Hello, my name is not Thornton Hall.

I am a guy living in Washington, D.C. working as a property manager. My family is in politics. I actually think we are on the verge of things getting much better because we are about to leap forward in the science of our lives. 

That leap is a switch from the Newtonized understanding of life ushered in by the Enlightenment to a recognition that everything important to us is governed by the science of Charles Darwin.

We are social animals in an ecosystem but our language to describe it is littered with the physiomechanical metaphors that were all the rage when people like Voltaire first sought to place our experience and behavior within the realm of empirical science. Left/Right "spectrums" are from The Opticks. The "trajectory" of history is a projectile described by the laws in The Principia. "Power" brings all the connotations of electricity. Events have inertia. One side or the other in a political struggle has the "momentum." Events are spinning out of control.

The urge to science was correct. We can be understood. But we are animals and no amount of physics ever gets to biology. Our lives have nothing to do with F=ma and our experiences cannot be graphed on a Cartesian Plane. We live in a complex web of causes that are also effects and effects that are also causes. It's never the same web twice, but evolves over time thanks to random variation and selection pressure and those same pressures are changing each of us even as the web changes all around us. Newtonians seek to map that web. Darwinians know that such maps are useless, outdated before they are halfway done. "Don't mistake the map for the territory" is a favorite saying of the leading Newtonian philosopher of our age. But the error is thinking that there is any territory in the first place.

The only knowledge that lasts is not about how things are, but about how things change.