Sooo, you wanna know what I learned this week?
First of all, I missed my thought last week – did you miss me?
No guiding idea really formed, so I just left everything tangled up as it was.
But this week I won’t let myself off that easy.
A problem that has followed me for a while resurfaced again, very predictably rooted in my academic struggles. And honestly, as someone finishing a second Bachelor’s degree in social science, you’d think I’d finally understand what “theories” are – or at least what a theory is. But nope. My main issue is that theories are always explained in the most complicated way possible, even though in their simplest form they shape huge parts of our social and political world.
So let’s do a quick review of my studies so far.
So what the f. are theories?
If you ask a university professor, you can get anything from a 5–50 minute monologue, and at the end you’ll feel none the wiser. At least I don’t.
Academia loves using the metaphor that theories are “standing on the shoulders of a giant,” meaning that even though the giant has done the foundational work, we can see further because we build on it.
But honestly: who the fuck is this giant, and why does he always feel so blurry?
Basically, theories are generalized statements built from past research.
They’re a way of analyzing whatever is in front of you — a problem, a phenomenon, a process, a position — using earlier assumptions that have been tested, polished, and turned into a coherent perspective.
If you take away the testing and analyzing part, you basically end up with stereotypes. Theories are just the cleaner, academic version.
Inductive? Deductive? Or simply lost?
Academia has two fancy words to structure how research works:
- Inductive: start with real-world observations, gather specific phenomena, build theory from there.
- Deductive: start with an already existing theory, use it to analyze individual cases.
Ideally, falsification — the possibility that a theory is wrong — should guide everything.
But let’s be real: most of the time we’re all just searching for results that prove our point.
In general, scientific theories try to do four things:
- Help us understand
- Help us explain
- Help us predict
- Give us a base to test and evolve from
Why am I telling you this boring stuff?
Because theories shape politics and society just as much as stereotypes shape our daily life — whether we admit it or not. We use stereotypes to simplify the overwhelming complexity of everyday interactions; politicians use theories to simplify the overwhelming complexity of governing entire societies. It’s the same mental shortcut, just operating on a much larger and far more consequential scale.
And just like I wrote in Weekly Thoughts #02 about the stock market being institutionalized fortune telling, every political prediction works in a similar way. Politicians don’t have a crystal ball. They cannot control what every single person in the world does — and let’s not even open the discussion on whether someone should. So they rely on assumptions. And those assumptions don’t appear out of nowhere; they come from theories that tell them what to pay attention to, what to ignore, what counts as a threat, what counts as progress, and what might happen next.
That’s why understanding theories is actually important: theories decide what politicians see in the first place. A realist will interpret an international crisis as a power competition, an idealist as a diplomatic failure, a structuralist as an institutional breakdown. Same event — completely different realities. Without knowing the theory behind their words, it can sound like politicians are simply disagreeing, when in fact they’re not even talking about the same kind of problem.
Theories also shape the language they use. When a politician says things like “national interests,” “interdependence,” or “global order,” each phrase is loaded with theoretical assumptions. Without understanding those theories, we hear only the surface. With them, we suddenly recognize the entire worldview underneath — like discovering hidden subtitles.
And politicians desperately need those worldviews. You can’t govern millions of people by saying, “I’m doing this because it feels right.” You need a narrative that justifies your decisions, that frames them as rational, responsible, or inevitable. That narrative almost always rests on theory — whether it’s economics, security, democracy, globalization, or risk modeling. No theory means no legitimacy.
Theories also give them a framework for prediction. Politics is ultimately about decisions whose consequences lie in the future. Should we invest here or there? Will this policy stabilize or destabilize? Will cooperation help us or trap us? Politicians don’t know the answers — they guess. Theories are their strategy for guessing. Prediction becomes their compass. But a compass only points in the direction the theory believes is true. When theories fail, the predictions collapse — and when that happens, failed theories usually get swept under the carpet because admitting them publicly doesn’t help anyone’s political image.
So we rely on assumptions. Politicians need those assumptions — partly from statistics, because numbers are the base layer we all agree on — but mostly from whatever words sound the most convincing. We also want politics to guide us in areas where we haven’t formed opinions yet. Theories are the tools they use for that guidance. Because at the end of the day, they never know if the steps they’re taking will actually lead to the results they claim. Prediction is their compass — but it only works until it doesn’t. And when a theory turns out wrong, it’s usually swept under the carpet because admitting it does not help anyone’s political image.
So what do theories boil down to?
Tools made of words.
Words that sound fancy, claim to be objective, and offer predictions most people will agree with — if the phrasing is convincing enough.
Through repetition and reuse, these words gain their own power. They start shaping the world they were supposed to only describe.
The Realists, the Idealists, and the Forgotten Gears
In political science you typically meet three big groups:
Realists
They see power — economic, military, political — as the ultimate goal.
Politics is a constant battle of David and Goliath, with everyone trying to be Goliath. The cold, hard facts of power are all that matter.
You see this in Trump’s doctrine of economic dominance, where anything else is dismissed as naïve or “too idealistic.”
Idealists
They aim for “better politics,” whatever better might mean.
They believe in cooperation, in the good of people, in international interdependence as a pathway to shared goals.
But even they often avoid asking the question from my last weekly thought: “Is it worth it?”
Functionalists / Structuralists
These are the ones who look at the little gears that actually make politics move.
They remind us that dreaming up beautiful visions doesn’t matter if the institutional gears don’t shift. Because if they don’t, realists will yank us back to the ground.
Any academic book would hang me for this simplification, but sometimes being “not enough” is exactly what helps things make sense.
Why this matters (and why it scares me a little)
When you watch the news, the small exchanges and day-to-day conflicts create a huge amount of anxiety, and very little clarity about the bigger picture.
And that’s exactly when we’d need that “giant” the most.
We’re shifting toward a worldview dominated by realist thinking — mostly shaped by men who grew up in a world traumatized by exactly those views. They are now hacking away at the idealistic world others tried to build after World War II. They’re using the interdependencies and institutions built on idealistic language to gain discursive power.
Because discourse shapes politics just as much as expectations shape the stock market.
Across history you can see the same core problem: we put our wellbeing — whether “our” means country, class, culture, or race — above the wellbeing of humanity as a whole.
Idealists tried to take that broader view after WWII — addressing decolonization, rebuilding countries they destroyed, creating interconnectivity so everyone might prosper. But realists always find their way back in. Some argue that capitalism itself is built to reproduce realist logic, that expansion and “more” will never include everyone.
Add to that the theories of culture, belonging, ethnicity, nationhood — frameworks that define who counts as “us,” and justify strategies to gain more in the global game — and suddenly war becomes a valid tool again.
And here we are.
A world stuck between theories that aren’t working and realities none of us truly want.
Maybe what we’re missing is a theory that allows radical change — a theory that breaks the cycle of needing an “Other” to define a “Me.”
Because everything in our world is built around that idea, and without a new theory, we keep replaying the same script.