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4. HOW POLITICAL DEFINITIONS SHAPE REALITY: SQUARES, GOVERNMENT, RACISM, LEFT AND RIGHT
Greetings fellow dumdums,
Welcome back to What is Politics – where our ultimate goal is to figure out how we, as ordinary people can achieve our political goals, even though we don’t have official decision-making authority.
But before we can achieve our goals, we need to know what those goals are and before we can do that, we need to know what words mean, because as we saw in the first episode, political terms are a cesspool of meaningless worbs – words that everyone uses without really knowing what they mean – which as we saw in that episode, makes us more confused, more powerless and easier to manipulate.
In the second episode we defined politics as anything to do with decision-making in groups, and we saw that although journalists and academia talk about politics as if it’s just about decision-making involving the state, that the word politics actually refers to decision-making in any kind of group, whether it’s a state, or you and your boss and your coworkers, or you and your friends, or you and bunch of fellow chimpanzees deciding on who gets to eat some bananas that you found.
And we divided politics into public politics meaning decision-making involving the state, and private politics, meaning every other kind of decision-making in groups, and we saw that the same political principles, like government, democracy, dictatorship, class and bargaining power apply to both kinds of politics.
In the third episode we saw that most human societies over the past 12,000 or so years have been organized into political hierarchies, where some people have more decision-making power, more wealth and more rights than other people. And we saw that hierarchies serve three related purposes: they facilitate efficient group cooperation, they facilitate conflict avoidance, and they also facilitate the exploitation of less powerful members of the hierarchy by more powerful members of that hierarchy.
And then we saw that what the left right political spectrum is all about, is where one stands in regards to these hierarchies. If you support the interests of the people on top of a given hierarchy then you’re on the right on that issue – and if you support the people at the bottom, then you’re on the left.
In short, left right political spectrum is about hierarchy vs. equality i.e. about class conflict, conflict between the different ranks in our various political, economic, cultural and international hierarchies.
TODAY’S EPISODE
In today’s episode we’re going to continue talking about left and right but this time with the goal of illustrating the power that definitions have in shaping our our perceptions, and how good definitions give you galaxy brain and help you understand the world around you and help you communicate effectively with the people around you and help you act more effectively in your own interest – and how bad definitions make you confused and more likely to alienate the people you need to align with, and more likely to shoot yourself in the face or walk off of a cliff.
And in doing so, we’re also going to explain the criteria that we use – and that I use in this podcast when I’m evaluating how to define all of these ill-defined political worbs.
LEFT-RIGHT
Last episode I asserted that the left right political spectrum refers to the opposition between political hierarchy on the right and political equality on the left and I briefly mentioned some popular competing definitions, like the market versus the state or equality versus liberty or the collective versus the individual – which I asserted were incorrect, but I didn’t really explain why those definitions are incorrect or what makes a definition correct or incorrect in the first place.
The merriem-webster dictionary website has a short article on how they choose new words to add to their dictionary, and at one point they say “A dictionary isn’t an idea museum, it’s a user’s manual for communication.” – in other words, don’t inherently mean anything – they’re just social conventions – they’re communication tools – but even if definitions of words can’t be objectively right or wrong, they can be right or wrong in practical terms in the sense of whether or not they do their job communicating the ideas that we want to convey.
So when we’re choosing definitions for words, there are some criteria that we use which I call the 4C’s – Consensus, Clarity, Convenience, and Consequences.
Consensus means does everyone agree on the general definition of a word. If everyone thinks a word means one thing you’re going to have a hard time using it to mean something else.
Clarity means three main things:
1. does the definition make sense – in other words is it coherent
2. does it help clarify some important real world phenomenon, and
3. are you using a clear formulation of the definition, versus a confusing formulation of the same idea. Like you can define your ring finger as the third finger from the thumb, or you can define it as the finger that’s not you thumb or your index finger or your middle finger or your pinky, but it’s the other one. Two different formulations of the same definition.
Convenience means things like:
is the definition you’re using an easy way of getting your idea across – does it fit in with the general associations that people have around that word, does it match recent historical use so that you can read older books easily and make historical analogies that people will understand? or do you have to explain yourself every time you use the word and does it cause antagonism and confusion instead of conveying the idea you want to get across because it has connotations that clash with your intention?
And most importantly, Consequences is the effect of your definition on peoples’ perception.
Does the definition you’re using help people see important connections or important distinctions that give them more power to navigate the world, or does your definition mix up unrelated things, or divide things up that belong together and keep your focus on superficial things that make people more confused, and powerless to achieve their goals.
In other words does your definition give people galaxy brain, or does it give them pudding brain.
SAPIR-WHORF
In psychology we talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, the idea that peoples’ perceptions of reality are shaped in part by the language they use – so like if you don’t have words for certain things in your language, you tend not notice or think about those things.
So in some cultures, you don’t have a word or even a concept for depression. People just say they’re “tired”. And as a result they don’t seek counselling or therapy or psychiatry, they just rest and sleep and treat it like fatigue, or like you’re just being a wus. If you’re from Nigeria or Thailand or India or else you have grandparents from those countries you might recognize this.
Another example that’s discussed often is that many cultures don’t have a word for the colour blue.
Ancient Greek, ancient Hebrew, ancient Chinese and Ancient Japanese all had no word for blue, and you have several cultures where this is still the case today, like the Himba who live around the border of namibia and angola. Himba people live from animal herding and have an environment where it’s really important to distinguish between different different greens and brown but not blues and other colours which appear less frequently.
The himba language lumps together dark blues with darks reds, greens and purples, and lighter shades of blue with certain shades of green.
In 2006 psychologist Jules Davidoff and his team did colour experiments with Himba speakers and English speakers, where they showed them a bunch of squares where 1 is blue and the rest are various shades of green, and asked which one is different. And then they were shown another set of squares which were all one shade of green, except for one which was a slightly different shade of green. Most of the Himba speakers spotted the different green square immediately but had a harder time noticing the blue square in the other set. Meanwhile for the english speakers it was the opposite, they all spotted the blue square immediately but most of them failed to notice the different shade of green, or else took a long time to find it.
Your vocabulary shapes what you notice and what you don’t notice.
So when it comes to political words we want definitions that make us notice important things, instead of obscuring them.
OK so let’s apply our criteria to something easy – the definition of the word square as a closed geometric shape with four equal sides.
That’s a really great definition.
First of all, it’s a consensus definition.
Almost everyone who uses the word square in english knows what it means and if you present that definition to them, they’ll agree that that’s the correct definition.
The definition is also clear: it doesn’t contradict itself, it makes sense, and this particular formulation of the definition is also nice and tight.
And because it’s clear and has consensus use, it’s also very convenient. It’s a quick easy way to convey the idea of a sape with four equal right angled sides with one little word. And it’s consequence is that it if you learn this definition, you will have a concept of a square so you’ll notice objects with four equal right angled sides more readily, and you can do all kinds of architecture and engineering and art and design more easily with that concept in your head.
Now lets say for some reason that you started to have a bunch of people running around who insisted on using the word square to mean: any shape with four sides regardless of the length or angle of the sides. Like let’s say that these people want us to focus on all quadrangles – rectanlges, rhombuses and squares – equally.
That definition is nice and clear, and it conveys an important geometric concept – but because it goes counter to the consensus definition, it would be incredibly inconvenient to use. Every time you talked about squares you’d have to spend time explaining to people what your definition is as opposed to the consensus definition. And if they pointed to old textbooks that use the other definition you’d have to start arguing about how those textbooks are old and we need to expand our focus to include all four sided shapes.
And if over time, that definition somehow became the consensus definition, then the consequence would that there would be no specific word for what we now call squares and people would notice them and think of them less readily. And if you wanted someone to make something in square shape you’d have to specify say “a square with all equal sides and right angles” each time.
GOVERNMENT
When it comes to political terms it’s the consequence criteria takes on some extra weight.
So for example, LuckyCat who has a cool youtube channel asked me where I got my definition of the word “government” from.
In episode 2 of this series I defined a government as a person or group of people that makes and enforces rules in a given polity meaning a political unit – and I also pointed out that a polity can be a public polity like a state, but it can also be a private polity, like a home, or a business – meaning that if you own your home you are the government of that home and if you own a business you are the government of that business.
Now I didn’t invent this definition, but I didn’t copy paste it from anywhere either. I took the standard definition and I shifted the emphasis away from the state in order to highlight that government exists in the private sphere and not just in the public sphere.
Why did I choose this definition?
Let’s look at our criteria.
First consensus – if you look up government in a bunch of dictionaries and encyclopedias you’ll find two main definitions – a general one that has room in it for private polities, and a specific one that specifies that government is about the state. I don’t know where to find statistics for the prevalence of different definitions, but I found that the majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias use the general definition but usually with a formulation that nonetheless emphasized state and other public polities like villages or tribes.
Only the Oxford English dictionary which is a gargantuan 75 volume affair mentioned a private polity at all – the government of a school, which was in its quotation section.
Either way, most people aren’t consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias to learn what a word like government means, they’re inferring the meaning from context, usually from newsmedia, political journalism, academia and every day conversation.
And if you look at newsmedia, political journalism and academia, they use the word government almost exclusively to discuss the state. The same goes for everyday conversation.
So the consensus among ordinary people, and journalists and academia seems to be the state-specific definition, and the consensus among dictionaries and encyclopedias is the general definition, but almost always with a major emphasis on the state. And in books about politics I only know of one book, Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson which specifically focuses on government in private polities.
So why did I buck the almost consensus trend of emphasizing the state? Why did I formulate it without even mentioning the state?
Lets look at the other criteria:
Clarity: both the general and state specific definitions are clear and coherent. They both highlight something important that exists in the real world.
What about convenience: you could bring up the fact that historically it was common in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier to use the word government to refer to any kind of authority, and in Anderson’s book she talks about US president John Adam’s correspondence with his wife, Abigail, about her famous “All Men Would be Tyrants” Letter. And in that correspondence, he uses the word government to describe household authority, employer employee authority, master slave authority and teacher student authority.
But we’re in the 2020’s now, and most people aren’t reading those kinds of texts – why do we want to resuscitate an older definition that might make people have to stop and think a little when you use it.
The answer is the Consequences criteria – because my definition makes people have to actually stop and think every time I use it! Restricting the word government entirely to the state public sphere makes us completely oblivious as to how so many of the exact same principles and dynamics that apply to the government of states also apply to us in our workplaces, and families and schools.
For example private polities can be democratic or they can be dictatorial just like states can. A large cooperative enterprise is a representative democracy, and a regular enterprise is an opt-out dictatorship, just like Sweden is a representative democratic state and China is an opt out dictatorship state. States have class conflict between government and citizens who have different interests, just like businesses have class conflict between workers and owners and management – who are the government of private businesses.
States have laws and constitutions and private citizens have contracts, which are basically just private laws and constitutions with rules and enforcement mechanisms. We all know that the contents of contracts reflect the relative bargaining power of the two parties but we don’t think about how public laws and constitutions reflect the relative balance of power of different actors in a public polity – workers, owners, farmers, renters, landlords, men, women, the elderly, the young, specific industries etc. And just like contracts, laws are only worth something if they’re enforceable.
State governments use many of the same techniques to control their citizens that business owners use to control their workers. And citizens use many of the same techniques to get legislation they want from states that workers or unions use to get concessions they want from their employers.
Government is government and politics is politics – the same principles and analytical categories apply.
Seeing those connections gives you power. Not seeing them takes away that power. Galaxy brain vs pudding head.
And since there is no other word in the english language for private government, if we don’t broaden the term government to include the private sphere, then we have no words for the concept of private government at all, which mean that it becomes an almost invisible force in our lives – like the blue square for the himba, or the slightly different shade of green square for the english speakers.
When the state spies on you and controls what you do and say, that’s considered oppression that must be resisted, but when private companies spy on you and censor you or control what you do, that’s just the way the world works, if you don’t like it get another job or start your own facebook, or your own youtube.
If your video is blocked on a quasi-monopoly platform like youtube almost no one will see your video, which in effect is the same as when a state like china blocks your video. But because of our stunted definition if government, we expect freedom of speech and other constitutional rights to apply to the state, but not to private monopolies. When we realize that the directors and owners of private companies are in fact governments that regulate the lives of millions of workers and consumers, we may want to start thinking about things like extending constitutional rights to the private sphere.
Now there are arguments for why we should not to do this and we’ll look these when we talk about capitalism and private property rights, but we can barely even ask the question if we think government is only about the state.
And because of these consequences, I revived the emphasis of the general, historical use of the term government, and then i use the term “the government” or else “public government” to refer to state government, and the term “private government” to refer to every other type of government.
And the exact same logic applies to why I used the broader definition of politics as decision-making in groups, vs the state specific definition of politics which is much more popular in journalism and academia, although you’ll tend to find the general definition in dictionaries and encyclopedias.
RACISM
In a few minutes we’ll see how the different definitions of left and right have hugely different consequences in terms of perception, but first I want to look at the competing definitions of the word racism to highlight the convenience criteria.
The word racism emerged in the early 20th century as a version of the term racialism that was used at the same time and had been popular in the late 19th century in connection with all of the scientific race theories that were popular at that time. The term became more popular in the 1920’s and 30’s with the rise of Nazism and fascism, and especially after WWII when much of academia became preoccupied with trying to understand what led to the holocaust. And then became it became most prevalent during the rise of the Black civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Until recently there were two standard definitions of racism which were used more or less interchangeably. A general one, that just meant a hostility or antipathy towards a certain race – and a more specific one that meant the belief that there are biologically different human races, that these races have distinct characteristics that determine the respective cultures and behaviour of their members, and that some races are superior to others in various ways that give them the right to more wealth, more power or more rights than inferior races.
In 1967, two leaders of the American Black Power Movement, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton put forward the idea of Institutional or Systemic Racism, which is when institutions and systems of power consciously or unconsciously treat people favourably or unfavourably according to their racial classification – for example in the United States today, African Americans and White Americans use marijuana at about the same rate, yet African Americans are arrested for it about 4 times as often, for a variety of reasons.
In the 1970s some white anti-racist educators and academics came up with and started popularizing a new definition of the word racism, which they defined in shorthand as “prejudice plus power” which is basically the same concept as institutional racism.
This new definition has become almost standard in academic humanities departments in the last 10 years or so, and it’s also popular among certain activist groups, but it’s still largely unknown outside of those circles.
This new definition is clear and concise, but it has huge problems in the convenience department because the overwhelming majority of the population who went to university before 2010, or who never went to university, have one of the classic definitions deeply ingrained in their heads.
As a result you see the same scenario over and over, and I’ve seen this myself a bunch of times – you have a younger university educated person having a conversation with an older person or someone who didn’t go to college, and the young persons says something like “well black people can’t be racist” and the older person is like “huh? so are they missing part of their brains? or are they’re like magic unicorn people? isn’t that racist?” and then the students get offended or start explaining the prejudice plus power concept, and the older person is “no, racism is a feeling or an attitude, every human can be racist – just because someone is oppressed doesnt meant they don’t have the same feelings as i do” and then they end up having some long twisted conversation about how jews can be racist against arabs in israel but when if they live morocco they’re not racist anymore they’re just discriminating and everyone gets more and more irritated at eachother.
But if you try to restart the same conversation but using the term “institutional racism” the older person immediately understands what’s going on – and if the student says something like “in America institutional racism only oppresses Black and Brown people and benefits white people and never the other way around” there might an argument about it, but everybody knows what the other one is talking about and they can have their discussion or their argument without needing to have a confused irritated 45 minute pre-argument argument about the definition of racism first.
Now people who insist on using the newer definition will argue that all of this inconvenience headache is worth it because of the consequence criteria – for example the new definition forces dominant groups to focus more on how they personally benefit from institutional racism and it focuses our gaze on systemic issues rather than on individual personalities and feelings. And they argue that we can use the word discrimination to talk about prejudices and dislike at the individual level.
Now you can choose whatever definition you like best – but – changing the definition of a word that most people understand one way, to mean something else that we already have a word for is extremely inconvenient – so if you’re going to do that the consequences payoff better be worth it.
Personally i think that the more recent definition is a total failure as a communication tool if you’re interested in talking about racism to anyone outside of a university, but in 20 years if that definition becomes the consensus, then it won’t be inconvenient anymore. I would still have a problem on the consequences level because I think it implicitly dehumanizes and fetishizes oppressed people, but that’s just me!
LEFT AND RIGHT
OK so let’s look at the consequences of the different definitions of left and right.
So why am I so adamant that hierarchy versus equality is the best definition, even the correct definition?
Again, let’s look at our criteria for choosing definitions – consensus, convenience, clarity and consequences.
For consensus, there is no consensus, you have all these competing definitions.
Now no one ever sat down and invented the concept of left and right with a specific definition that they presented, like I did with the term worbs in episode 1 of this series.
It was an analogy from the French Revolution in 1789, based on which side of the national assembly the pro and anti revolution delegates were sitting or standing at – revolutionaries on the left, monarchists on the right. and you have to infer the meaning of that analogy from how people used it.
HISTORICAL CONVENIENCE
What about convenience?
Next episode we’ll see that historically, from the french revolution until the cold war, the consensus use of left and right was consistent with hierarchy vs. equality and not any of the other definitions.
But, just because something was used a certain way historically, doesn’t mean it makes any sense to keep using it that way today. So like in old english, the word Silly originally meant happy. And later it meant fortunate or blessed and then it meant pious, and then it meant innocent, and then harmless, and then weak, and then foolish and now it means absurd or ridiculous. The original definition is clear, and precise but it’s also completely inconvenient because it has a completely different and totally consensus meaning today. And using the old definition would make everyone confused and irritated and no one would know what you’re talking about and you would just be some annoying pretentious asshole.
In the case of left and right however, there is a strong convenience argument for hanging on to the original historical definition – because in politics we constantly make historical analogies and read historical texts, and we constantly refer to historical examples of left and right. So we often talk about the nazis and the communists and we call people fascists and and we’re having a revival of socialism and of left and right wing populism, and we still refer to the french revolution and the bolshevik revolution and we have an anarchist movement and a capitalist libertarian movement and all of these were historically classified as left and right in ways which are congruent with the hierarchy versus equality concept but not with any of the other definitions.
For example it would be inconvenient and confusing if all of sudden we had to start thinking of nazis as left wingers, and anarcho-communists as right wingers which is where the big versus small government definition of the political spectrum would place them. And we’d have to start sticking absolutist and feudal monarchist on the left, even though the forces of monarchy in the french revolution are the original right wing, the very thing that the original left was revolting against. All of the non hierarchy vs equality definitions would mix up who we traditionally classify as being on the left and on the right
So hierarchy vs. equality wins in the historical convenience criteria, and it’s still in use today which also helps.
MARKET VERSUS STATE: INCOHERENT
So that’s convenience and consensus, now let’s look at clarity. Here things start to get interesting.
Remember clarity means the definition is clear as in easy to understand, it’s coherent, and it clarifies some important phenomenon.
Let’s start with the market vs. the state.
That’s easy to understand. But is it coherent? Like are the market and the state actually opposed to each-other?
Remember that we’re talking about a political spectrum, which means you’re moving between two opposite poles. Like cold versus hot, up versus down. Even a colour spectrum is a spectrum between high visible wavelenghts and low visible wavelengths. Spectrums require opposites. You can’t have a spectrum between Pizza and Apples, or cold versus yellow.
What about the state and the market. The term “the market” refers to the collection of choices that people make in terms of exchanging resources in a given context. And I’m not going to define the state right now because it’s complicated and i haven’t yet decided on a satisfactory definition – but the state is most certainly not the opposite of the market, nor is it incompatible with the market. The state is in fact the context that most markets exist in nowadays.
The state can impose restrictions or constraints on the choices that people make regarding exchanging their resources, and it can even snuff out a market entirely by making it really onerous to exchange your resources at all – so in those situations the state can be opposed to the market. But the state can also be used to encourage markets or even make them possible in the first place.
For example, having food safety regulations for processing plants and restaurants can increase the costs of selling food which might lower sales, or prevent some people from opening food businesses – but at the same time, if people are constantly getting food poisoning whenever they they go out to eat or buy food at the grocery store, then it’s the absence of those regulations that stifles markets, as less people will bother taking the risk.
Even most so called libertarian capitalists believe in maintaining some form of state, despite the fact that the very existence of a state violates the fundamental principles of capitalism which we saw briefly in episode 2. and that’s because if you don’t have publicly funded courts enforcing contracts or police enforcing property rights, then people who can’t afford their own private enforcement armies or private courts, will be too afraid to enter into contracts or to exchange goods and services except with their most trusted friends and across short distances, because the risk of getting ripped off and robbed will be just too high for most people most of the time.
And sometimes you can’t even have a market at all without the state. So one famous example is ancient Rome, where you had flourishing trade all across europe and into africa and Asia, in large part because Rome built, maintained and protected huge roads all across the territories it controlled. But once the western part of the Empire collapsed, and there was no state there to maintain and protect the roads, you couldn’t transport goods across long distances on land anymore unless you had your own private army to fight off bandits. And even if you did have a private army you still could’t trade across the increasing number of roads that were no longer passable because no one was maintaining them.
And even though almost everyone benefited from these roads, conditions were such that no private entities were able to emerge to provide the kinds of maintenance and services that were required to keep trade by land going across long distances.
As a result, long distance travel and trade across land basically stopped, and the sharing of knowledge and skills across long distances stopped along with it. Economies became extremely local, skills and arts deteriorated and vanished with no access to great schools or great masters to teach students outside of local areas. Western Europe went from being an advanced world civilization to a rural backwater. And this lasted for hundreds of years, until enough political consolidation re-emerged and european states got bigger, and capable of maintaining and protecting long distance roads and trade routes again.
The state is not the opposite of the market, the state is just another context that a market exists in. It’s like the weather – good weather can facilitate or encourage markets and bad weather can discourage trade and stifle markets like during a blizzard or a big storm at sea.
So the state vs market paradigm is a huge failure in the clarity criteria. Instead of clarifying a real phenomenon, it creates a false binary and makes you assume that two things are opposed to eachother when they aren’t, thus making you more confused and less intelligent.
It’s a Pudding brain generator.
EQUALITY VS LIBERTY: INCOHERENT
What about Equality versus liberty?
Are those opposites? People on the right will insist that they’re opposites, and that the only way you can achieve any equality is via the intervention of massive state power that stifles liberty, and they’ll point to the Soviet Union and other so-called communist countries as the ultimate examples.
But if you ask the french revolutionaries, or almost any socialist or anarchist up until the rise of the Soviet Union, they would tell you that there’s no such thing as liberty if you don’t have equality, because people with more power use that power whether it’s state power, economic power or cultural power, to dominate people with less power thus reducing their liberty.
Like your boss tells you what to do all day and not the other way around because your boss has more wealth than you do, which is why you entered into a contract that takes away your liberty for 8 or more hours a day in exchange for money to live. And the government can tell you and your boss what you can and can’t do for the exact same reasons. Whether it’s the inequality between your boss and you, or between the state and you and your boss, economic inequality is the main source of political i.e. decision-making inequality.
That’s why the slogan of the French Revolution was Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – liberty, equality, fraternity or brotherhood. You need the sense of kinship and brotherhood in order to maintain equality, and you need equality, in order to have and safeguard liberty. And that’s just the most famous slogan that we remember today – there were other slogans floating around among the revolutionaries at that time – liberty, equality, security – liberty, equality, property – liberty, equality, strength, – liberty, reason, equality – but in all of these slogans, liberty and equality were always seen as inseparable. The idea that they’re opposed only becomes popular with the cold war and the rise of so-called communist countries which justified their dictatorial powers in the name of enforcing equality.
In the French revolution they were particularly thinking of political and cultural equality but it applies just as much, if not more, to economic equality as well.
Now there is a legitimate question about how you can enforce equality without some giant state power that crushes liberty – but anarchists and socialists have had ideas about this for the past two hundred years or so, and we’ll look at these as well as some historical and anthropological examples in the future. But even if the relationship between liberty and equality is complicated, they are by no means opposites, and what’s way less complicated is the relationship between liberty and inequality.
You could much more easily propose a spectrum between liberty vs. inequality and show a million historical and anthropological examples where the more inequality you have the more servitude and slavery you have – like a 1:1 correlation!
This is why fans of so called libertarian capitalism have a very peculiar definition of liberty where signing a terrible contract out of pure desperation that puts you in a position of abject servitude is considered to be voluntary and liberty, as we’ll see in future episodes.
Anyhow, equality vs. liberty is another false binary that fails the clarity test, and gets another pudding-head prize.
BIG VS SMALL GOVT
What about big government versus small government? Now that’s actually a coherent concept! These are actual opposites! So it passes the most basic part of the clarity test.
But does it clarify an important conflict or division that actually exists in politics? If we look around us and across history, do we actually see a huge struggle between people who cherish big government and those who love small government?
No, we don’t. The same right wing parties who want to get rid of government when it comes to regulating employers and markets and corporations, love HUGE government when it comes to surveillance, the military the police, immigration, and regulating where you put your pee pee and your wee wee. And then you have left wing parties who typically want the government to get the hell out of your wee wee or your bedroom, and to reduce the state in terms of military, police and immigration control, while beefing up the state to the max when it comes to taxation, providing health care and education etc.
So big and small government are on both sides of the left right divide. Right wing politicians in the United States and the other anglo-saxon countries might like to talk about big vs. small government but the actual conflict is about what we should be doing with the government, and not about the size of it.
A political spectrum based on big versus small government fails the clarity criteria in that it fails to clarifying what actual political conflict is about. It misses the point, and makes you focus on something superficial aspect of the size of the government – instead of on what the real conflict is about – what government is for – promoting equality or protecting hierarchies.
Like left wing libertarian-socialists and right wing libertarian-capitalists both oppose the state – but for completely different reasons. What is that reason? A left-right spectrum based on big vs small government gives us no insight. It puts them on the same team.
Focusing on big versus small government is like if you had a bunch of red guns and blue guns and a bunch of red berries and blue berries, and then you divided them up into red things vs. blue things instead of into guns vs berries.
Pudding brain!
INDIVIDUAL VS COLLECTIVE
You can apply everything I just said about big vs. small government to the individual versus the collective definition, which is very popular among libertarians.
They’re clear opposites so it’s coherent, but they don’t reflect a real cleavage between political forces. Right and left wing political parties and coalitions want more collectivism and more individualism, but in different areas. Left wing parties invoke collectivism in terms of our economic responsibility for eachother, i.e. to push for greater economic equality.
Right wing parties invoke collectivism in terms of national identity versus competing nations or vs immigrants, or vs competing racial, ethnic or religious groups, i.e. to enforce cultural hierarchies. Right wing parties also invoke collectivism to foster a sense of solidarity between the rich and the poor of the same identity group, thus bolstering economic hierarchy.
Left wing parties invoke individualism in terms of promoting equality of individual personal liberties, like rights to artistic, sexual, and religious freedom, freedom of expression etc.
And Right wing parties tend to invoke individualism in terms of the right of individuals to amass as much wealth as they can – i.e. to increase economic hierarchy.
You don’t see coalitions of political parties where one person is like “i believe in the collective responsibility for every person’s economic needs” and another person is like “i believe in the collective superiority of the white race over the mongrel races!” and theyre like – hey, we both love collectivism, let’s make a political party together!”
HIERARCHY VS. EQUALITY: CLARITY
The only definition of left and right that clarifies an actual real political division is hierarchy vs. equality.
So if you ever wonder why right wing parties or coalitions of parties often have this seemingly contradictory alliance between religious groups who want the government to make sure you only have sex when you’re married, and big business groups and libertarians that would love to be able to use straight up hard core porn to advertise toothpaste to children – the common thread linking these seemingly opposed groups is hierarchy – they support the dominant economic and cultural classes – the business groups want government to foster more economic hierarchy, and the religious groups want the government to impose more cultural hierarchy. And those different types of hierarchies reinforce each-other in various ways so those people will tend to coalesce when faced with egalitarian coalitions, despite their internal contradictions and their disagreements, even if they don’t think of themselves as interested in hierarchy or ever even think about hierarchy
Similarly in left wing political parties or coalitions of parties you typically see alliances between sexual minorities and feminist groups on the one hand, and ethnic minorities and immigrants on the other who are often religious and culturally conservative and not really enthusiastic about giving more rights to trans people and gays and women. And both these groups are usually allied with organized labour in these left-wing coalitions, which seems totally unrelated to gay rights, feminism and immigrant rights.
But what unites these groups on the left, is that despite their disagreements and contradictions, they all want more equality for their members vis à vis established economic and cultural hierarchies.
A left right political spectrum based on hierarchy versus equality helps us easily explain these alliances. The other definitions give us no insight. Just pudding.
CONSEQUENCES: HIERARCHY VERSUS EQUALITY
Where it gets really interesting though is when we look at the consequence criteria – the consequences on our perception. The consequences criteria helps us understand why so many bad definitions of left and right that total blow the clarity criteria are nonetheless so prevalent. When bad ideas are popular it’s usually because they either fulfill some kind of psychological need, or they serve the interests of some powerful group.
So, in terms of consequences, a hierarchy versus equality spectrum makes you notice hierarchies all around you, and it makes you notice that some people don’t like these hierarchies. It makes you think about arguments for and against existing hierarchies.
And in this sense, it’s frames the world in left wing terms because noticing and thinking about hierarchies and opposition to hierarchies might make you question those hierarchies, versus if you don’t even notice that the hierarchies exist in the first place.
That’s why the writers who still use the hierarchy versus equality paradigm tend to be socialists or otherwise on the left, like Noam Chomsky or Corey Robin, with the very notable exception of Doctor Professor Jordan Peenerston on the right.
CONSEQUENCES: EVERYTHING ELSE
What about the perceptual consequences of all of the other definitions?
We’ve already pointed out that they make you focus on superficialities and miss the big picture – but not only do they make you confused and blind, but they make you confused and blind in a particular way that frames the world in right wing terms – specifically in right wing terms that benefit the elite classes at the top of the hierarchies in capitalist countries in soviet style state communist countries!
So for example the market versus the state paradigm.
Big business owners and the think tanks and lobbyists and right wing tv pundits that serve them, love to screech against regulations and laws that interfere with their ability to maximize their profits. But despite all of their money and power and influence, they have one big problem – people have the right to vote, and a lot of these regulations and worker protections and minimum wages that they want to get rid of, are very popular.
It’s hard to get people to vote to lower their wages and raise their rents, and allow your boss to demand that you to poop in diapers at work if you want to keep your job.
Well if you come up with a whole ideology that the market is this supernatural magic force that brings us all of the wealth that we enjoy and all of the freedoms that we love, and it can never do anything wrong by definition, and that the state is this horrible evil tyranny that interferes with the holy market, and that enslaves everyone and ruins your life, and it can never do anything good by definition well then you can convince people to vote for candidates who support cutting minimum wages and laws that prevent your boss from requiring you too poop in your diapers.
And the same thing goes with the individual versus the collective. Any human society tries to balance the two. Total collectivism or total individualism would be seen as forms of insanity in most society.
But, if you can convince people that collectivism is pure evil – nothing more than an illusion which justifies the mindless tyranny of the majority oppressing the individual, and that things like taxes and social programs are bribes by tyrants invoking collectivism to control the masses – and that the only thing that guarantees anyone true freedom is the ownership of property – then you’ll be delighted when politicians get rid of minimum wages and mandatory bathroom breaks and when they keep lowering taxes for the wealthy.
The same for big versus small government, or liberty versus equality.
All of these paradigms are part of a class war narrative designed to make you hate anything that might benefit workers at the expense of their bosses, and love everything that will benefit bosses at the expense of their workers. Every regulation that tries to gives you more power and money will only make you poorer and a slave of the tyrannical state – the only real way to improve your life is be to more useful to your boss, or become your own boss.
But if you do start your own business, and you start to cut into the market share of the big companies that fund all of the AEIs and Hoover and Cato and Fraser institutes, and Praeger U‘s that promote these ideas, you’ll find that those same companies that throw a tantrum whenever government raises your wages, won’t hesitate for one second to use the power of government regulations to crush you out of existence.
It’s no surprise a lot of these fair-weather freedom lovers are huge fans of murderous state dictatorships when those dictators use their tyrannical powers to support business owners while crushing workers. So for example Milton Friedman, the big government-hating, the market worshipping, freedom loving, nobel prize winning guru of 20th century capitalism was delighted to be an advisor to the brutal dictator of Augusto Pinochet in Chile to help him impose the supposedly free market by force.
Note that all of this hypocrisy makes perfect sense in a hierarchy vs equality paradigm.
SOVIET PUDDING BRAIN
But it’s not only capitalist hypocrites who gain from these definitions! If you just reverse the stigma of these nonsensical paradigms, you get an equally pudding brained justification for the tyranny of the hypocrites in charge of the Soviet Union.
So if instead of idiotically worshipping the market like a god and demonizing the state, you idiotically worship the state like a god, and demonize the market. And instead of mindlessly venerating the individual and making the collective into conspiracy by evil statists who want power, you mindlessly venerate the collective and make individualism a conspiracy by capitalists who want to divide and conquer and enslave you. And instead of saying that brutal inequality is the price we all must pay for glorious liberty, you say that dictatorship is the price we have to pay for the moral superiority of equality, and the eventual promise of freedom.
According to this narrative, the market is just chaos and anarchy which give the rich and powerful all the power and take it out of the hands of the workers, while the state is the only instrument which can carry out the rational will of the people. The individual is selfish and destructive and immoral, and what separates moral human being from animals is that individuals are capable of setting aside their selfish interests to serve their community, as we all must do to serve our glorious country so that our nation can survive versus the evil capitalists who threaten us, or the evil nazis who are really just capitalists with their masks off. And all of this is why we need the leadership of the communist party, which is made up of the smartest, most altruistic members of all of society, from every ethnic group and social background.
So a left/right political spectrum based on market versus state, or equality vs liberty or individual vs collective might be incoherent, and it might make you a blind pudding head who can’t see what’s happening right in front of your face, but it makes you the kind of pudding head that is easier to manipulate into supporting policies that benefit the elites in the USA and in the USSR.
NEXT TIME
OK, that’s enough information for today.
Next time we’ll finish up with left and right, and we’ll do a little history tour to see how left and right were used in different time periods, and then we’ll the see how lenin and trotsky changed the definition of the word socialism which gunked up the popular understanding of left and right, and them we’ll finally be able to answer the question of why communism is on the far left of the political spectrum and nazism is on the far right, when Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR seemed to have so many important similarities.
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And until next time, seeya!
what even is politics though, like? 
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