'Metaphysics' and 'Politics' are two words you don't often hear in the same sentence. In the West, this isn't always regarded as a bad thing - the pernicious influence of the "prosperity gospel" creed (wherein wealth and a reasonable standard of living are the result of God's grace ... so economic intervention is heretical) within American politics does a handy job of showing why we're often wary of putting these concepts together.
And while the related doctrines of neoliberal free-market economics often seem to be turning on avowedly similar principles, that doesn't have to mean that every single intersection of political action with metaphysical guidance has to be a ghastly negative travesty.
Indeed, the conscious eschewment of metanarratives, guiding principles, and tried-and-tested 'instruction manuals' for political being and agency is actually one of the things that's lead fairly directly towards this nihlistic neoliberal politico-eco-socionomic muddle we're all in today.
But it isn't nihilism, the spirit of this age. Not properly, anyway. That would imply a complete rejection of even the possibility of other ways of thinking in the face of the cold, drab and grey flat intellectual plain which now comprises much of our political spectrum.
Instead, it's the absence of a meaningful and engaging set of things in which to believe ... the space where one might grow, rather than the yawning gulf of the howling void.
It's in that spirit that I'd like to take the time to introduce you to two concepts that help make my political world go round - and, for that matter, fundamentally changed the way I viewed politics and my place in it once I discovered them.
The first of these is drawn from the works of a man by the name of Eric Voegelin. An Austrian refugee who turned up in America after fleeing the Nazis following the Anschluss in 1938, much of his academic output was (understandably) devoted to attempting to explain the phenomenon of 20th century "political religions" like Naziism and Communism.
At their core, Voegelin believed both creeds to be "Gnostic" in form and origin, borrowing heavily from the writings and analysis on the early 1st millennium Christian initiatory cults of the same name to describe how their world-view worked.
The world, the Polis and the modern nation-state were seen to be imperfect realms inhabited by the damned, in which some primeval sin or acts of alienation was directly responsible for the present, current torturous state of modern man. In the case of the Nazis, this was the influence of non-Aryan peoples and concepts which had served to shackle and dissolve the mystical bonds of a truly German organic nation-community. For the Communists, the idea was that the exploitation of man inherent under capitalism had caused our misery.
In both cases, it was held that some radical act on the part of a prophetic, visionary elite could incite the overcoming of this "alienation" - and set right what once went wrong, thus ushering in a new Golden Age more appropriately in tune with how things "ought to be". The jargon for this is to "Immanentize the Eschaton" (loosely translatable from Academicese as "bring into our reality the ideal state of the post-Apocalypse" ... but better rendered with the Jewish phrase "Tikkun Olam" - again, translatable from Hebrew as "Make Whole The World").
Voeglin's theory is a meta-narrative. It's meta-political. ... And if you look closely, it's also quite plainly meta-physical. At least to the true-believers operating inside the box.
The reason why this was a revelation for a much-younger me to encounter was because I realized that - quite apart from explaining the root-points of origin of some of the worst regimes of the 20th century - it also perfectly encapsulated the thinking behind much of New Zealand First.
The way this works should be obvious: New Zealand had its very own (economic) Golden Age running from somewhere shortly after the end of World War Two, right through to 1984. We were number 2 in the OECD for living standards, with an unemployment rate in 1959 of 21. (That's twenty one people, by the way - not twenty one percent)
Then, following Muldoon's defeat in the 1984 General Election, one of those renegade rogue apostate Archons who could have been drawn right out of myth turned up and ruined things - particularly the egalitarian ethos which our Post-War Consensus model nation-state had striven so hard to embed and to immanentize. The name of this evil Archon was Roger Douglas. The act of "alienation" was the onset of first Rogernomics, followed by Ruthanasia. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What I was doing in New Zealand First, therefore, was seeking to set all this right. Fulfilling my part in this grand, sweeping national meta-narrative by working together with my fellow insight-blessed True Believers to remove from influence the creed of alienation that is Neoliberalism - and in so doing, restore New Zealand and New Zealanders to our true place as the economic paradise known rightly as "Godzone".
It's amazing how much fervor and hard work and effort people are prepared to pour into a cause when they've got a big story to feel like they're [doing their necessary] part of. One of the reasons why I feel Labour in particular and NZ political participation more generally is falling by the wayside, is the inability of our political classes to sweep people up in exactly this kind of metanarrative. The fact NZ First makes this its direct stock-in-trade, by contrast, directly explains why our Party is continuing to grow.
The second concept's a little more esoteric, and is a Hindu allegory known as "Indra's Net" that partially explains how Karma works.
Now contrary to the verbalized opinions of a half a hundred semi-stoned Albert Park part-time mystics ... Karma is not some sort of credit-chequing account with the universe-at-large wherein you make a deposit of good deeds in the assumption that this facilitates an extension of future-good-fortune credit. It's far more complex and subtle than that.
Hanging down from the great god Indra's palace on Mt. Meru is a gigantic net like a spider's web. At the intersection of each of the strands hangs a perfect, infinitely refracting diamond. Within each of these jewels, it is possible to see the reflection of every other jewel. Thus, the actions committed within sight of any jewel slowly ripple out in image form across the jewel-network, before eventually returning right around to the site of the original jewel.
You can see immediately how this relates back to both politics and Karma. Your actions help to create the tone and tenor of the society you live in. And eventually - what you put into the system comes back to you. Do bad things, and pay the price of living in evil times. Be a creature of civic virtue, and enjoy reaping the benefits of contribution to a positive, caring community.
Political involvement is what we make of it. We all have our own reasons for taking an interest. But in our drive for "rationalism" and "progress", we run the risk of turning into what Dr Hunter S. Thompson called "a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."
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