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It’s a Ring Not a Cruller
This may be old hash but something I often think about is that the purported spectrum of political sensibilities doesn’t seem to be a linear gradient but rather a circular construct. This would place absolutists and the like, let’s say, from about 170 to 190 degrees on a compass, with the calm, reasonable, and flexible types sitting on the opposite bearings.
A ring has so many more practical applications when describing the infinite variations of thought the human race enjoys. It has the benefit of being infinitely divisible in that say a one-degree arc describing libertarianism also has built in a 360-degree cross arc that can explicate all the flavors of that one particular mindset. A bar, stick, or straight line could also be divided infinitely of course but lacks the critical nexus where absolutists on the The Left and The Right meet and commingle and make psychotic terrorist babies.
Our minds process our universe in at least four dimensions if we include time even though we physically live linearly. The political spectrum is a mental construct and so should not be described as a straight line.
Visualizations are important and a ring allows more mental visualization waggle room. How would you picture in your mind a person who favors strong central banking and a robust military but can’t stand the thought of some busybody on their block being able to invoke the power of The State to pick on their neighbors? Can a stick or bar diagram cut it? If we use a Hula Hoop or even a Water Weiner (the offspring of a stick and a torus) rather than a plain old stick we can more easily visualize and thus categorize and quantify the range of human ideology.
With a ring The Left won’t be allowed to further conflate all conservatism with Nazism while simultaneously proclaiming that socialism or communism is somehow the opposite. They are not. The two are forms of absolutism that, on a more logical political spectrum diagram, would be kissin’ cousins, as they say. A ring as the political spectrum explains why The Left has no problem covering for and enabling certain religious extremists who would typically be described as being “Far Right.”
I’m sure there are other logical political diagrams in existence but I think the simple and practical step of using a ring and not a cruller in normal discourse would go a long way to clarifying in the minds of all those misinformed and maleducated souls exactly whose politics stand where and what effect those views have on the march of civilization.
The rhetorical trick of somehow separating the far Left from the far Right is juvenile and cruel. Shouldn’t that be done away with?
Published in General
Great name for a band. It’s also going on my next T-shirt. Kudos to you, sir!
MFR, I see your point. There are those who claim an extreme ideology or other but “just want to be cool” about it.
In my experience most of those people don’t totally believe many of the things they say, they are repeating a social pattern they grew up around. My interaction with “laissez-faire anarchists” as well as the “socialist hippie” types is they are simply exerting the least amount of effort possible to claim they have some sort of tres-chic ideological position without the commitment to execution their purported beliefs would necessitate.
They also fail to see past the ends of their own noses to the actual application and consequences of their ideologies which will be executed by somebody even if they themselves just claim “peace, man”.
Thanks for another suggestion for improvements on the old, 1-d, Left-Right political space. We may get there yet.
A circle (ring) could be useful for some purposes, but since I think one of the most important distinctions is between collectivism and individualism, I don’t think it gets at fundamentals.
It seems the individualism-collectivism continuum is linearly independent from/to/with your circle, so we could represent it as a line perpendicular to the circle and produce a cylindrical space that accounted for both. (Your Water Weiner seems to be cylindrical; the water weenie, though, is what the aliens used to spy on Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss.)
All sorts of spaces, of all sorts of dimensions, might well represent all sorts of cross products of continua of political values: perhaps an orbifold, if we needed one with a singularity — though I can’t think of a continuum of political values with a singularity right now.
Speaking of multi-dimnesional thought. I was sort of getting at that a simple doughnut would have inner walls that intersect without actually describing the model as a sphincter since I’m not a physicist or mathematician. I was looking for something simple-ish to get more people on the correct way of thinking instead of this idiotic left-right polemic we’ve been stuck on. The very way we describe our differences, or allow the opinion makers to make us describe ourselves, is keeping the American body politic stupid.
…continuing.
It’s easy to think about all our beliefs on a 1D continuum but it’s an intellectual dead end which is one reason we continue to be divided, intellectually, as a nation. there is no room in that particular very popular model for rational but not necessarily highly informed people to expand their reasoning.
Yes. Wrong categories.
I’ve learned something about pastries: I thought a French cruller was the only kind of cruller; I didn’t realize a generic cruller could be a line segment.
And after further reflection we both might be right. As a weekly treat on my hump to the grocery store I buy myself a couple fresh doughnuts. In the display case among the long-johns and eclairs are a couple that look like two different shapes made of the same batter and icing. One is a stick, the other a ring. Both taste about the same with the ring being more dense with icing due to a higher density from accumulation on the inner diameter. So, these might be both the French and the “conventional” cruller?
I agree that the standard left-right continuum is an oversimplification, but I think that the circle idea is substantially more incorrect. It is generally not true that as one travels further on any political or ideological spectrum, one somehow encounters the opposite.
This error generally arises from the idea that Nazis were right-wing and Communists were left-wing, yet they both seem about equally wicked and totalitarian. Jonah Goldberg debunked this idea by pointing out that Nazis were also left-wing.
Goldberg’s counter-example was to point out that there are some dogs — I don’t remember the breed — who are so ugly that they’re cute. But this is generally not true. You can’t get so fat that you become thin. You can’t get so short that you become tall. It generally doesn’t work that way.
There is one possible way in which political extremes can move in the same direction, which is a tendency to violence. The further one is toward a political extreme — either pro-liberty or anti-liberty — the further one is from the reality of the moment, which makes it possible that people on both extremes would be more likely to resort to violence. But that is a question of (usually misguided) tactics, not a convergence of ideology.
You are proving my point for me while claiming to prove my little idea wrong. Travel opposite directions from a point a circle and both paths end at a single point. Give up the whole Left/Right thing it doesn’t matter. The point as I amply described is absolutism/totalitarianism/fascism stem from the need to conquer and control. They are on one side of a theoretical circle while the opposite type of people are on the other. I have been describing exactly the thing you say Goldberg described with his quote. It is exactly true that if there is one mindset, fascism for example, that somewhere on any descriptive model exists it’s opposite.
So you are dead wrong or you didn’t read the exchange before posting.
The thing about the dogs is also off the mark as it describes a physical reality when we’ve been discussing psychological states. There is a finite number of these so they have nexus.