Life in 4D
A reader question on navigating our polarized present.
A reader* recently asked me to respond to a hypothetical question that’s probably not terribly hypothetical right now:
How should a shop keeper (i.e. a public facing, cooperative, market participant) in a purple district approach life in 2025?
Thinking in 4D
This is a good excuse to play around a bit with the “Life in 4D” framework I’ve been tinkering with.
This 4D framework is meant to help us escape the 1D binary that modern life tries to force us into. Instead of being forced into a binary either/or box (you’re either with us or against us!), the 4D framework encourages all of us to take a deep breath and explore the complexity of the landscape we’re all navigating together.
And spoiler: landscapes exist in 4D, not 1D.
So here’s how that framework works in practice:
The shopkeeper should start with the first dimension, which is her own values, goals and talents. This includes things like how comfortable she is with politics generally, how she feels about polarization, her specific political and social set of commitments, and so on. But it also includes things like her financial position, how her shop is doing, and her immediate needs as a small business owner.
The second dimension involves exploring the breadth and length of her landscape, which for our purposes focuses on the people around her and her social networks. Who are her customers? What kinds of things does she sell and what political implications (if any) do those items carry? Who depends on her and her business? Does she have family who rely on her income? What is her shop’s relationship to the local community?
The third dimension involves digging into tradeoffs, or what I call the pits and peaks of the landscape she’s facing. This is where we see height and depth play out in practice and it involves thinking really honestly about the risks of different courses of action and how much she can afford to risk in the first place. Here’s where a shopkeeper might weigh questions about alienating customers or risking supply lines or attracting or repulsing different kinds of employees. It’s also where she thinks about how the first and second dimensions interact. Some values are so deeply important that they’re worth sacrificing much for. It’s good to know what those are on the front end.
The fourth dimension is time. Here’s where the shopkeeper needs to think not just about this present moment, but also about where she wants to be in five years and in ten years. How do her short term and long term goals interact? What does she need to start or stop doing now to get to where she wants to be by year end? Or in five years?
I’m being intentionally vague, because the original question asked broadly about life.
But let’s make the question much more specific:
If a customer asks this shop-keeper to hang a political flag on the front of their store as a sign of solidarity, how should she respond?
Political Signals in 4D
Again, we start with the basic 4D framework, but now we have more specific questions we can ask.
Notice, this framework doesn’t answer the questions for you. But it does help us escape the knee jerk responses we often have to political questions. In this case, the shopkeeper might feel immediate social pressure (that tribalism rearing its ugly head again) or might feel fear about offending a good customer or about being canceled. Tribalism and fear both land us firmly in black-and-white 1D thinking. And that’s not a good place to make complex decisions that might have painful downstream consequences for both the shopkeeper and her community.
So here’s how she can start instead: After offering some basic script about needing some time to do more research or consult her co-owner or just think, she can work her way through the 4D framework below. I’ve jotted down some questions that might apply in her case, but these are by no means exhaustive.
1D: The Individual
Does this particular political flag represents the full complexity of the shopkeeper’s values on the topic? Does the discourse this symbol represents tell the full story? Or does it encourage binary thinking and over-simplification? And does whatever it represent align fully with her values? If she agrees with the perspective the flag represents, is that flag also linked with other political positions she may not be as comfortable with?
2D: The Social Landscape
How will hanging this symbol affect her customers? Her community? Her family? In a purple district, is it likely to alienate people she values? Is it likely to harm her business and, by extension, her employees? Should she consult her employees, given that she would then be asking them to work in a space that she has aligned with a particular political position?
3D: Tradeoffs (Pits and Peaks)
What are the risks and benefits of hanging this flag? What does the shopkeeper get from hanging the flag? What benefit does hanging the flag offer the impacted group, if at all? Does the act provide any tangible benefits to anyone? How might it inadvertently harm other people? Could the message be misinterpreted due to the nature of the symbol?
4D: Time
How will she feel about this symbol or this decision in a year? Is the fervor to hang the flag right now representative of an enduring truth or is it a fleeting response to media outrage that will likely change focus in a few days or months? What are the short term effects and how do they weigh against longer term effects, if any?
Notice, this process takes a bit of time and she might even find that her answers change over time. This is why it’s important for people like small business owners and corporate CEOs, university professors and K-12 teachers/administrators, and a range of other people who might be asked to weigh in on politics to go through these questions ahead of time. The concept of institutional neutrality is one way institutions prepare for questions like this, precisely so they’re not caught in tribal or fear-based 1D decision-making. But institutional neutrality isn’t always the right answer. Each person needs to weigh these questions for themselves, based on all four dimensions of their particular landscape.
Depolarization Tactics in a Polarized World
If I were this shopkeeper, I’d likely decide that there’s a real benefit to creating hard boundaries around political discourse in 2025.
On a self-interested level, there’s not a lot to be gained by publicly taking sides with one political party or group over another in non-political spaces. There is, however, a lot to be gained by really clarifying your own values and creating boundaries that protect those values.
On a broader level, communities gain real benefits when individuals choose to preserve neutral spaces in civil society. The more spaces we have where Democrats and Republicans and independents and non-voters and whoever else can come together to collaborate or connect or just stand in line and not be confronted by divisive social messaging, the better off we all are.
The reality is that politics will poison anything it touches these days. And even more importantly, while it might feel meaningful or even necessary to share one’s political beliefs in a range of environments - the public square, one’s house of worship, or the classroom - sharing political thoughts in those spaces doesn’t make politics better and it actively makes those spaces worse.
So, depending on what the specific problem is, I would say: create firm boundaries and politely decline representing any particular political view, serve everyone with respect and dignity, and save political activities for where they have the most impact and can do the least amount of unintended harm: calling congresspeople, working with advocacy groups on issues you care about, engaging in meaningful activities that solve real human problems on the local level, engaging in bipartisan conversations through Braver Angels or some other bridging organization.
The goal here isn’t to be apolitical. It’s to keep politics within clearly defined boundaries so that civil society can flourish. It’s better for your business and better for everyone else too.
*Substack navigation made it impossible for me to find the original request, which I thought was in my DMs but apparently was not. If this was you, please let me know! I’d love to credit you.
What Do You Think?
Does the 4D framework help flesh out complex issues? Is it a decent framework for navigating decision-making in a complex world? How would you improve it? Or are there cases you’d be interested in seeing it applied to?
Drop ideas in to the comments! And as always, if you like what you read, subscribe and share. It means the world.