Tober said:
An interesting take on the left-right political definition. I would look at it differently. I'm Dutch and we look at it from the perspective we call 'Maakbare Samenleving'. It essentially means 'can society be engineered to get an optimum society or not'. The left-right position is the scale on which how strong the belief is in this engineering and how much of it is wanted. Or the level of social engineering in other words. Far left in this case is a full belief that everything would need to be socially engineered, whereas far right would be a complete rejection of it. Or in other words how much to curb the inane individual Human instincts versus seeking the optimum from a group perspective. It is for this reason high population area's tend to be left leaning, where low population area's tend to be right leaning, because obviously the more people need to share a certain space, there is a stronger need to engineer/regulate the group to prevent chaos. Obviously means the higher the level of social engineering is, the more influence a central authority needs to have to make this possible. Therefore left leaning politics tend to lead to more government/regulation and right leaning politics tend to lead to less of it. This was visible during the Covid era. The more left leaning people accepting the Government's guidance more willingly , where the 'anti-vaxers' where more right leaning and more prone to protest other Covid measures. From this perspective anarchy I would call far right, because it's a rejection of centralized authority. Essentially the 'Survival of the Fittest' approach. Where far left is a total subjection to the central authority, because 'the central authority knows best.' The National Sozialistische Partei, or how the British invented the slang word Nazi for it, was founded in 1920 as a follow up to the German workersparty. It had a strong nationalistic belief system and to propagate it would mean to quell any dissent from its message. Therefore implementing strong censorship, rejection of religion and the centralization of power. Essentially 'the government knows best' approach. As I said earlier, it's interesting how different a take can be looking at the left-right political spectrum. I guess a lot of that has to do on where people live and what their daily exposure is to their regulatory bodies and how that influences their lives. |
Yeah, that is why I said earlier, that I doubt political stances or even only the left-right spectrum can be captured in just a number. For the left-right spectrum there are typically two views of what defines it: economics (left is for sharing the wealth equally, while the right wants to have more wealth for better work - both by the way can also be interpreted in different ways leading to subgroups) and state control (which is the axis you describe more or less, although the social engineering part is a new view for me). I hear the first time that anarchist are put into the right and you say yourself this puts the Nazis in the left. But for a lot of other cases the state influence axis actually does describe the differences between left and right, as you explained with COVID. So yeah, I doubt this is just a one-dimensional thing.
