Basins of attraction are places of local stability or equilibrium where the system in question is more likely to settle and remain, because less energy is needed to keep the system there. In the state-space model, the basins are locations in the state space where large numbers of people don’t have to invest a lot of cognitive energy— they don’t have to think much— to maintain their political ideologies, because (among other reasons) the ideologies at those locations align with their temperaments and moral intuitions. Psychologists can measure people’s investment of cognitive energy by using methods such as the implicit association test, which captures the degree of subconscious association between mental representations in a person’s mind. Generally, the more conscious an association, the more cognitive energy is invested in making the association.
Buzz Holling practically despairs on this score. “Because we are only now beginning to understand the changing reality,” he writes, “there is consequently no limit to the ability of good scientists to invent compelling lines of causal explanation that inexorably support their particular beliefs. How can even the best-intentioned politician possibly be expected to deal with that? How can even the most reflective of the public?”
Psychology is not history but science, a science constructed on naturalistic principles.
The ideal of equality in freedom could never be static, frozen in time, because in truth it could never be realized; each generation had to define the concept anew. And so the American Revolution was “an endless process rather than an isolated act,” and the ongoing effort to achieve the ideal constituted “a restless and dynamic search for a state of society that could at best be approximated, never fully attained.” It was a Sisyphean task, but no less real or desirable for that.
One of the more telling examples [of criticism of Hannah Arendt's political ideals] came from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who lamented what he called Arendt’s “curious perspective.” She imagined “a state,” he said, “which is relieved of the administrative processing of social problems; a politics which is cleansed of socioeconomic issues; an institutionalization of public liberty which is independent of the organization of public wealth; a radical democracy which inhibits its liberating efficacy just at the boundaries where political oppression ceases and social repression begins—this path is unimaginable for any modern society.”
Agree.
