You’re not actually thinking about politics.

You’re feeling it. And that’s not good.

A warm greeting and sit-down at a local Mexican hole-in-the-wall turned into a heated discussion about politics and free speech. It wasn’t the first time. We’d known each other for a decade — all the way back to our high school days — and had sparred like this before. I thought he was smart, but completely misguided.

And he thought what, exactly?

In all likelihood, he felt the same way I did. I was the smart, but misguided one.

Two friends stare at the same picture. They take away two completely different things, as if they’d just looked at two completely different parts of the world. They talk after. They try to understand what the other saw in the picture. It’s genuine. It’s curious. It’s even introspective: why didn’t I see that? I wonder what else I’m missing…

There’s not much at stake. They want to learn.

But when that picture is the world — when it’s you and me, and countries and economies and taxes and laws and genders and communism and free markets — we don’t really try to understand anymore. We want to score points instead. Because every point we score means we have less homework to do — less introspection, less research, less talking, less thinking — to understand how the world works. So let’s please rack up those points! Anything but homework!

Homework is tedious, but that’s not the real reason we don’t want to do it.

This homework is scary. It asks us to stare an uncertain future face-to-face, mull over the pains of the past and present, what’s owed, what has to be earned, what we should expect of ourselves, and what others should expect from us. What’s worse, though, is that you’ve also signed an implicit pact with most of the people you know, and most of the people you love. “I won’t do my homework if you don’t!”

We can understand how we got here by thinking about something less scary than the world. Think about a tree instead. You know a lot about trees. You know that they eat sunlight and drink water, you know that they have roots and leaves — the leaves fall in the autumn — and you know that animals feed off them and live in them. You know what their bark feels like, and how their leaves smell in the rain, and the sound the wind makes when it blows through them. The moment you think about a tree, all that experience distills into a feeling. The feeling of “treeness”.

Try to explain treeness. Put it in words. It’s hard.

But all trees have it. And even things that aren’t trees can have parts of it.

The pouting child won’t budge. His mom calls for him, but still he won’t move. He’s upset, maybe he’s hungry. But he just stays planted in the same spot. Like a tree.

You weren’t born knowing what “treeness” is. Your notion of treeness (yes, it’s yours, and not mine, and not hers or his) was years in the making. It started almost as early as you did.

“Look, he’s playing with the leaves! How cute.”

“Sweetie, are you ready? We’re going to see the beautiful fall colors.”

Years of staring and listening and smelling and touching and tasting. That’s where your “treeness” comes from. It took a long time to figure out. But now you know treeness, and trees are familiar. They’re comfortable. Like old leather.

Your picture of the world is like your “treeness”. You built it over a long time. You heard it and you saw it. No, you didn’t taste it. Or maybe you did? Maybe it tastes a little bitter, like the coffee you were sipping the first time the thought jumped into your mind, that this might just be the right way to understand the world.

There’s a word for what your mind does — that involuntary distilling of countless experiences into a feeling; that reduction of your complex, high dimensional observations of the world into simple emotions. You could almost call it dimensionality reduction. That’s what it’s called in computer science.

You smell the fall air. You hear the wind blow through the tree’s leaves. You feel the bark on your hand. Then, dimensionality reduction. And those experiences become “treeness”.

You chat with your mother. You overhear a comment your teacher made. You watch a documentary with your sister. Then, dimensionality reduction. And those experiences become… your picture of the world.

What’s the difference between the two?

Treeness, you learned almost entirely by yourself. You sniffed the air. You picked up the leaf. You made your own treeness, and you can be confident that you did a pretty good job of it.

But your picture of the world wasn’t like that. It was second-hand. You got it from your mom. From the teacher. From the documentary. And every single thing you’ve heard about the world since your picture of it was first built, you’ve diligently twisted and squeezed to make sure that picture remains intact.

If I showed you a type of tree you’d never seen before — a maple tree for example — you’d try to understand it in the context of your sense of “treeness”. If you learned treeness by hanging around pine trees, you’d probably think of the maple tree as “a tree with weird leafy things instead of needles.” But if you learned treeness from hanging around palm trees, it the maple would become “a short tree with really small leaves.” Your sense of “treeness” changes what seems important about any new trees you encounter.

And when you hear about a political event, or a news story, you do the same thing: you understand it in the context of your picture of the world. You can’t really help it. But it does mean that you’re usually absorbing only the part of the story that fits most comfortably in your picture of the world.

But it’s not like you had control over that picture. It’s borrowed and stolen. It’s inherited and copied. But it doesn’t feel borrowed or stolen, inherited or copied. It feels just as much a part of you as your sense of treeness. It feels like in some ways it is you. After all, who are you but the sum of your treeness, and your carness, and your chairness, and all your other “ness-es”, and your picture of the world?

But your picture of the world is harder to shake than your treeness. In some ways, you’re shackled to it. It connects you to your family. You use it to choose your friends. Eventually, you’ll use it to decide who to start your own family with.

None of that matters to your friend. He’s still there, staring at the same picture you are, thinking his thoughts. He has his own treeness, and his own picture of the world. And maybe it’s the same as yours.

But it probably isn’t. Either way, it’s as comfortable to him as yours is to you.

You knew that already, though. Long ago, you figured out that other people don’t think for themselves. Other people just believe whatever pleases their parents, or wins them the most friends, or gets them a second date. That’s how other people work, you see.

But not us. We don’t do that. We listen to evidence, and we think about our picture of the world. We formed it by thinking about all sides of the issue. That’s what we tell ourselves.

But then we scroll through our Twitter feed. There’s a headline that makes our blood boil. And a thought bubbles to the surface of our subconscious. Try to suppress it immediately! Oh no, it’s too late, we might as well write it down: “you know, you should eventually read one of those articles you disagree with.”

And no sooner does that thought arise, than do we get the kneejerk counter: “But I don’t have time right now.” That empty promise is just enough to make the guilt go away.

It’s one among a thousand lines of defense that we’ve built, that make us no better than our friend, who so obviously doesn’t think for himself.

The fact that our friend sees things differently can annoy us. Some part of us wonders, “how dare he take a different lesson from looking at the same picture that I did?”

When we were in the art gallery, it was a welcome phenomenon — we might learn something from our friend! But in the arena of politics and tribalism, it’s just stupidity and ignorance; a symptom of sloppy thinking, and poor dimensionality reduction.

Of course, our friend thinks the same about us.

How can we break out of the box we’ve trapped ourselves in, and see all the facts the way they are? Well, we can’t. We can at least see the box, but only with the help of someone who isn’t also stuck inside it with us.

We need our friend to see the world clearly. Without him, we’re cursed by our own myopic dimensionality reduction process, destined never to see that our picture of the world, just like our sense of “treeness”, has very little do to with what’s actually out there.