A Quantum Lens on Politics
A classical lens on politics leads to short-sighted policies. To take issues like climate change and biodiversity loss seriously, maybe it's time to view politics through a quantum lens.
A weird world
“The world is as weird as we feared.” This sounds like something right out of a political speech — at least if we were to replace ‘world’ with ‘candidate.’
But no, it’s a quote from a recent popular science article describing the latest evidence against local realism, or the idea that everything interacts through direct causal relationships (where interactions cannot exceed the speed of light). The new findings are based on correlations between distant entangled particles. Is this still considered weird?
I have to confess that I’ve become a bit obsessed with politics lately. When I read an article on how “the fuzziness of the quantum world has been demonstrated at the largest-ever scale,” my thoughts turn to a candidate’s outlandish claims about crowd sizes at campaign rallies. Descriptions of how more than a billion atoms can act as a single quantum wave make me think of the potential and power of coherent social movements.
Viewing the world through both a quantum lens and a political lens, I’m getting lost in metaphors and analogies. It could be a good time to put this newsletter down and get back to routine, classical work.
A critical time
Not so fast… Politics matters. A lot! It influences how we organize society, what we prioritize, and how we manage conflicts and disagreements. Politics has a decisive impact on the quality of life on this planet, both now and for generations to come. Millennia, in fact.
Who would guess this from watching political debates? Global scale problems with profound consequences for everyone are rarely elevated to major policy issues in political campaigns. At best they show up as snippets in speeches. There is a remarkable disconnect between what we know and experience and how we respond. We see few commitments to action, and even fewer measurable results.
This disconnect seems to be my “issue.” As I’ve mentioned before, we are in what’s considered “the biggest election year in human history” — a year when over three billion people in 72 countries can potentially vote. Yet in 2024, some of the most important issues, including the state of the atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems are not being taken seriously. Human and planetary well-being seem to be oversized issues that do not fit on today’s political agendas.
At this critical time we should be mobilizing, organizing, and transforming to respond to existential threats. Yet most politicians are not even paying lip service to issues that have implications for all of us. What is going on?
A classical view of politics
There is no lack of excuses. First, there is a fear that talking about these big issues will alienate voters at a time when democracy itself is at stake. Then there’s a realization that issues such as “global warming” do not rank among the highest priorities for voters. And research showing that extreme weather events rarely lead to increased attention towards environmental issues. There is also the well-documented influence of money, misinformation, vested-interests, and corruption on people’s attitudes to environmental issues. Many politicians seem to conclude that it’s easier to keep quiet and focus on other priorities.
Maybe the real problem is that we are still viewing politics through a classical lens, and failing to recognize its filters and blind spots:
For more than 30 years, sustainability policies and practices have been discussed, interpreted, and implemented through a lens that is centuries old, yet still quite powerful. The classical lens for politics was ground, edged and fit to suit the rational, mechanistic, Newtonian worldview. This lens separates humans from nature, the mind from the body, “us” from “others,” and the present from the future.
I wrote this a few years ago in a book chapter called Politics Through a Quantum Lens. I pointed out that although the classical lens may have been considered far-sighted at one time, it now gives us a myopic view that leads to short-sighted policies. This lens creates distortions that limit present-day responses to existential challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.
I suggested that “Rather than perpetuating a fragmented, partial, and polarizing view of the world, the current global context invites us to view politics through a fundamentally different lens.”
A quantum lens
The book, Foundations, Principles and Inspirational Resources of Integral Politics, edited by Elke Fein, was part of a research project on Leadership for Transition (LiFT 3.0) that focused on alternative approaches to politics. Foundational to integral politics is the idea that experience, culture, behavior, and systems are not separate — they co-arise. A quantum lens on politics builds on this integral perspective:
Quantum social science emphasizes the important role of subjectivity and interiority in politics and recognizes that the lines between “us” and “other” are constructed rather than fixed. As such, it opens up a much-needed inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality. This has important implications for politics, which is often based on interests, identities, and grievances, as well as the desire for security, control, and power.”
What are the implications? “Looking at each other and at nature through a quantum lens recognizes that the potential for connection and coherence always exists through our inherent oneness and acknowledges that we are already connected. In other words, politics is about how we manage our entangled relationships.”
A new politics
A quantum lens focuses on relationships that overcome divisions, polarization, and paralysis to support an equitable and thriving world for everyone. Do we need to explicitly use a quantum lens to change politics, since entanglement is, in fact, the nature of reality?
Connection is already evident in the discourse, or at least it’s making a comeback. For example, in a recent speech, former US President Barack Obama reminded us that “the ties that bind us together are still there,” and that most people do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz talked about a commitment to the common good and an understanding that we are all in this together – they everyone can make a real difference: “It’s the values we live by. It’s the way we treat each other.”
Although a quantum lens may not seem necessary, it can help us see the new politics more clearly and enact it more quickly:
Looking at politics through a quantum lens opens spaces and opportunities for viewing relationships differently, for recognizing entanglement, and for activating a stronger sense of agency. Taken together, these can contribute to a “fractal politics” that generates new patterns, which can shift systems and cultures in ways that influence both our individual and shared realities across scales.
It’s exciting to participate in this new politics, and to consider what it looks like in practice. Next week I’ll be talking about this with Indra Adnan, co-founder of The Alternative UK and author of The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age. In the meantime, let’s experiment with viewing politics through a quantum lens and explore why it matters!
We actually live in a quantum world, and once we fully grasp that, nothing will ever be the same again.
—Danah Zohar
This is all very brilliant from a macro perspective, Karen. But I also wonder if expecting climate solutions from the top down, and thus detailed policy discussions in the polity, is also not rather Newtonian. I've seen the solutions percolating from the ground itself up, expressed as co-sovereignty between the feds and Tribes. It is notable that the one speaker at the DNC who spoke directly to the climate crisis was our first Native Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland, who is in charge of vast federal lands and is actively ramping up the bison transfer program to address biodiversity, and pursuing a co-stewardship agreement with the Tribes to manage bison on the land. At the top levels of politics right now, I think it is more about worldview and permissiveness than the kind of leadership that imposes solutions. E.g., the Biden administrations adoption of the 30/30 goals on biodiversity. Kamala was the climate advocate in the White House that interjected a lot of the climate components in the infrastructure and 'inflation reduction' act, so we know where she stands. But given the current nature of politics in this country, we know as well that she has to speak like a moderate in order to have the opportunity to pursue a much more progressive social agenda. So she mostly lets her surrogates like Haaland, AOC, and that twenty-something Congressman from Florida express her view on the climate. Unlike Obama, I think it is realistic to hope that she is not wedded to the moderate agenda, that it's just code sharing for the purpose of thwarting the Death Star candidate. Everyone knows that the climate is on the agenda. In moderate talk, it is "the future" we are moving "forward" to. And we know that the worldview of the other side is suicidal. Even "democracy" can be seen as a proxy for climate, as this election is seen to be about "survival."
Feels like quantum change to me.