Although a virtue signal can be appropriate, virtue signals are more often used as weapons against any free discourse. Virtue signals without free discourse can then degenerate into fanaticism, conflict, rebellion, and even civil war. In the Civil War, the South's virtue signal was a for profit benevolent servitude and that virtue signal resulted in 620,000 soldier deaths, 10,000 civilian deaths, $22B cost, 15% decline in GDP, and countless years of reconstruction...all to preserve this Southern virtue of a profitable servitude.