“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is the most widely misread poem in all of poetry.
Most people think the point of the poem is that you should take the road less travelled, march to beat of your own drummer, etc.
This is a misreading.
First of all, we are repeatedly told that the two roads looked basically the same.
Some lines:
“Then took the other, as just as fair"
"Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,"
"And both that morning equally lay"
20 line poem, about 25% of them devoted to sameness of the paths.
It matters that he took one and not the other only because choices beget choices (and, importantly, foreclose others) and this is life.
We then tend to ascribe meaning and narrative retrospectively to those choices.
The traveler laments that he can’t take both paths, have all the experiences, NOT foreclose certain choices by making others:
“And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler”
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence,” the traveler tells us. And when he does, he will ascribe meaning to his choices. He will say he took the one less travelled (even though they were the same) and it really DID make all the difference, as he says, because by making that choice he definitionally could not make the other.
Yesterday my wife, laughing, goes “I feel like you have this whole social life on #nostr that I don’t know about.”
Clearly I need to get her on here, right?
Despite RFK ending his campaign, I’m hopeful that there’s an emergent groundswell of independent political voices in the U.S.
Voices that are heterodox, non-monolithic, beholden to neither of the two ossified existing parties.
And I hope this leads to a politics with less theater and more real human interaction; less doctrine and more ideas.
Americans are a deeply innovative people. Our country’s founding itself was a tectonic innovation in governance.
Back then it was the tyranny of a distant monarch. Today we live under the tyranny of the two-party system and the ubiquitous media machine that supports it.
There’s a frontier beyond this paradigm, though, and I hope we can find a new frontier in our politics, too. Something more than merely recycled Reagan or FDR.
It’s why I feel so strongly about #bitcoin. Because it aids in the subversion of this paradigm. Same with #nostr.
Other than education, I’m not sure there’s anything in America more in need of innovation than our politics.
I see glimpses of something new, whether it’s Vivek walking around talking to everyone, even passionate detractors, impromptu and unscripted, without handlers or teleprompters.
Or RFK, taking on big pharma, crusading for clean food, healthier lifestyles, and a detoxified world for our children, and doing it all while a massive, coordinated censorship campaign sought to banish and discredit him into obscurity.
I occasionally even see some of it in a guy like John Fetterman who, after his hospitalization, has made the radical decision to just say what he thinks, haters be damned, party marching orders be damned.
I don’t agree with any of these people on everything. But that’s perfectly okay. And that’s the point.
What I want to see is a politics of PEOPLE, warts and all, debating ideas; not of vast machineries producing newer vessels for the same shit.
We are a nation capable of generative, even revolutionary heterodoxy. We awesomely, transcendently weird. But we’ve allowed our political imaginations to atrophy on a 24/7 diet of mainstream media, algorithms, and the virtue-signaling regime that makes us all self-censor.
Polarization went from being a temporary bug to being fundamental. Grievance is now both a business and an infinite regress. Activism is a profession.
If you listen closely you can hear the song of the trapped who has grown to love its cage.
But I’m hopeful there’s a rumbling of something new on the horizon.
