"Scope" is a critical dimension that's missing from this analysis. Whether or not an actor seeks "local" or "global" scope to their actions completely changes the other 4 dimensions.
The Soviets imagined that they were leading a "world revolution". Conversely, I doubt that Castro's followers imagined the same within the scope of Cuba. An argument could be made that they thought they were joining the "world revolution", but that seems unlikely considering that they'd missed the boat by 40 years. It's easier to imagine Cuba building a "local utopia" in federation with the Soviets.
Similarly, I expect that there are many "local" acting American Conservatives. Carlson, for example, often says that he only cares about the United States.
Trade unions also have a more "local" aspect to their work. While some may be arrayed into a national or international hierarchy, others are, again, more federated in their approach.
"Local" vs "global" also goes a way to answering another commenter's question about shared beliefs. A religion could be seen as a "global utopian" vision, but a nationalist group could be seen as a "local utopian".
This is a really great analysis. As someone who is an apostate Ayn Rander, having seen the error of my ways, I would suggest that there's no right or wrong to it. Reality is a combination of the two in every axis. Your comparison to Meyers-Briggs is spot-on, in the sense that these are personality traits, not indications of the nature of reality. Where we get into trouble politcally is by confusing the two. We view life through our emotional outlook then come to the mistaken belief that our mental map is the territory.
There are two important conclusion to draw from this distinction.
First, the politcal pundits I most admire are those people who had the honesty to question their beliefs and change as they grew with wisdom. But instead of flipping to the other extreme, they arrived closer to the middle. I have in mind someone like George Orwell, who never gave up his socialist beliefs - he just moderated them.
Second, knowing that the underlying reality is None of the Above, we can come to the realization that actually every combination of these poiltical dimensions has something to offer, since they see the world differently from us. That is, as long as they do not go to extremes. But that means that we should always listen to people with different political personalities and be able to articulate our differences. Even if we disagree with them, it will be a respectful diagreement. It also means that their difference in viewpoint is a reality chack on us that keeps us grounded.
One way to accommodate the continuum challenge would be to use a scale along the axis such as P-p-n-c-C (the "n" being neutral) to denote relative position on the axis between Progressive and Conservative.
I think we could do a little more work to elaborate on the rationalist/spiritualist distinction. I will tentatively say I am rationalist, but it is with trepidation. This is because I think that at root humans are inherently religious creatures, in the sense that we have a very strong need for overarching narratives to make sense of our lives, **and** that, this urge being instinctual and largely unconscious, it often goes unnoticed even among those most rational-seeming Rationalists™️ - those who purvey a set of ideas that we might name with the term "scientism".
True rationalism is exceptionally hard to apply consistently and needs constant checks and balances from other minds in discourse. It also requires comfort with existing in uncertainty and the unknown, and these are not natural instincts of human beings.
In other words, I think that there *is* an objective universe and that rationality is the best thing we've got for discovering it, but I also think we are primates who are easily deceived by ourselves and that we should therefore be on guard against over-zealous purveyors of "rationalism" (including ourselves), especially when they are paired with an over-confident progressivism.
Perhaps this is just a C's take on the R/S divide.
I'd want to further consider the pairing of spiritual/intuitive by asking: what, exactly, is intuition? Is it metaphysically inspired, like spirituality, or is it something else?
I have found that as a young man I basically pooh-poohed the idea of intuition. To me at that that time I viewed it as something like superstition, or perhaps like old wives' tales. But I later understood (I think) a nuance between the source of superstition, which is mostly non-causal relationships, often entirely arbitrary and authoritarian and passed along as whole cloth and never honestly tested, and old wives' tales (hence "OWT"), which are entirely different at their core.
OWT are in reality a compendium of shared experiences, which makes them an informal empirical knowledge database. It started off as either repeatedly observed circumstantial evidence, reliable enough to bet on, and/or actual observed causal connections, as best they could be determined. It is passed along and accepted, and added to, somewhat. It is not actually an orthodoxy, as superstition is.
Now personal intuition, which is what I *thought* was what was intended in the spiritual/intuitive - rationalist axis in this article, is like a subset of OWT: it is an informal database of *your own* life experiences--not shared. When you interview a contractor for a home remodel, e.g., and you intuitively feel unease, I think it's because s/he exhibited character/personal traits that within your past experience you have found--either often in diluted form, or seldom, but of virulent intensity--to be detrimental to your interests.
This all happens subliminally, I believe. You draw a near-instantaneous, subconscious connection between the present situation and multiple past experiences.
So what happened in my case was that very gradually I found myself having more, and of better accuracy, intuitive flashes as my life progressed. I subjectively found that I was getting better and better at it, and often it was of greater benefit than a consciously rationalist approach (and this is because application of the rationalist approach can be subject to errors in methodology, whereas intuition is not). Plus, it was much faster.
Now, in my late 70s, for most normal day-to-day situations, or some combination of the elements that are shared with day-to-day situations--it is good enough to be used as my immediate default position, good enough to go with with very limited risk.
I could never have done this in my 20s-30s.
Anyway, if accurate, intuition perhaps is in the rationalist domain.
This is an excellent beginning of what is probably the most important conversation of our time: The formation of a new political lexicon. The conceptualisation as a spectrum is especially good. And perhaps we should all note that none of us are 'fixed' into one category but are subject to change according to external influences.
No doubt this would all benefit from being smashed around and argued about. But it feels like a foothold for establishing a better domain for political discourse in this age in which: "Political discourse is lost in an anachronistic lexicon of left wing versus right wing, socialist versus capitalist politics. Progress has no coherent guide and its ever-faster pace has no known destination. Physical Economics provides a definition of Wealth and Progress. From this starting point the economic relations between individuals and collectives can be more rationally and accurately assessed. The choices, political, moral and ethical that individuals and collectives make can be reconsidered as decisions about how to use their share of energy, their proportion of Wealth as a guide for directing Progress." https://www.physicaleconomics.org/test
The most important part of your excellent and useful schema is that it convincingly demonstrates that the standard left-right dichotomy always obscures more than it reveals. The weakest aspect is its idealist vantage point. What I mean is that while you have correctly mapped out where various folks sit in these four dimensions, your schema ignored (or at least you chose not to treat) the motivations that move people to hold these positions. I think that this was not your intention here so this is not a criticism.
On the other hand, it is (in my opinion) very important as a practical political matter to correctly deconstruct abstract political beliefs to uncover the class interests that motivate. This is really a different subject, but in the real existing world there are friends and enemies. As a libertarian, I identify my class enemy as the professional managerial class. The professional managerial class is hugely ramified; it contains the right-wing progressives you wrote about plus vast swathes of the professional middle classes and all others who view the government as more beneficial than harmful. So, from a practical political point of view your schema is idealist because it ignores the primary political contradiction facing American society: the Culture War which is a classic class struggle between the state aligned professional managerial class and those of us who view the the government as more harmful than beneficial.
I find this really clarifying and am also simultaneously having trouble placing myself. This is perhaps to be expected from someone who has traversed from infantile socialism (as so many well meaning youngsters must) through anarchism (collectivist then quickly towards individualist), on to classical liberalism and now in middle age has grown more and more sympathetic to plain old small-C conservatism of the "Chesterton's fence" persuasion.
Let me give it a shot.
(P/C)HIR
I really waffle on that first one. I would say my stance is that while stagnation is death in a dynamic universe full of threats, social change should be kept to the minimum needed to respond to emerging threats and is certainly not an end in itself.
I also waffle on the R there, in a subtle way. I'll expand on that in another comment.
Sheesh, I guess this makes me Italian-fascist-adjacent 😬😆
Hmm, I still think everything in here sort of flows out of the first axis. There are surely quirks and developments along the way and differences in how things are applied, but accepting that History is in charge will inevitably lead to the breakdown of order, unleashing a spirit of doing whatever a person wants to in terms of certain vices, and unrelenting material control over the universe, getting you the PEIR. Really, the only difference between between the communists and classical liberals in this is the public's willingness to go along with the insanity. But, looking around America today, I suppose that's true. I guess I like Aristotle's categories: the insane/sane axis with varies methods of government.
What I now believe is the progressive belief that history has a fated flow from barbarism to Utopia is very simply an increasing worldwide per capita access to assets and resources, such as food all the way up to smart phones. Now, since an absence of such assets tends to raise the immediate level of anxiety as it approaches bare subsistence, the converse, plentiful surpluses, tends to lower social anxieties.
So, world wide, and over the course of history, access to ever-increasing surpluses has worked to calm internal frictions and give the impression of a fated direction toward human happiness. I would further postulate that very many man-in-the-street modern progressives--the "woke"--have the causal arrow reversed, as they so often do: they believe that greater emphasis on social justice enables increasing surpluses, when it's actually the other way around. Social justice--and by extension, Utopia--are luxuries that we can currently afford, whereas in the past this was less often true.
But really, it all depends on those surpluses, and the ability to distribute them somewhat. If that goes away, and for a protracted period, survival genocide become more and more likely.
An interesting framework. I think it is worth considering the dynamic effect of achieving power upon this taxonomy. Wherever people are in this schema, the corrosive effect of power leads to an awful lot of post hoc justification for their actions. You may start idealistic PEMR but power is incredibly seductive. Hence contemporary, nominally ultra-liberal Western elites implementing censorship regimes of unprecedented scope and technological sophistication.
Very true. Power always corrupts and people adapt their beliefs to justify and maintain that power. It is a destabilizing effect on mapping political spectrums.
That kind of inquiry is vital but I find this framework unnecessarily complex and to lack realism in some cases. I continue to believe that Sowell's Vision Theory is both more accurate whilst also being simpler, and thus a superior theory.
Specifically:
> The Left values and prioritizes equality over other values; this undermines or precludes the establishment of hierarchies and boundaries
I've never seen any evidence of this. They SAY they prioritize these things, but their actions show otherwise. Leftist (unconstrained) societies are always exceptionally hierarchical and set up that way deliberately, libertarian capitalism on the other hand minimizes hierarchies to the greatest extent possible but is usually understood to be "right wing". Whatever it is, it's not the left.
The leftist obsession with eliminating national borders is actually just a surface level appearance of a deeper desire, namely one world government. Exactly because they so crave hierarchy they are disgusted by the present global arrangement of many independent nation states without any entity sitting at the apex, and from this flows their desire for international law, NGOs with World or Global or International or United in their name, and by extrapolation a desire to eliminate borders such that there are no cultural or legal differences bounded by geography which might lend the concept of nations legitimacy.
People who truly attempt to abolish all hierarchies and boundaries are more properly called anarchists and they are so vanishingly rare we can ignore them as a group.
This problem becomes very apparent when you compare Naziism vs Communism and claim they differ by how hierarchical they are. But no such difference exists. The two were identically hierarchical, with a dictator at the top issuing orders down the hierarchy to which everyone else was entirely subservient.
Would you class anarcho-capitalists as 'vanishingly rare' anarchists?
Also, I'm not sure that, "The leftist obsession with eliminating national borders is actually just a surface level appearance of a deeper desire, namely one world government." as you say. I suspect their yearning for world government or universalist NGOs and international law is because they assume that they would be the class in charge of these institutions, but not because they want to erase boundaries for the sake of erasing boundaries, although I agree with your larger point that the left in power has no problem with hierarchy.
Yes and I've hung around the Bitcoin community so I've actually met real anarchy-capitalists in the flesh, something not many people can say. Even there, they were a tiny minority.
I think that while you are correct that anarcho-capitalism is a very fringe ideology today, it seems to me that it is going to be the future of the West. Your comment appeared to dismiss anarchy as utopian and I wanted to put in a good word for anarcho-capitalism.
I see. I don't think I passed judgement on them one way or another beyond observing their rarity. I doubt the future is anarcho-capitalist, but I hope it is at least libertarian.
I think the "Left" values hierarchy because it is an effective means by which to aggregate power which is without doubt their ultimate political value. I think the "Right" values hierarchy because it is an effective means to protect freedom which (maybe) is not their ultimate value but certainly is up there.
"The two were identically hierarchical, with a dictator at the top issuing orders down the hierarchy to which everyone else was entirely subservient."
Yes. I think many people miss that they were very similar authoritarian systems that differed primarily in "state religion". It was Marxism for the USSR and race/nationalism for Nazi Germany.
I have always been fascinated by how people are fundamentally different across history despite still being the same species. How we think and make decisions today is different from 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 years ago. An ancient Greek's beliefs in what was just and true would be very different from a medieval churchman or classical liberal of the laissez-faire 19th century or a 21st century progressive Democrat. Even as a child in my history classes I readily grasped that people accepted certain things as right and just today and defined themselves by those beliefs to be a good person. But the same person would espouse entirely different beliefs in the past and be a different kind of good person, even if such a person would be abhorrent to us today (such as slaveowners).
But the *why* is what I always ask myself and still somewhat struggle with. As a writer of historical fiction I also also had to be careful to match the characters to the prevailing strains of beliefs common for their eras in realistic ways, something sadly lacking from most modern historic fictions who seem to think they can set a 21st century mind in a past century with no negative consequences.
But your somewhat in jest creation of new political typologies and giving them credibility by suggesting a parallel with Myers-Briggs is one of the most enjoyable - and insightful - things I've read in a while because suddenly I now have an actual map for understanding how a person's personality would gravitate to the competing cultural-political ideas of the time. Using your guide, one can see how a person would be a devout woke progressive today but a conservative in defense of a highly spiritual religious entity a thousand years ago. Or the staunch believer of the communist hierarchy and espousing its rigid ideological beliefs and state ordained rituals would be a virtuous Greek in defense of the rigid cultural hierarchies and traditions of his era. Even today's progressive schoolteacher has more in common with devoutly religious evangelical women in the Great Awakening than she'd like to admit.
There is one extra dimension to the new political personalities you may want to consider. I'm sure you're aware of Isaiah Berlin's two liberties concept, of positive and negative liberties, which goes a long way in explaining why both classical liberals and communists saw their ideals as oriented towards human freedoms despite enormous differences in what the ideals entailed (link to Berlin's lectures: Ihttps://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/). In practice, few people are purely negative or positive liberty but a blend of both. I am now thinking people's political beliefs can be determined by how their innate characteristic traits balance positive versus negative liberty needs, and then further shaped by the prevailing needs of the time. It is dangerously tempting to think one can come up with a formula for predicting a person's political leanings. Character traits + 40% negative liberty + 60% positive liberty = political stance.
I also think this is a very useful piece, because I have been frustrated by the left/right binary for years as well as the conservative/liberal binary, exacerbated because those terms also creep into discourse among members of the Catholic Church as a way of defining the current internal polarization there. Aware that the first set originated during the French revolution and were used again by communists to describe different degrees of communism, I’ve always felt both terms are lacking when trying to describe the current realities. I like this system much better, but like you, I’ve always disliked Myers-Briggs because it never quite made sense to me.
I also do like the refinement suggested in the comments: I want to think this over more. I’d be very happy to see the terms “right and left” consigned to history’s dustbin. I’ve always agreed with Chesterton’s Gabriel Syme in the following exchange from The Man Who was Thursday:
Gregory: ...we shall abolish right and wrong!
Gabriel: (eagerly) And right and left too! They have always been so much more trouble to me.
The last two were easy. The first two, I struggled with. As there is a real disagreement in the Libertarian sphere right now, especially around borders.
And they do like some laws, just not very many of them. They’re really into laws and government protecting the sovereignty of the individual, and not violating the NAP, but they’re really against other laws (victimless crimes, drug laws, prostitution laws, etc.)
I think I got it right, but I’m also thinking out loud and welcome an alternative view.
CHIR here. Though possibly more of a CHxx. How would a recognition that cultures need something to communally believe in, which used to be religion, and can be nationalism, but is best (in the 21st century, anyway) when simply a shared commitment to Enlightenment values. Does that make one an S?
"Scope" is a critical dimension that's missing from this analysis. Whether or not an actor seeks "local" or "global" scope to their actions completely changes the other 4 dimensions.
The Soviets imagined that they were leading a "world revolution". Conversely, I doubt that Castro's followers imagined the same within the scope of Cuba. An argument could be made that they thought they were joining the "world revolution", but that seems unlikely considering that they'd missed the boat by 40 years. It's easier to imagine Cuba building a "local utopia" in federation with the Soviets.
Similarly, I expect that there are many "local" acting American Conservatives. Carlson, for example, often says that he only cares about the United States.
Trade unions also have a more "local" aspect to their work. While some may be arrayed into a national or international hierarchy, others are, again, more federated in their approach.
"Local" vs "global" also goes a way to answering another commenter's question about shared beliefs. A religion could be seen as a "global utopian" vision, but a nationalist group could be seen as a "local utopian".
Good ideas! I think I thought of these as included in the progressive mindset, but they could be separate.
I'd think that the British Raj would be a solid, clear example of the CH*R in action in a global scope.
This is a really great analysis. As someone who is an apostate Ayn Rander, having seen the error of my ways, I would suggest that there's no right or wrong to it. Reality is a combination of the two in every axis. Your comparison to Meyers-Briggs is spot-on, in the sense that these are personality traits, not indications of the nature of reality. Where we get into trouble politcally is by confusing the two. We view life through our emotional outlook then come to the mistaken belief that our mental map is the territory.
There are two important conclusion to draw from this distinction.
First, the politcal pundits I most admire are those people who had the honesty to question their beliefs and change as they grew with wisdom. But instead of flipping to the other extreme, they arrived closer to the middle. I have in mind someone like George Orwell, who never gave up his socialist beliefs - he just moderated them.
Second, knowing that the underlying reality is None of the Above, we can come to the realization that actually every combination of these poiltical dimensions has something to offer, since they see the world differently from us. That is, as long as they do not go to extremes. But that means that we should always listen to people with different political personalities and be able to articulate our differences. Even if we disagree with them, it will be a respectful diagreement. It also means that their difference in viewpoint is a reality chack on us that keeps us grounded.
One way to accommodate the continuum challenge would be to use a scale along the axis such as P-p-n-c-C (the "n" being neutral) to denote relative position on the axis between Progressive and Conservative.
Perhaps assign a color to each category, and then use brightness/saturation to distinguish between "P" and "p" levels along the continuum.
I think we could do a little more work to elaborate on the rationalist/spiritualist distinction. I will tentatively say I am rationalist, but it is with trepidation. This is because I think that at root humans are inherently religious creatures, in the sense that we have a very strong need for overarching narratives to make sense of our lives, **and** that, this urge being instinctual and largely unconscious, it often goes unnoticed even among those most rational-seeming Rationalists™️ - those who purvey a set of ideas that we might name with the term "scientism".
True rationalism is exceptionally hard to apply consistently and needs constant checks and balances from other minds in discourse. It also requires comfort with existing in uncertainty and the unknown, and these are not natural instincts of human beings.
In other words, I think that there *is* an objective universe and that rationality is the best thing we've got for discovering it, but I also think we are primates who are easily deceived by ourselves and that we should therefore be on guard against over-zealous purveyors of "rationalism" (including ourselves), especially when they are paired with an over-confident progressivism.
Perhaps this is just a C's take on the R/S divide.
I'd want to further consider the pairing of spiritual/intuitive by asking: what, exactly, is intuition? Is it metaphysically inspired, like spirituality, or is it something else?
I have found that as a young man I basically pooh-poohed the idea of intuition. To me at that that time I viewed it as something like superstition, or perhaps like old wives' tales. But I later understood (I think) a nuance between the source of superstition, which is mostly non-causal relationships, often entirely arbitrary and authoritarian and passed along as whole cloth and never honestly tested, and old wives' tales (hence "OWT"), which are entirely different at their core.
OWT are in reality a compendium of shared experiences, which makes them an informal empirical knowledge database. It started off as either repeatedly observed circumstantial evidence, reliable enough to bet on, and/or actual observed causal connections, as best they could be determined. It is passed along and accepted, and added to, somewhat. It is not actually an orthodoxy, as superstition is.
Now personal intuition, which is what I *thought* was what was intended in the spiritual/intuitive - rationalist axis in this article, is like a subset of OWT: it is an informal database of *your own* life experiences--not shared. When you interview a contractor for a home remodel, e.g., and you intuitively feel unease, I think it's because s/he exhibited character/personal traits that within your past experience you have found--either often in diluted form, or seldom, but of virulent intensity--to be detrimental to your interests.
This all happens subliminally, I believe. You draw a near-instantaneous, subconscious connection between the present situation and multiple past experiences.
So what happened in my case was that very gradually I found myself having more, and of better accuracy, intuitive flashes as my life progressed. I subjectively found that I was getting better and better at it, and often it was of greater benefit than a consciously rationalist approach (and this is because application of the rationalist approach can be subject to errors in methodology, whereas intuition is not). Plus, it was much faster.
Now, in my late 70s, for most normal day-to-day situations, or some combination of the elements that are shared with day-to-day situations--it is good enough to be used as my immediate default position, good enough to go with with very limited risk.
I could never have done this in my 20s-30s.
Anyway, if accurate, intuition perhaps is in the rationalist domain.
But, hey...what do I know? :^)
This is an excellent beginning of what is probably the most important conversation of our time: The formation of a new political lexicon. The conceptualisation as a spectrum is especially good. And perhaps we should all note that none of us are 'fixed' into one category but are subject to change according to external influences.
No doubt this would all benefit from being smashed around and argued about. But it feels like a foothold for establishing a better domain for political discourse in this age in which: "Political discourse is lost in an anachronistic lexicon of left wing versus right wing, socialist versus capitalist politics. Progress has no coherent guide and its ever-faster pace has no known destination. Physical Economics provides a definition of Wealth and Progress. From this starting point the economic relations between individuals and collectives can be more rationally and accurately assessed. The choices, political, moral and ethical that individuals and collectives make can be reconsidered as decisions about how to use their share of energy, their proportion of Wealth as a guide for directing Progress." https://www.physicaleconomics.org/test
The most important part of your excellent and useful schema is that it convincingly demonstrates that the standard left-right dichotomy always obscures more than it reveals. The weakest aspect is its idealist vantage point. What I mean is that while you have correctly mapped out where various folks sit in these four dimensions, your schema ignored (or at least you chose not to treat) the motivations that move people to hold these positions. I think that this was not your intention here so this is not a criticism.
On the other hand, it is (in my opinion) very important as a practical political matter to correctly deconstruct abstract political beliefs to uncover the class interests that motivate. This is really a different subject, but in the real existing world there are friends and enemies. As a libertarian, I identify my class enemy as the professional managerial class. The professional managerial class is hugely ramified; it contains the right-wing progressives you wrote about plus vast swathes of the professional middle classes and all others who view the government as more beneficial than harmful. So, from a practical political point of view your schema is idealist because it ignores the primary political contradiction facing American society: the Culture War which is a classic class struggle between the state aligned professional managerial class and those of us who view the the government as more harmful than beneficial.
I find this really clarifying and am also simultaneously having trouble placing myself. This is perhaps to be expected from someone who has traversed from infantile socialism (as so many well meaning youngsters must) through anarchism (collectivist then quickly towards individualist), on to classical liberalism and now in middle age has grown more and more sympathetic to plain old small-C conservatism of the "Chesterton's fence" persuasion.
Let me give it a shot.
(P/C)HIR
I really waffle on that first one. I would say my stance is that while stagnation is death in a dynamic universe full of threats, social change should be kept to the minimum needed to respond to emerging threats and is certainly not an end in itself.
I also waffle on the R there, in a subtle way. I'll expand on that in another comment.
Sheesh, I guess this makes me Italian-fascist-adjacent 😬😆
CHMS, Classical Reactionary. Haha, Deus Vult!
Hmm, I still think everything in here sort of flows out of the first axis. There are surely quirks and developments along the way and differences in how things are applied, but accepting that History is in charge will inevitably lead to the breakdown of order, unleashing a spirit of doing whatever a person wants to in terms of certain vices, and unrelenting material control over the universe, getting you the PEIR. Really, the only difference between between the communists and classical liberals in this is the public's willingness to go along with the insanity. But, looking around America today, I suppose that's true. I guess I like Aristotle's categories: the insane/sane axis with varies methods of government.
But maybe I'm saying that because I'm a CHMS.
What I now believe is the progressive belief that history has a fated flow from barbarism to Utopia is very simply an increasing worldwide per capita access to assets and resources, such as food all the way up to smart phones. Now, since an absence of such assets tends to raise the immediate level of anxiety as it approaches bare subsistence, the converse, plentiful surpluses, tends to lower social anxieties.
So, world wide, and over the course of history, access to ever-increasing surpluses has worked to calm internal frictions and give the impression of a fated direction toward human happiness. I would further postulate that very many man-in-the-street modern progressives--the "woke"--have the causal arrow reversed, as they so often do: they believe that greater emphasis on social justice enables increasing surpluses, when it's actually the other way around. Social justice--and by extension, Utopia--are luxuries that we can currently afford, whereas in the past this was less often true.
But really, it all depends on those surpluses, and the ability to distribute them somewhat. If that goes away, and for a protracted period, survival genocide become more and more likely.
We are the same. Haha
An interesting framework. I think it is worth considering the dynamic effect of achieving power upon this taxonomy. Wherever people are in this schema, the corrosive effect of power leads to an awful lot of post hoc justification for their actions. You may start idealistic PEMR but power is incredibly seductive. Hence contemporary, nominally ultra-liberal Western elites implementing censorship regimes of unprecedented scope and technological sophistication.
Very true. Power always corrupts and people adapt their beliefs to justify and maintain that power. It is a destabilizing effect on mapping political spectrums.
That kind of inquiry is vital but I find this framework unnecessarily complex and to lack realism in some cases. I continue to believe that Sowell's Vision Theory is both more accurate whilst also being simpler, and thus a superior theory.
Specifically:
> The Left values and prioritizes equality over other values; this undermines or precludes the establishment of hierarchies and boundaries
I've never seen any evidence of this. They SAY they prioritize these things, but their actions show otherwise. Leftist (unconstrained) societies are always exceptionally hierarchical and set up that way deliberately, libertarian capitalism on the other hand minimizes hierarchies to the greatest extent possible but is usually understood to be "right wing". Whatever it is, it's not the left.
The leftist obsession with eliminating national borders is actually just a surface level appearance of a deeper desire, namely one world government. Exactly because they so crave hierarchy they are disgusted by the present global arrangement of many independent nation states without any entity sitting at the apex, and from this flows their desire for international law, NGOs with World or Global or International or United in their name, and by extrapolation a desire to eliminate borders such that there are no cultural or legal differences bounded by geography which might lend the concept of nations legitimacy.
People who truly attempt to abolish all hierarchies and boundaries are more properly called anarchists and they are so vanishingly rare we can ignore them as a group.
This problem becomes very apparent when you compare Naziism vs Communism and claim they differ by how hierarchical they are. But no such difference exists. The two were identically hierarchical, with a dictator at the top issuing orders down the hierarchy to which everyone else was entirely subservient.
Would you class anarcho-capitalists as 'vanishingly rare' anarchists?
Also, I'm not sure that, "The leftist obsession with eliminating national borders is actually just a surface level appearance of a deeper desire, namely one world government." as you say. I suspect their yearning for world government or universalist NGOs and international law is because they assume that they would be the class in charge of these institutions, but not because they want to erase boundaries for the sake of erasing boundaries, although I agree with your larger point that the left in power has no problem with hierarchy.
Yes and I've hung around the Bitcoin community so I've actually met real anarchy-capitalists in the flesh, something not many people can say. Even there, they were a tiny minority.
I think that while you are correct that anarcho-capitalism is a very fringe ideology today, it seems to me that it is going to be the future of the West. Your comment appeared to dismiss anarchy as utopian and I wanted to put in a good word for anarcho-capitalism.
I see. I don't think I passed judgement on them one way or another beyond observing their rarity. I doubt the future is anarcho-capitalist, but I hope it is at least libertarian.
I think the "Left" values hierarchy because it is an effective means by which to aggregate power which is without doubt their ultimate political value. I think the "Right" values hierarchy because it is an effective means to protect freedom which (maybe) is not their ultimate value but certainly is up there.
"The two were identically hierarchical, with a dictator at the top issuing orders down the hierarchy to which everyone else was entirely subservient."
Yes. I think many people miss that they were very similar authoritarian systems that differed primarily in "state religion". It was Marxism for the USSR and race/nationalism for Nazi Germany.
Excellent abstraction!
The Briggs-Myers bracketed caveat is spot on, too.
I have always been fascinated by how people are fundamentally different across history despite still being the same species. How we think and make decisions today is different from 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 years ago. An ancient Greek's beliefs in what was just and true would be very different from a medieval churchman or classical liberal of the laissez-faire 19th century or a 21st century progressive Democrat. Even as a child in my history classes I readily grasped that people accepted certain things as right and just today and defined themselves by those beliefs to be a good person. But the same person would espouse entirely different beliefs in the past and be a different kind of good person, even if such a person would be abhorrent to us today (such as slaveowners).
But the *why* is what I always ask myself and still somewhat struggle with. As a writer of historical fiction I also also had to be careful to match the characters to the prevailing strains of beliefs common for their eras in realistic ways, something sadly lacking from most modern historic fictions who seem to think they can set a 21st century mind in a past century with no negative consequences.
But your somewhat in jest creation of new political typologies and giving them credibility by suggesting a parallel with Myers-Briggs is one of the most enjoyable - and insightful - things I've read in a while because suddenly I now have an actual map for understanding how a person's personality would gravitate to the competing cultural-political ideas of the time. Using your guide, one can see how a person would be a devout woke progressive today but a conservative in defense of a highly spiritual religious entity a thousand years ago. Or the staunch believer of the communist hierarchy and espousing its rigid ideological beliefs and state ordained rituals would be a virtuous Greek in defense of the rigid cultural hierarchies and traditions of his era. Even today's progressive schoolteacher has more in common with devoutly religious evangelical women in the Great Awakening than she'd like to admit.
There is one extra dimension to the new political personalities you may want to consider. I'm sure you're aware of Isaiah Berlin's two liberties concept, of positive and negative liberties, which goes a long way in explaining why both classical liberals and communists saw their ideals as oriented towards human freedoms despite enormous differences in what the ideals entailed (link to Berlin's lectures: Ihttps://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/). In practice, few people are purely negative or positive liberty but a blend of both. I am now thinking people's political beliefs can be determined by how their innate characteristic traits balance positive versus negative liberty needs, and then further shaped by the prevailing needs of the time. It is dangerously tempting to think one can come up with a formula for predicting a person's political leanings. Character traits + 40% negative liberty + 60% positive liberty = political stance.
I also think this is a very useful piece, because I have been frustrated by the left/right binary for years as well as the conservative/liberal binary, exacerbated because those terms also creep into discourse among members of the Catholic Church as a way of defining the current internal polarization there. Aware that the first set originated during the French revolution and were used again by communists to describe different degrees of communism, I’ve always felt both terms are lacking when trying to describe the current realities. I like this system much better, but like you, I’ve always disliked Myers-Briggs because it never quite made sense to me.
I also do like the refinement suggested in the comments: I want to think this over more. I’d be very happy to see the terms “right and left” consigned to history’s dustbin. I’ve always agreed with Chesterton’s Gabriel Syme in the following exchange from The Man Who was Thursday:
Gregory: ...we shall abolish right and wrong!
Gabriel: (eagerly) And right and left too! They have always been so much more trouble to me.
As an INTJ leaning CHMS lately, that last sentence puts me in a bind.
I’m not as high level a thinker as the rest of y’all, but I pay my $6, so let me try my hand at the Ron Paul Libertarian.
Conservative, Egalitarian, Individualist, Materialist-Rationalist
The last two were easy. The first two, I struggled with. As there is a real disagreement in the Libertarian sphere right now, especially around borders.
And they do like some laws, just not very many of them. They’re really into laws and government protecting the sovereignty of the individual, and not violating the NAP, but they’re really against other laws (victimless crimes, drug laws, prostitution laws, etc.)
I think I got it right, but I’m also thinking out loud and welcome an alternative view.
CHIR here. Though possibly more of a CHxx. How would a recognition that cultures need something to communally believe in, which used to be religion, and can be nationalism, but is best (in the 21st century, anyway) when simply a shared commitment to Enlightenment values. Does that make one an S?
This is a thought-provoking model. I took up your invitation to think through another possible combination (CEIS): https://vincentkelley.substack.com/p/does-this-political-category-exist