Society feels like multiple interacting vector fields ala magnetic and electric fields. But instead of 2 fields there are probably many...personality, knowledge, energy, needs etc. And you exist as some charged particle (negative or positive?) thrown into the middle of all that dynamic chaos being pushed and pulled in various directions.
theoretically if you add the value-vector of all people together you end up with a long vector that represents the direction of society (even the opposing ones), and you can then normalize this to have the unit vector of society. i.e. what is the "direction of society".
Your skew wr.t. this one (inner product with, or projection on to this) will be some number between -1 and 1 (if we account for opposition I guess)
Basically if both vectors are of unit length, you get the cos(angle between). Completely off kilter would be a score of 0. While "opposed" would be -1
There’s a term “off-kilter”, which is easy to explain using vectors like this.
If we take the general vector of society, just sum up all personal vectors and normalise, we form a big vector for society. This is what’s “normal”.
Kilter refers to the concept of how aligned we are with society’s vector. So the concept of being off-kilter is how skewed you are wrt this normal vector essentially.
Of course valid for any of the eigenvectors corresponding to subfields again, and this also goes some way to help form the overton window, which has recently been up here in some posts...
It’s a fun sociomathematical formulation.