I may have first learned about gimbal lock from Andrew Chaikin’s excellent book “A Man on the Moon” (pdf) (epub). In orienting the Apollo lander, gimbals were used to control the orientation of the rocket engine, and so gimbal lock was a potential problem. A gimbal is a part of an apparatus that lets you orient something (for example to rotate a globe, to rotate a rocket engine, to rotate a 3D image on your screen). A rotation of the object on one gimbal is a rotation on a particular axis set by that gimbal. Rotation on an exterior gimbal changes the axis of interior gimbals and so if one is not careful, gimbals can become aligned in such a way that temporarily limits the ability to quickly change orientation through some range of possible orientations.
The phenomenon can be described as “parking yourself in” in orientation space. After a set of adjustments, putting your car in a tight space, the only way out is to do something akin to reversing your earlier adjustments – performing a lengthy multipoint turn. Typically this occurs just when one would like the ability to simply reorient quickly, thus ruining your quick getaway. With gimbal lock, it is not exterior cars that force us into a tight space which limits us, but the mechanics of the control mechanism itself: the gimbals.
Political Gimbal Lock
In political science, we like to describe the actions of governments and people using the analogy of orientation:
In the sense of orienting a lunar lander, we wish to orient our political ambitions and orient our governance. We wish to point our political apparatus in a certain direction (for example to fight a specific crime, to end a social ailment, to create a pyramid, or to improve some aspect of education) and to step on the gas, firing our political lunar lander rocket. Or, simply to refer to such a plan of orientation for the sake of a theoretical argument. To do so correctly requires communication of this orientation to our political actors, precise readjustment and focus along an infinity of axes presented by every detailed decision.
The left and the right, the red and the blue, socialism and capitalism, all examples of directionality on a gimbal which we rely on in our indication of political orientation. The meanings of these words, like meanings of all words, are contextual, and can change with time. Sure, we could remind ourselves that left and right referred to something specific when they emerged after the French revolution, the left referring to those on the left of the hall who wished the government had less power, and the right referring to those on the right side of the hall who desired more power for those currently in government. However this might not be as clear after exterior gimbals have swung and now perhaps these words have different meanings in new contexts.
We have seen these exterior political gimbals swing often. Lets avoid specific examples in this post, sticking with the abstract metascience, but one example is that those who publicly questioned the federal 9/11 commission report 20 years ago were labeled as left wing while those who publicly question the same report today might be labeled right wing.
If the only accelerator buttons in the voting booth are labeled red and blue, but both red and blue are directions which share the same orientation on some issue, then we might say we face a political gimbal lock on that issue. Well to be fair, with only a binary choice gimbal lock is guaranteed, but even with multiple binary indicators gimbal lock is a reality. Our mechanisms of describing the state, or affecting change, cannot be moved easily into certain directions, as the very symbols of our language can have meanings which prevent it. Spooky innit.
How to Avoid Political Gimbal Lock
So how can we avoid it? Well the first point is that we might not always want to avoid it. The class of people in power, which keep in mind could still mean anything you like it to, doesn’t usually want to enable political change. Therefore an alignment of political gimbals in such a way that locks the system is therefore desirable – until it isn’t. Eventually there will be need for some change and so we don’t want to be too stuck at that point.
A second point would be that we shouldn’t rely on gimbals at all, if they can bite us like this. However, gimbals are useful. Red and blue are concepts people can quickly voice, republican and democrat are teams with history and people know them already. Therefore it can be easier to use this existing linguistic infrastructure rather than to create an entire formalism to describe the direction we really wish to indicate. The mind is drawn to simple one dimensional or binary structures, black and white, up and down, us vs. them, and so we are always tempted to use such simplifications when they at least somewhat apply. The problem is that they can lead us into extremely tight parking spaces, which are impossible to evacuate in a timely manner. We will be forced pushing hard to e.g. ensure that e.g. blue points one way on an issue, then pushing for blue, and going back to realign for a further push and so forth in a multipoint turn.
There are then two strategies for escaping political gimbal lock: to perform the multi point turn and navigate to desired orientation using the existing gimbals, or to escape the existing gimbals temporarily and reorient using new external gimbals (possibly quaternionic in nature). In some sense these choices are analagous to Balaji’s binary political choice of “exit” and “voice”, taken from “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States“.
As Michael Penn would say, that’s a good place to stop.
it is possible to work ourselves into a corner of political orientation space in which