The terms ‘right’ and ‘left,’ as political terms in use
today appear to me to be applied in an ad hoc and makeshift manner. Certainly, there seems to me to be no clear
theory underpinning their application to politics. So let’s develop one.
We will start with two positions: 1) Society should act to benefit the individual. We will suppose that to be the premise of the
right. The nest step is the notion that
society is best served when it serves the individual. The extreme logical conclusion is that
society can be sacrificed for the individual.
2) The individual should act to
benefit society. We will suppose that to
be the premise of the left. The next step is that the individual is best served
when he serves society. The extreme logical conclusion is that the individual
can be sacrificed for society.
This is just where we are starting. We will come back to this.
This will not give us our usual alignment of interests. For instance, from this basis, universal
health care is something which should be desired by someone on the right. On
the other hand, the justification for national defense is found on the left. So, apparently we have another axis, independent
of the left or the right, which is the size of government. The argument against universal healthcare,
then, is against a larger government, and in favor of a smaller one. But it
cannot be one of efficiency. There are
dozens of examples where universal healthcare is more efficient at delivery of
services to citizens than what happens in its absence. Neither can it be a liberty argument, and it
cannot be a danger argument.
We also observe that while totalitarianism is indeed on the
left, anarchy, reputed to be a phenomenon of the left, is under these premises,
in fact a possibility of the right. Note
we have said nothing about inequality.
We have not mentioned any relationships between individuals, but only
between an individual and the rest of his society.
Now our two premises are incomplete, and in fact pejorative
of the left. We have placed the benefits
to the individual on the right, and the costs to the individual on the left.
Lets go back to what we see. Or rather what we are told is
what we see: We see Right and
Left. We see Republicans and
Democrats. We see the rights of the
individual versus the demands of the state. But I do not think that is the real
situation.
Consider instead that all politics comes down to who gets
the benefits, and who bears the costs. And remember, all benefits have to be paid
for. The extreme positions on each of
these then is either the individual as a particular, or society as a whole.
But this gives us the following table: I have also included some rubrics one might
consider these positions, and their arguments, to go under.
Society pays:
Society Benefits Society
pays: Individual benefits
(Communism)
( Capitalism )
Individual pays: Society benefits Individual pays: Individual
benefits
( ? )
(Libertarianism)
So these statements are like the corners of a physical table. They are the extremes, and all of politics,
all the actions of and in society, goes on on the surface of this table, inside
these corners.
Now, no society really exists, or has ever existed, at the
corners, or even at the edges, of the table.
Robinson Crusoe, for instance,
being both the individual and his complete society, is squarely in the
middle. They are ideals that
(misguided) individuals strive for. They
are misguided because these corners properly apply to different aspects of
every society. These values are
themselves a higher dimensional structure than we have come to understand, and
- and the table, it’s actually a tetrahedron. I am preserving the line of my thinking
because, even described, it is far more difficult to jump directly to the
tetrahedron.
But to return to consideration as a table, the left-right
axis is from the lower left corner to the upper right hand corner. The lower left corner, we can substitute for
the question mark "altruism." Or,
taxes. Similarly the upper right, which
we have shown is congruent with universal health care, we have put capitalism. As we have stated above, there is another, independent, dimension, which is size of government. On the right we can have all government, (which de facto I suppose would be fascism,) and on the left no government, which we have named "altruism," extending the definition of the word to include the corresponding political structure, however it may be constructed.