Introducing the Coherence Party

Things everywhere seem to be falling apart, but most commentary misses the point about what's really happening.

It's never been better documented that both Republicans and Democrats take the same money from the same people. Even worse, it's newly clear that almost everything we see in the "mainstream" conversation is theater, unlikely to reflect reality.

While a right-leaning voter argues that culture's become too liberal, a left-leaning voter argues just the opposite—and in identical ways, both arguments obscure the larger loss.

In early 2017, Kellyanne Conway tore open a rift in the space-time continuum and spoke a parallel world into existance. It happened quickly on the first Sunday after Trump's first inauguration—a time when Sean Spicer was still insisting one inaugural audience was larger than another.

That morning, Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet The Press with Chuck Todd in her ongoing defense of the administration.

Arguing about which president drew a larger audience, Kellyanne Conway looked straight into the camera and told her interviewer that—while he may have his facts—the administration had their own ... < gulp >

...alternative facts.

Her obvious hesitation before those two words reveal she knew in real time what she was doing—entirely unconcerned with inaugurating America's Age of Incoherence.

In the blink of an eye (or the gulp of a pundit) Conway gave the world a lucid endorsement of widespread incoherence—quickly spreading as people and communities split further into separate worlds.

Affecting all parts of society, it's now entirely common for smart, honest, hard-working people to exist in states of complete incoherence—sometimes simply as an act of self-preservation.

However a clock starts ticking once an incoherence is revealed, and we'll become increasingly distressed until we either resolve it or go mad.

Most of these observations are intuitive; that we live in incoherent times, that people lead incoherent lives, or that we don't love existing in states of incoherence all seem obvious.

The revolutionary insight is remembering that problems often point directly to their own solutions, and our path out of incoherence relies on tirelessly defending its opposite.

In earlier times, things cohered—literally, attached themselves to one another—for countless reasons beyond politics.

Whether social clubs, neighborhood groups, civic organizations or church communities, our history is full of abandoned forums where people used to gather, learn, serve, uplift, fortify.

It was these kinds of organizations and activities and their infinite analogs that once offered the cohering forces that compelled people to exist and invest in community.

If it seems things are falling apart, it's because we stopped creating, celebrating, and sustaining the countless things that bond communities together.

But we can make different decisions.

What if we could develop a critical mass of people who are committed first to a life and worldview of coherence?!

What about a Coherence Party?!

Just imagine where it could go:

"I vote for Coherence!"

"I am a Coherence voter!"

"I'm a Coherence candidate!"

(Or even, "I CoParty because those other loser parties suck.")

This moment is unprecedented, demanding we focus sincere collective attention in all sorts of ways not yet imagined.

But the first steps seem newly obvious—improving coherence first between our human race and the planet on which we depend, and then within a nation of 330 million people who must urgently do the same.