Have you noticed how every few months, the internet picks a topic and splits itself in half?
It was drag queen story hour for a while. Then Bud Light. Then the Barbie movie. Then DEI. Then the Olympics opening ceremony. Right now, it’s whatever happened in the last 72 hours on X that everyone will forget by next Thursday. Each time, the same pattern: two camps form, each absolutely certain the other side isn’t just wrong but actively dangerous to civilization. Rallies get organized. Threads get written. Unfollows get executed.
And then it fades. Nothing gets resolved. The wheel just turns to the next outrage.
I used to think this was a social media problem. Algorithmic amplification, engagement bait, outrage as a business model. And sure, all of that is real. But the Kybalion, the core text of Hermetic philosophy written (or at least published) in the early 1900s, describes something that might explain the deeper mechanism at work. It calls it the Principle of Polarity.
The basic idea is this: everything has two poles. Hot and cold. Love and hate. Courage and fear. These aren’t opposites in the way we usually think about them. They’re the same thing at different degrees on a single continuum. Hot and cold are both temperature. They differ only in degree, not in kind.
Here’s where it gets interesting for the culture war.
The pole you think is the opposite isn’t
When you watch two people scream at each other on a panel show (or on Twitter, or at a school board meeting), the conventional read is that they’re on opposite sides. Left and right. Progressive and conservative. Light and dark.
But look closer. What do the angriest people on both sides actually have in common?
A total certainty that they’re right. A refusal to sit with complexity. A belief that anyone who doesn’t share their position is morally deficient. An addiction to the feeling of being against something. A performative intensity that substitutes for actual thought.
They think they’re at opposite poles. They’re not.
In Hermetic terms, they’re both at the same pole: maximum intensity, minimum nuance. They’ve both traveled as far as they can in the direction of reactivity, just in different costumes. The Kybalion would say the true opposite of extreme left and extreme right isn’t each other. It’s the center. It’s the capacity to hold two ideas in your head at once without your nervous system treating it as a survival threat.
This is the polarity trap. You pick a side (or a side picks you, which is more common). You define yourself against the other side. You start measuring your own identity by how opposed you are. And somewhere in that process, you lose the ability to see the actual landscape. You’re not looking at the world anymore. You’re looking at the other side.
Just think of the last election. It doesn’t matter what year you are reading this because it’s always the same. A friend said something mildly critical of a candidate you supported, and you felt my chest tighten. Not because the argument was wrong (some of it was fair). But because your body had already categorized this as a threat. Your system wasn’t evaluating information. It was defending territory.
That’s polarity at work. Not the polarity of ideas, but the polarity of reactivity. Two people in fight-or-flight survival mode, each convinced they’re the reasonable one.
The pendulum doesn’t care about your values
The Kybalion’s second piece of this is the Principle of Rhythm. Everything swings. Day and night. Expansion and contraction. And in culture: progressive eras and conservative eras. Reform and retrenchment.
The pendulum swings.
If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve watched this happen. The 1960s gave way to the 1980s. The Obama years led to the Trump years. The MeToo movement sparked a backlash. Every surge of one direction creates a counter-surge. It’s not a bug. It’s how cultural energy works.
Here’s what the Kybalion adds that most political commentary misses: the pendulum doesn’t care about your values. It doesn’t reward good intentions or punish bad ones. It swings because that’s what pendulums do. And most people get carried with it.
Think about how many of your opinions are actually yours. Not the ones you’d defend in conversation if someone pressed you, but the ones you arrived at through your own process of inquiry. Most people’s political positions are reactions to whatever the pendulum is swinging away from. In a conservative era, they feel liberal. In a progressive era, they feel conservative. They don’t have positions. They have counterweights.
The Kybalion uses a specific term for this: “polarizing yourself.” It means choosing your position deliberately, independent of the swing. Not going left because the culture is going right. Not going right because you’re tired of the left. But actually sitting down and asking: what do I actually think about this, if I remove the urgency of the moment?
That’s harder than it sounds. The pendulum generates urgency. It tells you the other side is winning, that time is running out, that neutrality is complicity. And it tells both sides this simultaneously, which should be a clue that something besides pure truth is driving the bus.
If you are one of the few people who still watch the news, think about how every news segment is designed to make you feel mad about something. Every word said, every image shown, is specifically selected to make you believe something that will cause outrage towards someone or some group. Rarely, if ever, do you hear what the other person or group is thinking or believing. And these bleeds over into non-traditional news sources on the internet, where only the most sensational headlines get clicks. Driving emotions is big business. Once you realize this, once you fully understand this, you will have stumbled onto something the Hermeticists wrote about a century ago: the rhythm of collective emotion is predictable, and most people are passengers on it rather than navigators.
Rising above the plane
So what do you do with this? It’s not enough to say “both sides are the same” (they’re not, on most specific issues). And it’s not enough to say “just step outside it” as if the culture war doesn’t affect real people. It does. Laws get passed. People get hurt. The stakes are genuine.
The Hermetic answer isn’t to pretend the conflict doesn’t matter. It’s to change the plane on which you engage with it.
The Kybalion describes a hierarchy of planes: physical, emotional, mental. Most culture war combat happens on the first two. Physical (protests, boycotts, getting someone fired) and emotional (outrage, fear, tribal loyalty). Both are real. Both have effects. But both are reactive.
The mental plane is different. It’s where you can see the pattern. Not as an abstract intellectual exercise, but as a vantage point. From the mental plane, you can ask: why is this particular topic the outrage of the week? Who benefits from the intensity? What’s the underlying anxiety that both sides are actually responding to? Where is the pendulum in its swing, and do I want to be carried by it?
This isn’t detachment. It’s clarity. There’s a difference between someone who checks out because they don’t care and someone who steps back because they want to think clearly before they engage. The first person is apathetic. The second person is strategic.
Here’s a practical version of this. Next time you feel yourself getting pulled into a culture war flashpoint (and you will feel it, because the pull is designed to be irresistible), try this:
Pause. Don’t respond yet. Notice what you’re feeling in your body. Chest tight? Jaw clenched? That’s your sympathetic nervous system. It’s not thinking. It’s reacting.
Ask yourself three questions. First: is my reaction to this actually about this, or is it about something else (general anxiety about the direction of the country, loyalty to my team, fear of being associated with the wrong side)? Second: would I hold this same position if the cultural pendulum were in a different place, or am I reacting to the swing? Third: what would a thoughtful person who disagrees with me actually say, if I gave them the benefit of good faith?
That third question is the killer. Because most people in the culture war aren’t responding to the strongest version of the other side’s argument. They’re responding to the dumbest, most extreme version that their algorithm served them. And both sides are doing this, which means both sides are arguing against a caricature and thinking they’re engaged in serious discourse.
From the mental plane, you can do something neither pole can do: you can hold complexity. You can say “I think X about this issue, AND I understand why someone might think Y, AND the truth probably has elements of both, AND the real problem might be Z, which nobody’s talking about because Z doesn’t generate engagement.”
That’s not wishy-washy. It’s precise. It’s the difference between reacting and thinking. The culture war needs you to react. It literally cannot function without your emotional participation. The mental plane is the one place it can’t reach you, because you’re not playing on the same field.
Walking out, not checking out
There’s a quote from the Kybalion I keep coming back to. Paraphrasing: the master of polarity is not at the mercy of their emotions, because they understand the nature of the swing and can refuse to be swept away by it.
Notice what that doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the master of polarity has no emotions. It doesn’t say they don’t care about issues. It says they aren’t at the mercy of the swing.
You can still vote. You can still have convictions. You can still advocate for things you believe in. But you’re doing it from a place of choice, not a place of reactivity. You’re polarizing yourself deliberately rather than being polarized by the collective pendulum.
That changes the quality of everything. Your conversations are different because you’re actually listening, not waiting for your turn to defend your position. Your decisions are different because you’re weighing evidence, not processing threats. Your stress level is different because you’re not running a constant background program of tribal warfare.
I think a lot of people are exhausted right now. Not just tired, but genuinely worn down by the constant demand to have an opinion about everything, to pick a side on every issue within four hours of it surfacing, to maintain a running moral scorecard of everyone they know.
That exhaustion is information. It’s telling you that you’re spending energy on the wrong plane.
The Kybalion would say: the culture war isn’t going to end. The pendulum will keep swinging. New topics will replace the current ones. The pattern will repeat with different names and different faces, because it’s a pattern, not a series of unrelated events.
You can’t stop the pendulum. But you can stop riding it.
And from where I’m sitting, that’s not apathy. That’s the first real move available to someone who actually wants to think clearly about what’s happening. The culture war is a polarity trap. The way out isn’t to choose a side harder. It’s to rise above the plane where sides are the only option.
The mental plane is always there. You just have to remember it exists.
