Government needs passion directed towards reasonable political and social goals, rather than what we’re stuck with now: great passion directed at crazy goals, or dispassionate complacency swatting at meaningless ones. The “mature” middle causes more political gridlock than extremists because it adds too much gravity to the force of inaction. Electing new leaders who have a strong streak of immaturity is how to solve political dysfunction in Washington. Why? Because immature thinking can move mountains… and an immovable mountain is exactly what the politically moderate middle has become. Being moderate requires a dispassionate character, which is where the major party politicians (and inversely, their respective Eyes on Fire political bases) have gone off the governing rails.
We need to recalibrate the meaning of the word mature.
It likely rubs people with the abrasive side of the sponge that I’m claiming a person who declares themselves politically in the middle is the paradigmatic example of an ideological invertebrate lacking any meaningful social importance… but such is life… and I have an important point to make that’s worth wading through the metaphors. 
There lives a reflection of Truth when anyone self-declares themselves a label that is meant to imply an undercurrent of maturity. In our world, the meaning of “mature” has come to be something good. We’re wrong. We forget that mature boxes itself into being incapable of positive change. There’s nowhere to go but down.
Culinarily speaking, mature is a day away from sour and a week from rotten. As voters we are the master chefs of Washington – and we keep sending rotten ingredients. Over and over again.
It’s impossible to undo the rotting process. Once mature… that’s it. It’s over. We’re forever stuck with ingredients pre-destined to rot in office… …maybe this is little more than yet another argument in favor of term limits… …I don’t know. I’m no foodie. I eat mostly frozen. What I do know, however, is that no great idea has ever – ever – started from inside a stoic and ‘ma-Ture’ viewpoint. We need intelligent passion in government. Unfortunately, passion is one thing Mature has packed inside an old box and tucked away in a guest room closet. Therein lies a problem.
Passion Doesn’t Have to be Blind
Admittedly, a huge problem that dissuades many citizens from participating in government is too much passion. One arc of politics is that the act of picking a political side mandates one be a whack-job who misspells words on protest signs, or sees the world through Michelle Bachmann-colored glasses. In reality that’s not the case. Great passion can be directed towards reasonable and intelligent goals. Stupid isn’t a prerequisite for passion. Intelligent passion creates symphonies.
Contrary to what most people think about passion in politics, it’s not all or nothing; nor is it Truth that only extreme positions have the ability to foster great passion and support. We can pick sides of a debate, and fight strongly for what we believe is right without being one of “the crazies in politics” … but if we want to be effective and win the argument… if we really want to make this country a better place… then we need to be immature.
Politics, meet Mature and Immature.
Mature is an aristocratic English accent with an ascot. Mature does’t fight against injustices “because it’s more complicated than that.” Mature uses the phrase “I don’t have time” far more than is truthful. (“I don’t have time” is the mature way of saying, “I don’t care enough to do anything about it.” … Mature is the Godfather of Apathy.) Mature cares more about its 401k than what it does as a career to pad it. Mature cannot bend; it can only break. It is more brittle than it knows. Even emotionless Science has realized it needs to work with immature thinkers in order to uncover new and profound discoveries – but Mature by its nature is forever incapable of creating New. It collects stamps for displaying, but doesn’t care about where they’ve been. It’s already gone and grown. It’s stone… rock-polished and immutable, resting upon a squat, three-legged brass stand in a protective case.
Mature cannot think outside the box – Mature puts its passion into the box, shrouds it with spare bubble wrap, and places it high on a shelf where it won’t get wet… next to its other, for-reflection-only memories like high school year books and honeymoon photos.
Immature, on the other hand, is the root of all things new. Immature is the antidote to Apathy. It sees the DNA double helix in its noodle soup, and gets ideas about the universe while on a train watching cows fly by. Immature founded Christianity while Mature could only monetized it. Immature looks at the box placed high on the shelf – giggles – then makes a fort out of it complete with bubble wrap armor and a matching helmet. Immature can see outside the box, because it cuts a hole in one side to make a window. Immature makes ideas look easy.
If Immature can’t reach the box on the shelf, it’s not too proud to turn to its friend and ask, “Hey, help Lift Me Up so I can grab that, will yah?” Immature’s free admission of its incompleteness is how it achieves higher elevations.
It rejects the status quo and accepted paradigms, because Immature doesn’t know about those sorts of things yet. Immature might have bad table manners, but it has discovered new continents and creatures, founded new religions, and builds better breadboxes. It has sent humans to the moon and robots to Mars. Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Founding Fathers, Einstein, and countless others have enjoyed spending a lot of time with Immature, because Immature helped them see the world outside the bounds of the deemed socially regulated norms doled down by Mature and his Status Quo Posse (they have matching jackets, and burgundy-striped ties… and a boat house). Even God needed to consult Immature to come up with the platypus. No matter what you believe – in that belief system… when greatness happened – Immature was somewhere in the room.
Being able to perceive the world from an immature viewpoint is how we change the world. It’s how humans, society, and all the amazing puzzle pieces of our culture have evolved. Greatness is achieved through immature approaches life: inspired, unbound, passionate and imaginative thinking by those willing to cut into a wall of our boxed-in viewpoint and create a window. Those people are our legends. Those people are everything but “in the middle.” … Mature doesn’t even like to play peek-a-boo.
Personally, I like the imagination, optimism, and lack of brain-fog of Immature. The only thing that ought be mature are the soles of our shoes. Not our souls. Not our ideas, or our methods. Anything launched from a mature standpoint is destined to be lackluster and without passion; ultimately destined to go into the ho hum chapters of history. Indeed, ideas and policies eventually grow into something that is mature – but they should never begin from that viewpoint – all the latter gives us is re-authorization of century-old laws, while the former launches new countries, new industries, and humans into space.
That which is the black hole of society: the political middle.
Like most people who don’t get a paycheck from politics, I would like to see a lot more being achieved by government. Political dysfunction is the new normal in America, and through the last 20 years it has served as the oppressing (and/or depressing) cause of most Americans hating politics so much they don’t even bother to vote. Dysfunction in leadership creates apathy in the electorate, because, “it doesn’t matter who is in Washington. It’s broken.”
It seems somewhat counter intuitive, then, for me to bastardize the hard middle who tradition has placed on the pedestal of being the king of all problem solvers; those people in the die hard middle who find pride in their inability to pick an ideological side. People who pride them selves in being organized and contemplative, but in their constant shuffling of their files and chin-rubbing they never achieve anything. “How else can anything get done?” one might ask. “People who are in the middle give us hope of compromise!” one might think-exclaim. Yet another (I shudder to think) may go as far as saying in a refined accent, “Being in the middle is the mature thing to do.”
Well… they would be wrong.
The world is grey, but what motivates our policy decisions is not. The world is complicated and requires complex solutions to fix problems, but the criteria we use, and how we decide to go about fixing those problems is not a complicated matter. It takes an immature viewpoint to be able to see through the balderdash and find workable Truth.
The immature I’m advocating is not the yelling, temper-tantrum-throwing kind born from extreme political views… in politics those sorts manifest from well-marinated and matured hate. I’m talking about the creativity and lack of mental furniture that lets us see animals in clouds and spaceships in packing boxes. Immature is the best problem solver, and that’s what we clearly need. 
Politicians who pride themselves in and of the political middle are little more than jesters pantomiming the king: they exist to entertain the courtiers (with high hopes and open hands), but are wholly incapable of governing more than a small dog on a leash with sleigh bells tied to its tail. They struggle to look “mature” while wearing clown shoes everyone can see. In politics, that means being noncommittal and repeating “my good friend on the other side of the aisle” without ever doing anything about their absurd claims… nor pointing out that their esteemed colleague is lacking pants (of which we are all likely aware from the esteemed colleague’s twitter feed).
Mature vs. Immature approaches to policymaking and politics.
On policy, we gathered here today might as well tackle the core issue: Equality. From the Big E all “social issues” evolve. A wee bit of logic whittles down nearly all social issues to the center of the policymaking marrow: you either believe that people – groups, individuals, humans, souls – are equal, or you do not. (Even Freedom bows before Equality.)
Nearly all politically-driven social issues sprout from how any given group of people define Equality. That basic, fundamental human concept (or concept of humanity, however you’d like to frame it) is the root that holds the hope. It’s People … (People: when Person gets heavily pluralized into a mass, and thusly loses the empathetic sense of the singular Other. That point of critical mass when “collateral damage” is suddenly acceptable by We The People.) … and all the various world’s gods’ houses that tend most to chop away at the roots of the Equality tree. The divinely-inspired divide between “our rights (salvation)” vs. “their rights (damnation)” created and continues to dig into the first deep, dark divide between what is, in its purest sense, our shared religious beliefs and history. Each time that root is slashed, it allows infinite room for declaring oneself “better” than otherself.
The rest is just history repeating.
People are Mature. Person is Immature.
Person can see another Person as being of equal humanity. Person always helps Person when the other is in trouble. People do not. It’s just not possible for People – a group, a mass – to see another individual as being… equal. Nor can People ever view another People equal: because People in contrast to People equals War, not equality. If not war… at bare minimum, People in contrast to People equals an oppositional force neither can fully understand from inside the framework of their own mass, and therefore categorize one another as an untrusted enemy (enter Tea Party, stage right).
The problem is that People who have employed Mature as judicator have forgotten in what they believe… or at least what inspired their belief in the first place. They have a means to pass judgement, but no fundamental criterion by which to make it. They have a policy manual. What without the Why. True belief requires a purity that Mature cannot accommodate because it breaks a long-standing agreement with Routine. Maybe that’s why Mature never seems inspired. Immature glows and zig-zags excitedly down the aisle towards the giant, open doors – while Mature furrows, pays the tithes, wipes his brow with a monogrammed hankie, and double-yellow-lines it to the car with his spiritual mind hell-bent on the A/C.
Yet, in spite of it all, in politics the middle is safe; coveted, even. So is a storm shelter or a bunker – places people go to hide and protect themselves. The political middle roads are the Houses of the Holy for life-long politicians who wave like the queen from K street, but get nothing done in the process. The mature middle gives politicians room for escape, a back door, a hedge. It takes comfort, complacency, and a personal greed to remain in the security of the comfort zone to create the gravity well of the Political Middle that exists in America today. It takes a lack of courage and inspiration. It takes a truncated soul that fits nicely in the overhead bin. From that perspective it’s easy to blame political dysfunction on those advocates who are passionate about policy, because the passionate and creative are the non-conformists. If you don’t conform, the the status quo brands you “immature”.
The political middle is packed full of people with cold porridge in their veins. People in the middle are bores who check their stock portfolios on weekends before heading for a dinner party with the like-minded. They’re bland souls. They’re white-washed walls in Wales.
Too much mass in the political middle causes more political dysfunction than the extreme ideologues.
Politics is a tug of war (a game much loved by Immature). People in the middle create a black hole over which the rope is stretched. The bigger the black hole the more its gravity sucks at the rope and makes it increasingly difficult for people on either end to make progress in their respective directions. It also makes time slow down – nothing ever gets done.
Too many people occupying the political middle can have a larger stagnation impact on policy than an equal divide between the Democratic Party and Republican Party. The politically mature middle isn’t refined and desirable – it’s dead weight that eats light. Nasty bugger, it is. Stubborn and gluttonous. Obese and increasingly incapable of movement with its pride the sole characteristic maintaining its complacency. How American.
Even when measured, Passion is a delicate dance partner. I do not like having crazies in Congress, either. However, taking a stand on one side or the other doesn’t demand one be crazed and unbridled – fueled by high-octane, ideological zeal. I’m talking about having people in political office who are not afraid to eat lunch at a conservative business conference, stand up and say, “I’m a progressive, and I believe in a single-payer health care system. Any questions?” That doesn’t make them crazy – it merely proves they know what they believe. They are not a black hole of ideas like those who take everything “into consideration” and then do whichever gets them the most campaign contributions.
In modern politics knowing what you believe and saying it out loud (aloud loudly) is an act of relative immaturity… And so thusly I hereby resolve, proclaim and advocate we elect Immature to national office – many of them. And often. Elect Immature, because inside that spirit all things are, in fact, possible. Immature took us to the moon by the end of the decade. Immature connected a nation with a railroad. Immature went West. Immature declared a nation with a quill pen and lit its streets with captured lightning. Immature flew on cloth and spruce. That’s the sort of spirit I want in political office. I want the kind that crosses oceans, not aisles.
People who are self-declared moderates are roadblocks. Vacuums. They suck energy and power from the other people who actually want to push for their own visions of the country – when such politicians become as entrenched in routine and co-dependance as they now are – they are the cause of dysfunction in politics. Yes, some people view these politicians as being necessary buffers, and they’re not entirely wrong. But America has come to embrace such ideological mediocrity as a desired norm, and that is wrong.
Passion is a measured virtue that can be directed to passing moderate policies. Being passionate about issues doesn’t mean you have to be a political-rally-attending wacko who feeds itself on conspiracy theories and fervor fuel… you simply have to care, and then be willing to say it out loud for others to hear. Don’t the sort of person who sits with cold porridge slopping through their veins.
Manage your own relationship with Immaturity to make measurable progress.
Standing up and fighting for what you believe does not mean you have to be a religious zealot who wants all children to be home schooled, and stockpiles guns under your mattress. Nor does it mean you must be a scruffy atheist who drives an electric car made out of recycled water bottles, and chains yourself to trees every weekend. It means fight for what you believe is right with the same passion you had when it was OK for a grown up to call you “immature.” Be a Man From Another Time, back when we had imagination and thought about more things than just which medication, shoes, and stocks to buy.
Immaturity teaches us to be passionate and see things in ways that foster finding new ideas – it does not, however, mean being irresponsible. It does not give us a get out of jail free card. It does not allow us to be cruel, or condone us to send poisoned letters to elected officials. Immature isn’t stupid. Being friends with Immature means stop being so damn complacent and apathetic, and work for something better without the primary tactics being “make as much money as possible”. It does not allow us to detach policy from facts, make fun of what we don’t understand or practice, overrule reason, nor push religion with policy and law. 
Immaturity actually helps us find solutions to mature, hard-n-brittle problems.
Immaturity injects passion, but it does not strip us of our reason as does fervor and hate. Fervor and hate blind us. Immaturity does the exact opposite: it helps us see that which before from our mature perspective we could not.
Yes… we understand that the bubble wrap armor and matching helmet won’t protect us if an evil knight were to challenge us with a sword… we even understand that we might look a little goofy in our bubble wrap armor while ducked inside a cardboard box… but all that might give us some new ideas about how to land a spacecraft or make a better football helmet. And we have a window – we always make a window – so we can see outside our box. … I really do love that window.
Immature doesn’t block Reason, it introduces Reason to Creative Problem Solving (well-bred words have middle and last names, too). Immature can help you see that being in the complacent, mature middle is just as bad for the country as being in the extremes. What you believe doesn’t have to be extreme, but you must at least believe in something and be willing to stand up for it.
Pick a side. Fight for Truth, not merely belief. Bottom line: get off your arse, educate yourself, find your inner Immature… and do.
Published: by | Updated: 01-29-2017 07:50:25
