MONOCULES

One dictionary defines a Monocule as: A small crustacean with one median eye. My coinage of Monocule is completely different. On Twitter©, monocules are, well, plainly silly and are apparently related to a misapprehension of monocular as an optical instrument that lacks stereoscopic vision qualities.

Here’s what I think. I think I have a grand theory which will lead to a complete understanding of the political psyche. Polls will become obsolete as the new mathematics of monocules extends its tentacles into behavioural psychology. It’s all so very simple and even explains things like Mob psychology and Democracy, which has, of course, always remained  incomprehensible.

I want to start by explaining that Similistics, which I invented in order to ask the question, How can things be similar?,  opened the door to the science of monocules. After all, when one has asked how things can be nearly alike, one inevitably gets around to asking how things can be the same. Sameness turned out to be a deeper question than I had at first thought because there is connective sameness and associated sameness.

This distinction is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. For example, if I locate a thousand people who always wear red socks I have what I would call associated sameness with respect to wearing red socks. If I looked at only people whose age is 22 years, nine months, ten days, seven hours, fourteen minutes, and seven seconds, am I tending towards an irreducible representation and approaching connective sameness?

All we have to do is ask the right question. Aha! You say that my sample of people of nearly-exactly the same age might wear red socks for different reasons and hence are still associatively the same, not connectively the same.  And you’d be right. The key to selling red socks to 100 percent of any select population of 22-year-olds is to discover what is the trigger to a population of potentially red-sock-wearing people that leads to a massive purchase of red socks. You would create the irreducible group of connected sameness. Let’s call it our quantum group.

If you say, and I hear you whispering this, that this question is obvious, let me state that it is not. It is the profound shift away from the study of personality and political behavior to motive and political behavior.

I’m sure most people have been told that it is impossible to gage people’s response by their motives. Motives are hidden and private. We can only study personality. See the monkey grin; know that he or she wants to steal a banana. I admit that I’m not sure if there is a sex difference in banana theft. I think you get the idea, though.

So we come down to: Monocule is the member of a select group that all respond to the same trigger. Now, I’m sure you’re familiar with this because almost all of you have used a laser in one form or another–maybe to point the pretty red dot at the PowerPoint© presentation to emphasize a point in your lecture on the natural selection of profitable real estate holdings. Light Amplification  by Stimulated Emission. The stimulation of all things alike into performing a community action. Very powerful.

Impossible? Not at all.

Sooner or later I shall return with more about this and we will go about seeking out our population of Monocules. I promise that you will find this fun.

Some of you who know me know that I am at least partly speaking tongue-in-cheek. However, there is a serious purpose behind subsequent observations that I hope will lead you to reconsider how we think about the problems in our society.