After Hyperpolitics

Or: the political is the personal

MidJourney Prompt: A spectacular fractal sunrise

I.

What begins as a noble impulse toward building a better world often transforms into something more insidious: a totalizing framing of life that I've come to call "hyperpolitics." This phenomenon represents not merely a political stance but an entire mode of being, one that colonizes every aspect of human experience, transforming the everyday and mundane into the politically charged and the perpetually urgent.

Consider how we've arrived here: In our legitimate desire to understand the interconnected nature of social problems, we've inadvertently constructed a framework that demands every action, every utterance, every moment of rest become a self-conscious and publicly-accountable act of political warfare. The hyperpolitical mindset transforms every experience of guilt and rejection into the experience of cruelty and oppression, taking natural and necessary aspects of the human condition and declaring them to be exploitative lies to be resisted at all costs. The hyperpolitical mindset makes every interaction a referendum on the justice-orientation of all participants, transforming every conversation into a contest of revolutionary consciousness.

II.

The hyperpolitical framework operates through what we might call "infinite ethical recursion". Each political stance must contain within it all other political stances, creating an impossible standard for speech and action. The environmental activist must simultaneously be versed in and actively fighting for abortion rights, and the abortion activist must be versed in and actively fighting for anti-racism, and so on, creating an infinite regress of moral obligations that paralyzes meaningful action.

This paralysis manifests in increasingly baroque social rituals: Watch how activist meetings become exercises in prefacing statements with increasingly elaborate acknowledgments of privilege and positionality. Observe how social media discussions spiral into competitions of who can most comprehensively connect their specific concern to the entirety of global injustice. The result is a kind of performative complexity that masks a deeper intellectual and moral simplification.

Consider how this plays out in everyday life: A person wanting to start a community garden must first demonstrate how their garden will actively dismantle white supremacy. Someone organizing a mutual aid network must explain how their food distribution system will advance climate justice. These aren't merely questions of intersectionality – the (correct) recognition that systems of oppression interlock and influence each other. Rather, they represent a demand that every action simultaneously address all injustice, creating a standard that no individual or organization could possibly meet.

The psychological toll is profound. Activists and concerned citizens find themselves caught in endless loops of self-examination and critique, each thought spawning a thousand prerequisite thoughts, each action demanding a thousand prerequisite actions. This recursive burden creates what we might call "revolutionary perfectionism" – the paralyzing belief that unless an action perfectly addresses all injustice simultaneously, it is not worth doing at all.

III.

What I find fascinating about hyperpolitics is its secular replication of totalizing religious frameworks. Despite its often militant anti-religiosity, it resurrects the concept of original sin in the form of systemic complicity, and the devil appears in the guise of a unified source of all oppression. This theological parallel runs deeper than mere superficial similarity – it reveals something fundamental about human meaning-making and our persistent need for comprehensive worldviews.

The practitioner of hyperpolitics must maintain constant vigilance against this devil, must see its influence in every interaction, must fight it in every moment. This exhausting hyperawareness mirrors religious fundamentalism's constant battle against sin and temptation. Just as the medieval Christian saw the influence of Satan in every misfortune and every impure thought, the hyperpolitical activist sees systemic oppression in every interaction and every emotional response.

This framework creates its own eschatology – a theory of historical culmination that mirrors religious end-times narratives. Every moment becomes pregnant with world-historical significance; every action or inaction carries the weight of either hastening or delaying the final revolution. The personal becomes not just political but apocalyptic. The struggle against oppression takes on the character of a cosmic battle between good and evil, complete with its own saints (theorists and activists), martyrs (victims of systemic violence), and heretics (those who question or critique the accepted narrative).

The result is a kind of secular fundamentalism that, ironically, recreates many of the psychological and social dynamics it claims to oppose. It offers the same totalizing worldview, the same moral certainty, and the same promise of ultimate redemption through perfect adherence to its principles. Like its religious counterparts, it provides both the anxiety of constant moral peril and the comfort of knowing exactly what must be done about it – even if what must be done is impossible.

IV.

To offer a way out of this totalizing framework I want to advocate a return to virtue ethics, not as a retreat from political engagement, but as a more sustainable and effective approach to social change. This framework acknowledges the multiplicity of human roles and relationships, each with its own ethical demands and measures of excellence.

Virtue isn’t an action but a way of being. For example, when considering how to be a good parent, it would be impossible to map out each and every possible situation and interaction you might have with your children in advance and to determine the proper rules to follow. Instead, we are called to consider how we can be a good parent. How would a good parent be with their children? Patient? Strict? Generous? Challenging? Once you answer those questions then you can do your best to embody those virtues, and once you take care of your way of being then your actions take care of themselves.

I want to assert that our virtues are often given relationally. The virtues we seek to embody are often particular to the kinds of relationships we find ourselves in - we ask “how can I be a good parent? A good romantic partner? A good professional? A good citizen?” etc. Being a good parent can often be distinct from being a good professional, for example. Someone might be a great artist and a terrible romantic partner. There are often overlaps between these relational virtues, and these roles often interweave, but there ultimately (and crucially) remain domains of distinction that are particular to every relational configuration you find yourself in.

The hyperpolitical view is one born from activist communities and conversations. Activist relationships, like romantic or professional relationships, bring with them their own set of virtues. What I want to assert here is that the pursuit of activist virtue is distinct from the pursuit of other relational virtues, that being a good activist does not make you a good romantic partner (and vice versa), that activist ways of being have a limit and an outside.

V.

As we seek to decouple activist virtues from other relational virtues, we must recover the ability to decouple issues and organizations. This isn't a call for conscious ignorance of intersectionality, but rather a recognition that effective action often requires focus and specialization. The failure of one movement need not poison all others; the imperfection of one organization need not delegitimize all collective action.

More broadly, we need to recognize that we are not one revolution away from heaven on earth. Just as hyper politics believes in its own version of Satan, it carries its own vision of Rapture. Hyper-politics sees those of us who are alive today as being in a special relationship with history, one not shared with anyone in the past, since we alive today will be those bring about the world’s ultimate transformation. We might still have to die, but we can face our deaths knowing that the world as we know it will not outlast us, that our lives will be immortalized as those who founded the new order and ushered in world peace forever. [1]

VI.

The way forward requires something that might seem counterintuitive: a willingness to think smaller, to act within our specific contexts, to embrace the particularity of our roles and relationships. This isn't a retreat from political engagement but rather a recognition that effective political action often emerges from grounded, specific, and well-defined efforts rather than attempts to solve everything at once.

In letting go of the hyperpolitical framework, we might find not only relief from its polarizing and paralyzing demands but also find more effective paths to actual social change. Sometimes, the most radical act is simply to be good at what we do, where we are, with the relationships we have.

One Footnote:

[1] I think this is responsible for the enduring power of Marxism - Marxism briefly and accurately diagnosed the ills of mid-19th century social structures and created interesting dimensions for cultural analysis but failed as a ‘scientific’ theory and proved disastrous as a guiding light to re-found societies. It persists in its appeal by speaking to the same pain in our hearts that religion does, that a triumph over death and suffering is at hand and will indeed happen in our very lifetimes. Unlike religion, which posits an external rescuing force, Marxism asserts that humanity is in an immediate position to rapture ourselves.