Acceleration and diffusion are two correspondent consequences of liberalism.

1. Societies and groups compete for advantage

2. Some altruistic behaviours or cooperative strategies are manifest

3. Liberalism, a strategy for managing competing interests, emerges

4. Governance is managerial and technocratic in general

5. Ideology is deployed tactically, in order to achieve or sustain power

6. Time frames are near-horizon or current-only; politics is static and competitive,

7. This applies also to the authoritarian socities.

8. Greater inertia and incoherence is evident in the exploited polities

9. Crises demand reaction

10. Crises become sociotypical. This is because of the universality of newstime

11. The political field has expanded

12. Local realism collapses

13. Species wide interface manifests

14. Crises persist

15. Reactions increase in acuity and efficacy

16. Suprachronic challenges emerge and are recognised

17. The limits of liberalism are exposed, as longer view states achieve greater success

18. Liberal societies discard competitive norms

19. Humanity corresponds more successfully with itself

20. Humanity corresponds successfully with artificial general intelligence

21. Solutions more efficiently iterate

22. Humanity resolves to build the future, having realised that progress programs cannot be organic

23. Dynamical autropy is an emergent property.

24. The selves and the species are reconciled

Political Equilibria can exist within the political field, within space and across time. These are relative moments of macro stability, and can be assessed absolutely.

Disequilibrating factors could be:

1. A “broadening” of horizontal capacity within the political field.
2. A “stretching” of campaign tensility.
3. A “deepening” of the potency of campaign efficacy
4. A “weakening” of internal structures of the political field by external (or internal) stressors – cavitation.

These act to corrode any substantial equilibria and make equilibria less likely.

To some extent, the appearance of political equilibria increases with distance through space and time. Differences and turbulence can appear small with recession from the field in question.

Nevertheless, in the relative terms of their own parameters, equilibria can be noticed:

1. Relative to circumstances within the same political field chronologically adjacent.
2. Relative to political fields in geographically contiguous or economically or socially similar fields.
3. Because operators within the field itself comment so.

But more generally, because a universal political field encompasses all human action across time and space, political equilibria may be denoted when:

1. There is little change in political leadership over time.
2. There is only small fundamental disagreement over the political operations within the field, perhaps excluding ‘constitutional’ questions or questions of ‘legitimacy’.
3. There is little political violence
4. There is little external influence in the field
5. Transitions of power within the political field are relatively gradual or predictable.
6. There is little general uncertainty in the capability of those in government.
7. Actors are able to cooperate despite relative disagreement on political issues.

The human stands at the overlapping centre of three circles of confusion.

These are time, perception and mind.

1.      Humans can not successfully render time in the substrate of their imaginative consciousness.

2.      Their consciousness is contingent and non-neutral; and is folded into time fundamentally, since it has been produced through a chronal action. Mind is therefore inherently unknowable by itself, because of the paradox of a subjective computational process attempting to conceive of a subjective computational process; this process forever sputtering in its inefficacy towards mania.

3.      Perception is similarly contingently constructed, because evolution has created it for certain discrete purposes connected to the forward projection through time of the species.

As explained previously, these inefficiencies therefore do not allow the human to successfully locate itself in space or time appropriately, and mean that efforts to successfully improve its position will fail or be suboptimal.

This is the a priori realisation necessary for a systematic consideration of politics.

Two great contingencies keep watch over the river of human history, great pillars of stone between which the stream of our interwoven consciousness flows. First, the contingency associated with the emergence of the Neolithic and thence human script; second the looming, imminent diffusion of our thought into the shared collective cloud, underpinned or augmented by artificial minds. It is at this second waypoint which the human now finds itself. The human holds in one hand the stone axe, and in the other cradles the neuralink. The potential of the human’s proclivity for technology is fully realised, perhaps, as the node is inserted. Do mind-body dichotomies and ideological concerns dissipate in its computational force? Most importantly, will historical anguish and political alignments dissolve as human commonality prevails?

As the human casts its eyes backwards along the already navigated river, what does it see? How does the imminent metamorphosis affects its historical gaze? And more, how will the cloud-dwelling human then see time and history?

One explanation is that a relentless melting away of the narrative structures of the human past will begin. As the human mind accelerates away, the pitiful epochs, empires, intellectual trends, economic shifts and cultural movements will recede and dwindle, falling away to nothing, the periodisation and stories upon which its historical knowledge is poised collapsing into meaninglessness. We have seen this process before, on a more limited scale. Crucial past ideological or religious differences now seem petty. The great shifts in population and even ancient wars seem trivial, inconsequential, or predictable and recurrent. They did not seem so at the time; and similarly, as the entirety of human history decays and withers, we will wonder, as our minds are released upon a limitless landscape of thought, what all the fuss was about. We were there; and now we are here.

Alternatively, the human mind in the cloud will retain its reverence and curiosity regarding the past. It may do so as an intellectual indulgence, or categorise even recent historical traumas in the detached way we view ancient warfare and culture. Or it may find its care for the past sharpening. Why would we feel less pain in relation to an ancient crime, compared to one sixty years ago? Something more fundamental may also occur. Western linear views of time may falter; radical recompartmentalisations of time may thrive. Across human intellectual imagination, many conceptions of time recur; although the cloud will spring from the technological and philosophical conditions of the West, the neural conditions of the cloud might mean other traditions prosper. A fitness function may emerge, by which the heuristic most closely applicable to the human’s condition is favoured: which model for time and the human past will win out? Radial cosmological and chronal models may be appropriate. These, neatly, correspond with ancient, neolithic, and some Eastern and traditional models. We’re here, and we were here, and we will be here again. Same shit, different epoch.

And as the human stands, hands upturned in bewilderment, faced by the great monolith of our past, it is confused. This confusion has a new urgency, so imminent is its technological transfiguration. It senses this, as it wallows in its consumption and in its social hypochondria. All answers evaporate, and all questions hover brightly. Time and the human’s story have lost all meaning; and the human is numb.

Several iterations of an epistemological notion concerning representation cause us to reconsider the past and history. If we are only able to perceive the world representationally and inaccurately, and, more, if even spacetime is a misleading construct, the implication for our conception of the past is concerning. One argument holds that veridical interpretations of reality hinder species’ progress. In other words, their understanding of the present is inaccurate. They are rewarded evolutionarily by emphasising, ignoring, or exaggerating features of the environment or other organisms. Similarly, the very substance of our universe, spacetime, might be a secondary, ancillary effect of a deeper reality. We observe and inhabit a holographic projection of something more fundamental. Concerningly, the profound relational truths surrounding cause and effect, baked in to billions of years of evolution and driving organisms’ day-to-day attempts to manipulate their surroundings, break down in certain physical models, and seemingly arcane notions of entanglement and complementarity depart from our common-sense understanding of the fabric of reality. Thus, the software produced for our consciousnesses by evolution seems unable without the rarefied assistance of advanced mathematics to grasp reality at its most basic. If we inhabit a quantum hologram but do not know it, what in fact can we truly know?

The same is true for our understanding of time. Attempts to conceive of time stopping, ‘flowing’ backwards or operating differently at all are counter-intuitive and often unsuccessful. This is because minds have evolved to hunt and gather efficiently, to make simple tools and assist in the survival of our peers – and therefore have required a firm, robust and automatic conception of time and causality which suits its operating environment. Of entanglement and complementarity, Neolithic man (nor the Pleistocene Glyptodon) knew little – neither did they stop to ponder the nature of time and its irresistible unidirectional moment. As philosophers split hairs ever more finely when explaining the present and eternity, their failure to conclude the matter simply points to humanity’s deficit with such chronal perspectives. We do not know whether all moments have always existed, whether simply the present exists, whether the past exists in way the future does not – ad infinitum. A similar level of confusion relating to spatial location would be risible. Time is therefore especially unknowable, and we do not know whether we perdure, exdure or endure.

Similarly, a claim that we interpret our human present unclearly should find little disagreement. From political processes, major existential concerns (man made or natural), economic choices to warfare and corruption, it is clear that we rarely conceive of our primary challenges with clarity. Polling, election choices, private financial decisions, policy priorities – the experience shows that we do not understand the world nor our place in it. Extended to human biology and our wellbeing, our poor choices are daily manifest. We seem trapped in an iron prison of our genetic history, imperfect minds ill-adapted to their fleshly hosts. This is not to mention our even poorer record when initiating programmes to meet these challenges – theories, recommendations and legislation reverberate manically, failing in each iteration to save our selves.

We therefore are unable to lucidly decipher our human world, physical space and the nature of reality, and most pertinently time itself.

But what of the human past? If humans misinterpret reality in these concrete and theoretical ways, then why would we expect them to comprehend their past successfully? History and historians abound. As a profession, subject or ‘genre’ for popular culture, History is healthy, though it suffers a wide-range of contested explanations for its meaning, purpose, scope, content, level of moral responsibility, mode of practice, use, relative politicisation and mooted role in abetting oppression. Assessing the relative weight given to actors’ testimony in exploring historical events and processes is a well-trodden path, granted. Indeed, judging the merit or otherwise of every piece of historical evidence utlisied or discarded in the production of anaylses is the Historian’s assumed fundamental competence. But, more deeply, if our brothers and sisters through the ages also suffered from our maladroit earthly perception, how worthwhile is the historical project? Can we do more with our past than allow it to slip tragically through our fingers?

Perhaps historians understand this intuitively. Medieval chroniclers describe meteors, great storms and worse when narrating the causality of plagues. Hyper-real spiritual experiences become matter-of-fact events beside crop failures or wars. Recency bias, proximity to great events, trauma or habituation can seem the main factor in determining the content of witnesses’ accounts. To be a peasant in 19th century Russia would be to take on a host of spiritual, social, economic and moral assumptions relating to the nature of their reality. Trauma can be contextual. Historians understand these and other caveats associated with the use of such evidence. If it is their aim, reconstructing the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, is attempted with the appropriate care. Their practice includes many successes, most notably attempts to confront criminals in the recent past with appropriate justice. Nevertheless, the suspicion of futility and indulgence lingers.

More, tropes such as ‘victors writing the history’ obscure deeper truths. The unwritten histories of oppressed or defeated peoples receive attention from time to time, although bold conceptual leaps arguing defence of nefarious actors or promoting dead-end civilisations are rare. But there are also vast, unheralded, shadowy chronicles of our past which will remain forever silent. Given the frustratingly scanty evidence for even certain European medieval histories, our relative lack of information for the deep histories of the global south yields greater frustration. Perhaps microscale echoes of the everyday from past centuries tantalise precisely because truly comprehending our ancestors’ lives seems incredible. In the murk, any candle casts a brilliant glare. Instead of perfect facsimile, we construct an imperfect image of the past from what evidence we have, with varying resolution and fidelity. History seems a hologram of spent reality, distilled from the interference patterns of our own interpretative dysfunction.

Historians and anthropologists plough their furrows keenly, despite this regrettable evidential deficit. They can offer well-reasoned guesses when interpreting cave-art, refer to current tribal practices and, as sensibly as possible, graft our assumptions onto their subjects’ psyches. But, though fascinating, the limits of their practice are clear. Even if we imagine modes of thinking to modulate only slowly over the eons, interpreting the imagination of our stone age or bronze age ancestors seems a stretch. Perhaps, more than we, they perceived the nebulous quality of time more keenly. Were their cave-wrought artforms security against impermanence?

To extrapolate, have sociability and civilisation inured us to chronal complementation? The rise in fretting about existence as a correlate for the unfolding of modernity is fitting: as civilisation became less and less human, the humans worried more and more about their place. Their representational imagery underwent a transformation to the impression and thence the abstraction. The vector was toward greater and greater interpretation; perhaps, haunted by their great unanswered questions about Time, they sought greater diffraction of meaning amidst our riches of information. Perhaps Neolithic man had a clearer innate understanding of the unknowability of time and space, and worried about existence less. For the modern human, failed attempts to replace natural order proliferate, and therefore dissonance rules. But we pretend to know it all.

What are the tensors of the political field? What are the vectors and scalars?

1. The political field is always present, since and beyond the Neolithic contingency.
2. The political field exists in four dimensions, and expands as a correlate to the territorial and temporal expansion of human consciousness.
3. The political field ultimately governs the interaction between the human individual and the world.
4. The political field transcends and includes other fields of interaction.
5. To a varying extent, the political field scaffolds human interaction and achievement, but its influence in the moment at small scale can seem negligible.
6. Dereification of superfluous political objects can increase the clarity with which the political field is conceived, leading to greater efficacy of outcomes.
7. The political field is associated with the falsidical human perception of reality; it is a manifestation of our attempt to reconcile reality with our perception.
8. Representation in the political field exists at a range of scales. Ideas, events, controversies, individuals, ideologies and processes are misrepresented in cyclical or iterative generation.
9. Dichotomies, subjected to recession and perspectics, resolve.
10. Tensors might be national boundaries, class identities, in the fourth dimension elections, assassinations, wars, policy proposals, announcements and legislation, elsewhere gender identities or similar, location.
11. Scalars might be weight of feeling, degree of popularity, spend of policy proposal, breadth of coverage.
12. Vectors might be positive or negative trend of popularity, growth in impact of proposal, range of influence.
13. Political objects may prove efficacious, useless, important, facile, ethical, unethical or similar dependent on the perspective of the observer, impacted group in question, ‘distance’ of the observation in time, space and emotion. Polar, valid assessments of the same object are not only possible but necessary.
14. Reflection on the permanence and relativity of the political field can lead to superior outcomes for the species.
15. Improved capacity to manage an individual human’s consciousness can include clearer interaction within the political field as dereification begins; greater contentment within the political field can improve management of an individual human’s consciousness.

The Oxford Handbook of Philsophy of Time does not include a discussion of the interconnectedness of politics, history and time. It should discuss:

1. Prosaically, the hard-wired chronal aspects of constitutions, which are the concrete rulebooks and superstructures of our politics, namely term-limits, campaigning windows, periods of appointments to public offices. The history of such aspects, the reasoning and assumptions underpinning them.
2. The use of time as a descriptor or limiting factor to decisions, legislation and policies, or to manifesto / platform goals.
3. More importantly, the psychological influence on politics and human experience of our fluctuating understanding of the likely ‘deadlines’ for the impact or arrival of important existential factors, such as irreversible and harmful climate change, emergence of artificial general intelligence, growth into economic maturity of rival countries, depletion of certain natural resources, probable significant decline of natural resources; hauntingly, the notional frequencies of recurrence of cataclysmic natural disasters.
4. The social and psychological grounding for our treatment of time in our economic decision-making, which is the intellectual groundwork for much of point 3. The range of scales with which this is viewed, from high-frequency trading to the accumulation of sovereign wealth funds, and the impact on human economic experience of the culturally varying conceptions of time. The intrinsic effect of assumptions about time in human experience, for example the war for our attention / time waged by tech firms, the suffering associated with the use of human time. The utilitarian justification for the undignified abuse of human time.
5. Philosophical conceptions of time and historical periodisation which provides the context for point 4. Namely, the relations between hard cosmological near-constants and human interpretations of the same.
6. The relation between commonplace misconceptions of time, humanity’s role or purpose, and philosophies of the past and the future. The use of time in teleological or grand narrative philosophies, materialistic, dialectic, liberal, traditional / religious.
7. The link, therefore, between philosophical considerations of the present, human action and experience and political processes, which is fundamental.