WRB, Finger pointers unite! lol
The Left-Right Paradigm is for Suckers
Left or Right.
Liberal or Conservative.
Democrat or Republican.
And don’t mess with Mister In-Between.
Uh-huh.
Don’t be a sap.
The Left-Right, them-or-us, all-or-nothing dichotomy is what Philosophers call a false dilemma. That’s when you claim that there’s only two options, and it’s an either/or choice. As Dubya famously said, “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”
Well, pardon me, Slick, but I don’t have to be with you OR with “the terrorists” (assuming for the moment that there’s a difference between those two things).
There may be an infinite range of choices between those two extremes. Indeed, there almost always is — and I say “almost” only because, although I don’t know of an exception, I accept the theoretical possibility that there might be one, and, no, whatever you’re thinking ain’t it.
My old man was a decent mechanic — with automobiles and with playing cards. He could present the cards to you (“Pick a card. ANY card…”) in such a way that you THINK you’re making a free, random choice, but you’re not. You’re picking the card he set you up to pick. That’s known as “forcing,” as in he forces you to pick a certain card. When he taught me how to do this kind of thing (no, you don’t want to play poker with me), I promised not to reveal how he did it, so I can’t go into more detail.
Maybe I’ll give you a different example.
Here.
Try this one on.
When I was working at an upscale menswear store in the Chicago loop, lo these many years ago, I got a sales tutorial from the manager. He taught me that, say, if a guy is looking at ties, you don’t ask him, “Do you like any of these?” You ask him, “Would you like the red one or the blue one?” You present him with only two options, when it fact there may be a dozen ties he could choose from.
Or he could choose to buy none at all.
You “force” him to make a choice by framing the situation in such a way that it doesn’t include “neither.” Of course, it doesn’t matter to you which tie he buys, as long as he buys one of them. Either way, it’s money in your pocket.
See how that works?
Anyone who takes a close look at governments around the world and over time will discover that even though so-called “communism” and fascism are supposed to be polar opposites on the left-right scale, in practice they look a whole lot alike. Indeed, almost indistinguishable. In both cases, someone you don’t know has decided to tell you how you must live your life, and your job is to shut up and do what you’re told, or ELSE. No critical thinking required. In fact, it’s not allowed.
Take a good look at the “Two Party” system in the United States and you’re going to find the same thing. They both want to tell you how you have to live, and if you don’t like it, well, too bad.
These two supposedly “opposing” parties actually agree on about 99% of everything, and the 1% where they disagree is trivial. We have a de facto ONE party system. One party with two cliques that engage in much intramural ado about nothing.
I’ve seen this before.
Chicago, where I grew up, is, shall we charitably say, not completely without the influence of organized crime.
Organized crime is in the business of bleeding you dry in an economic version of death by a thousand cuts. Every time you spit, sneeze or scratch, the mob gets a cut of the action. A percent here, a percent there, may not seem like much, but it adds up to big bucks when there’s a high volume.
So there’s quite a bit of swag to fight over, and occasionally one sub-group of the organization might have a dispute with another sub-group of the organization over who gets what cut.
Once in a while these disputes might include bullet-riddled bodies found in the trunks of cars.
But you know all this, right?
I mean, how many times have you seen The Godfather?”
I only bring this up to make one very important point: Just because two mob families are having a disagreement between themselves, that doesn’t mean that either of them is on YOUR side. They might be arguing about who should get the lion’s share of the proceeds from fleecing you, but NONE of them is arguing that you should go unfleeced.
I think we want to remember that.
Because it applies to politics — which incidentally uses the same exact business model as the mafia.
The Right and the Left may fight about which of them is going to get to tell you what to do, but NEITHER of them is arguing that you should decide for yourself.
I submit that the left-right paradigm we are sold is a scam.
It doesn’t matter which tie you buy; your money is still going into the pocket of the same salesman.
So.
I think we desperately need to dump the erroneous right-left paradigm in favor of a paradigm that is accurate and true. Let’s call it the Freedom Scale. It’s simple.
The more individual freedom (or self-determination) you have, the less government control there is.
The more government control there is, the less freedom you have.
Using this model, government control — whether you want to call it communism, fascism or any-other-fucking-ism — is all on the same end of the scale. Individual freedom is at the opposite end.
Everything in between is some kind of compromise, and there are innumerable possibilities.
Thinking about it this way may not make you any more free.
But it might make it a little harder for them to jerk you around.
