# The Look at Geopolitics By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2024-03-01 The world of geopolitics is interesting and paradigm-bending. For those unfamiliar, geopolitics is a macro study of how geography impacts politics and international relations. Additionally, it is typical for geopolitical studies or gurus to dive into other macro dynamics such as demography, economics, and wars. The idea is that geography and other macro forces outside the control of a country define, constrain, and predict how governments and societies will behave. The best in this field spend massive amounts of time studying geography, complex political dynamics, history, and international politics. When one hears these individuals speak, one will likely feel that they know a lot about the state of the world in ways most of us are unaware. This alternative perspective is intriguing and convincing as their explanations for something happening or not are often grounded in physical restrictions, not just theories about human behavior. However, one might be hard-pressed to call it a science of any type. While its foundation is physical, its subject is intractable, and the time scale of usefulness is measured in decades if not centuries. This creates two problems. First, it would take a long time to know if the theories and ideas of geopolitics are correct. Second, creating an experiment is nearly impossible because nations typically disagree with being a part of double-blind experiments. So, as alluring as the potential predictive power of geopolitics is, it is hard to say whether there is any evidential accuracy for future predictions. Note that it's always much easier to come up with an explanation as to why something happened in the past versus what will happen in the future. There are just too many variables, unknowns, and randomness. That said, the ideas behind geopolitics combine to create knowledge and wisdom regarding the macro factors that influence and shape our lives if we do not pay attention. So, we don't know how accurate geopolitics is about their future predictions. Still, geopolitics opens our eyes to observable dynamics that inform our behavior and actions. Whether one subscribes to the teachings of geopolitics depends primarily on one's primary paradigm of belief and thought. If one believes in hard data and science, geopolitics is an unverifiable pseudoscience, even if geopoliticians show up with reams of data. If one cares less about data and has endless anxiety about the future, geopolitics is just the kind of savior one requires. If one is somewhere in the middle, one acknowledges the predictions of geopolitics as one possibility of the future and incorporates the geopolitical way of thinking into how they might make sense of the world. There are many ways to view the world. The more one collects, the more one might glimpse its true nature. #### Related Items [[Geography]] [[Politics]] [[Society]] [[Predictive Analytics]] [[Analytics]] [[Beliefs]] [[Paradigms]] [[Thinking]]