Path Dependency and Holding Together Your World: Can You Ride the Cyclone Safely?

Dharma as a Theory of Stability and Change, the Harris Nomination, and More

When I was a kid at the boardwalk amusement park on the Jersey shore I thought to myself “everyone who gets on this roller coaster gets off.” I never really thought about the terrible things that could happen if there were an accident. I’d come with adults (would they let me do something too dangerous?) and I’d been watching the Cyclone roller coaster for hours from the beach. The Cyclone stays on the rails and I would be “safely” secured to the seat. It’s path was clear and dependency posed only marginal risks for the thrills available.

If you will permit me, I’ll bring on some nerd-ness that comes not only from current politics but from considering theories of Dharma. To put this in less our jargon, we need to advance a bit our theories of stability and change. We’ll consider (just a bit) about the concept of path dependency and how it works on us as human beings. I'm also going to use a few other terms more familiar to yoga worlds but in ways that are deliberately simplified. Apologies in advance for requisite superficialities.

Dharma is the word we use that means holding the world together (see Gita 2..20) when 1. the world doesn't hold together when we wish it would and 2. holds together when we wish it wouldn't. We’ll leave it at that for now.

What before us in Dharma is a classic Rajanaka paradox, much like our human experiences of psychological suffocation and abandonment. Hold me tight, not too tight. Let go, but don't abandon me. Dharma thus describes nature, culture, and our inner psychologies (aka conscience) as the reality and the means by which we attempt to hold ourselves together. Every aspect of our lives is included: bodies, hearts, minds, culture, economics, politics, love, and death, it’s all there. Think of it as the principle we can't live without but that is hard to live with.

One of shadows of Dharma is called path dependency. Path dependency is describes why we like stability and why we find change difficult----a good example being something like this qwerty keyboard. Any other keyboard seems "weird" to us, like brown shoes with a black tuxedo. It's not that it couldn't be done, it's that it seems out of place or even "wrong." We’re not as free as we think we are but we’re not as bound as we might actually be. The risks like the possibilities are what we need to consider more seriously.

Now, such path dependency is not the same as mismatched (grey shoes would match a black tux) but rather that a violation of path dependency is a statement about convention, what is or is not “permitted” or isn't done by others, path dependences define and defy the norms but are never as simple as they appear to be. Thus, path dependency is socialized (and we humans can’t not be without psychopathy) and thus it is a feature of our inner workings (made by socialization, history, etc.) that are not necessarily consensual or even self-aware. Who would learn the qwerty way if qwerty weren't already the case?

Put simply, once things are the "way they are" it's hard to introduce change. We tend not only to stay in our lanes but also find comfort and conformity to be powerful features that may or may not be recognized.

Stepping out seems all cool and revolutionary but it comes with real costs---not only socially but in terms of historical determinations and our deeper inner desires to belong, to get on with the world as it has presented itself, as i has been made. Once again, revolution sounds all interesting until you find out that most revolutions create only more and often more dangerous path dependencies.

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We all wanna change the world

So you may say you want a revolution but nihilism is nearby and purity in politics or in religion (aka fundamentalism) are path dependencies even if they are presented as revolutions or as defying current norms. Being "different" is not as safe or easy or even as good as it seems once the alternatives present themselves.

The problem is that we can’t rid ourselves of path dependencies without invoking risks that present their own potential traumas. Change ain’t free even if freedom demands change.

Our alternatives become our new path dependencies, for better and for worse, and that remains to be seen. For example, once you learn your qwerty keyboard, what's the fuss? I can type faster than I can speak and write more precisely. It's not that change in path dependencies can't be done or shouldn't be tried. Rather, the dynamic to change requires as much the notion that change doesn't destabilize too much, because violations of continuity are even more difficult.

Just try reconfiguring your brain to your qwerty keyboard. I am a also personallyl a victim of "the new math" of the '60s and it's not that it was a bad idea, it's that it made difference incompatible with change. In other words, we may want and need change but differences introduced cannot fully reject the powers of continuity or even of conformity. We have to figure out how to change and not blow up our relationship to stability. I was confused by the new math because it failed to make enough connection with what I already could understand.

If we resent continuity or simply reject the status quo, we're going to have to face the consequences. Do you want that? Are you prepared for that? Is that how you expect to change the world or your experience? If so, go for it but try to think through these shadows of change and the forces of path dependency that cannot be denied.

We may not like these kinds of powers in our lives but the relationship between continuity and change is endemic to our survival, growth, and evolution as human beings. Natural selection has no plan or future so how it relates to path dependency is rather different from cultural facts (like the qwerty keyboard, for example). This deserves another discussion.

There are all sorts of implications and nuances to path dependencies that require serious consideration but that is more than we can take up here. Take for example the economics in which change presents further risk and management. A good example is fashion or the power of memes. The risks and the stakes are important features of the choices being made. When the risks and stakes are high we might well wish to mediate our relationship with change, much less innovation. I think we can see how complex this matter of path, dependency, and alternatives becomes.

Let's turn to the Harris Nomination and her choice for VP as another kind of example. I'm of the view that her nomination coming as it did "late" and unexpectedly has brought dynamic urgency into the mix---in positive ways for Democrats and in terrifying ways for MAGA that had no Plan B, that had apparently not considered this path.

While some are arguing that having only 100 days to the election is to Harris's disadvantage, I think we can argue the contrary: that it was path dependency with Biden that was the principal cause of our despair and resignation to a likely loss. Democrats broke through the path dependency trap with a candidacy that can be seen as empowering entire blocks of voters otherwise disengaged. At this time how Harris causes others to respond less positively seems outweighed by the fact that severing the path dependency is now a key to her political momentum. Sometimes urgency works to your advantage.

Of course, MAGA wants to burn down the world. They have told us as much and Project 2025 is nihilism to democracy, not merely to the organization of the state apparatus. That's the brand. But they have become path dependent on this brand of nihilism. And this has further consequences, much like what we see in other cults, religious and otherwise.

Thus we see how MAGA can ignore the inane, outrageous, how the offensive can be endorsed, ignored, or viewed as mere entertainment (because minds are already made up): there is little concern for any "gaffe" and even less concern for the facts because in a cult the path dependence is a defining feature. Tribal identities and partisanship are path dependencies very difficult to break.

People who have "always" voted R find it particularly harder in my opinion to vote otherwise because their brand is to applaud and "conserve" not their opinions but their path dependency itself. Such folks find more than comfort in their conformity, they find their identity in the very notion that path dependency is a positive good, a moral claim, a form of righteous consistency.

There's lots more to it but "conservatives" think path dependency a feature of their brand. It's shadow is that they are harder to penetrate with arguments, no matter the evidence. Thinking through path dependency requires critical thinking skills because most people don't want to change their minds or be persuaded as such. Folks want to believe they have always been right, especially adults, older people, the entitled and privileged.

To be open to being wrong or revised is scientific method and critical thinking. Look at the vaccine response for an example of how hard it is for people to understand that facts change because they are constructs of critical thinking.

Now to Harris and her VP choice.

The argument goes in three trajectories. First, she can choose someone with whom she is resonant, path dependency be damned. I would suggest this is a bad idea because to reduce the risks of path dependency we have to understand its influence. How much “shock” to the system brings benefit can only be assessed if we take understand that humans work with path dependency whether they know it or not. Her second position could be to use path dependency as part of our real problem. This would lead her to choose another woman, for example. Why not break the mold of the past? Or third, she can choose someone who not only inspires change or speaks to the future (a younger person like herself) but uses path dependency to prevent shocks to the system.

This last trajectory is causing all the talk about white men as potential VPs---then add in religion, relationship to other demographics, etc. Let's put this strategically, just to make it simpler. Can she not lose more of those folks than Biden lost last time? We're talking rural white people and black and latin men here in particular. I think we can assume that "traditional" Democrats will be more motivated and inspired because her nomination represents a break in the path dependency that brought us to Biden.

If this is the case, she doesn't need to win red districts or these particularly challenging demographics by larger margins, just lose them by a whole lot less than she might. Those demographics might also represent fewer people than ever, but let's leave that out. She then turns out more of those for whom path dependence has been problematic (rather than a positive) and are looking at her groundbreaking candidacy as an inspired choice. She has to do all of this while not wholly violating how path dependency gives us familiarity, comfort, and a sense of continuity that holds worlds together.

More about all of this later. If you're interested. What is before us is Dharma and how a spiritual life, a life of soulfulness and heartfelt conviction forms itself around realities we must consider because we are conditioned, limited human beings. Those facts do not frame our liability but rather, for the householder, are its very terms.