Discussing politics is a relatively new concept across the lens of history. Up until just under 300 years ago, political discussions among most people were either small talk about royalty or highly personal discussions about what decision to make in light of recent political events.
When a large group permits us to vote, we must make decisions between political parties. If we must choose representatives, we’re a degree removed from the decision-making process, so we must use philosophical standards to judge those representatives.
Broadly, we have a simple decision across a spectrum: “conserve” things we’re familiar with, or “liberally” try things we’ve not seen before. Our personalities heavily define our politics.
When people are young, they tend to have no basis for the old way of things. All they know is what they’ve experienced in their relatively short life and what they’ve listened from their culture. Since society is flawed and they imagine it can be better, they tend to embrace any social changes, since they have hope in what they haven’t seen.
As people age, they tend to discover that there’s nothing really “new“. At the same time, they often have amassed power over the old and familiar system. Thus, beyond the inherent risks to any large-scale changes, they have more to lose and tend to vote more conservatively.
Conservatives tend to vote for civilization and liberals for equality, but this isn’t precisely true:
- At the farthest extremes, a conservative will always enforce rules complying with a moral standard (thereby creating religion) and a liberal will always lean to leftist ideals, but these end up having more in common with each other than they may appear because of the severe implementation of order. This makes the spectrum more of a “horseshoe” than a line.
- Most normal people have a case-by-case inner conflict tied to their beliefs. Those beliefs come from religious views, definitions of humanity, how we should empower the weakest in society, and many other philosophical elements.
While liberalism can embrace anything trendy, conservatives can also embrace anything trendy from the past. They’re both adopting those trends through what they imagine:
- Conservatives are using the stories of the past (i.e., “history”) to define the best way to run society. They must make accommodations for changing cultures and technology or will make bad decisions.
- Liberals are using expectations of present actions onto the future to define the best way to run society. They must make accommodations for what they’re unable to know or will make bad decisions.
Undefined
They’re both partly wrong. History never precisely repeats itself, but every expectation of what may happen in a complex system (e.g., a nation) isn’t very accurate either.
Conservative and liberal are difficult to define because they’re responses to trends, which means they move as the trends move. If something was once a certain way 400 years ago, it’s a conservative or liberal idea depending on whether anyone remembers it, and this creates a much smaller “window” inside the larger spectrum of extreme political values called the Overton Window.
Political power often requires bending public opinion, so “conservative” and “liberal” are often hijacked for other purposes. Sometimes, conservatives are looking for new things and liberals are trying to restore an old social order, but feelings run so strongly that the definition and meaning of the words everyone uses is very difficult to separate out.
When the group isn’t “liberal” or “conservative” enough and the group can’t settle their conflicts, they tend to fork off into separate groups and redefine their purposes. In the USA as of ~2021, for example, “liberal” floats near leftism while “conservative” can broadly sit either near “libertarianism” or conventional “conservatism”, depending on how much influence people believe the government ought to have.
Most of this contention comes through a series of inter-related conflicts:
- An inter-group conflict about nuances regarding who should lead.
- Conflicts inside the group about the correct image to portray, which reflects with values are most important.
- Conflicts between groups, with the declared leader advancing the necessary image forward to let the public make their decision.
Defining
Political spectra are difficult to define, but free societies create a few constants.
First, all political conflicts are driven by philosophically irreconcilable opinions on who should have power. This comes from where they believe society’s chronic issues come from:
- Conservatives believe in preserving civilization by suppressing savage urges, which requires consistently taking from anyone who crosses boundaries.
- Progressives believe society’s leadership has many moral oppressions they must fix and atone for, which requires consistently taking from anyone with more power and giving to those with less.
However, both conservatives and liberals run the risk of abusing their power, meaning that too far in either spectrum becomes an oppressive, unjust society with punitive rules (“horseshoe effect”).
Conservatives believe in natural law:
- Humanity has inherent value but must experience consequences for their decisions. This makes the death penalty acceptable and abortion bad.
- Individual morality is irrespective of what an individual interprets. Thus, the laws and sentencing should still stand even with a tragic story behind a bad decision.
- Each person is at least partly responsible for the consequences they’ve brought upon themselves. Others can extend grace, but it’s not a requirement.
Progressives believe natural law is relative, nonexistent, or doesn’t matter:
- Humanity only has value according to others’ purposes, and the State is the highest authority over all consequences. This makes abortion acceptable and the death penalty bad.
- Individual morality, aggregated, is group morality. Thus, laws should flow from individual perceptions and sentencing should judge intent more than consequences.
- Reality is too uncertain for everyone’s consequences to be just. It’s the duty of the State to intervene to make things right.
Further, in the midst of the two poles, other values systems diverge from the spectrum by emphasizing individuals’ freedom:
- Liberals believe everyone should be free to do as they please, with the government serving as the provider or enforcer of those freedoms. They’ll often believe in solving it with making government bureaus or oversight committees.
- Libertarians believe everyone should be free to do as they please, so any redistribution of power would impede others’ freedoms. They’ll often believe in solving it with deregulation.
One of the most complicated problems about any of this political discussion comes in how people frequently want their freedoms, but tend to evade the responsibilities required to maintain them. This pattern creates a cycling trend (“Tytler’s Civilization Cycle”) that leaves people in various states of slavery and freedom.
Application
Some issues are not aligned on the political spectrum:
- The development of technology makes unintelligent people less necessary, and as of right now society can’t give jobs for anyone with an IQ of 85 or lower. Conservatives claim they need fewer barriers to the job market and liberals believe they can get job training for anything whatsoever, and they’re both wrong.
- Government debt is an economic risk, but a conservative nation will gladly spend more on its military while a liberal nation will spend more on social welfare programs, with limited discussion on how to frame taxes to minimize the pain to the public.
Younger people are usually easier to convince than older people. Thus, storytellers who talk about real-life events have plenty of social incentives to gravitate to liberal reasoning. It’s generally a higher social risk to appeal to conservative thoughts because older people are more resistant to change and having children removes any gray area about political fashions that affect them.
The image of politically extreme zealots is more dramatic than the average person’s honest views, so most mass media likes to promote those people. 90% of the people of any given party do not believe that way, and it’s often bigotry to believe they do. Ironically, the “horseshoe effect” means extreme political values curve back toward the same pathway to totalitarianism.
Political debates become fiercely heated from philosophical differences in how we believe people can become evil. Conservatives tend to believe evil is bad choices that lead to circumstances, while liberals tend to believe evil is circumstances that lead to bad choices.
Gender roles can easily fit into both conservative and liberal molds. On the conservative side, females prefer its safety and makes prefer its conquest of the unknown via historical precedent. For liberals, females prefer the heightened aspirations for agreeableness and males can conquer the unknown through novelty.
To live the good life, we must only consider politics to the degree we have control over political decisions. To the average person, it extends only to who we can vote for. In a free society, we must let everyone else learn and decide for themselves.
If everyone were given complete freedom, but also complete responsibility to maintain those freedoms, only high-conscientiousness personalities would want it. Everyone else is fine giving up at least some of their freedoms for security, to their tyrannical detriment.
Human politics have a nasty, irreconcilable paradox that transcends politics:
- Completely abolishing public property would guarantee tyranny to the degree that someone could defeat the unknown.
- Removing all private property would remove tyranny, but also any sense of responsibility (“tragedy of the commons”).
- Even if the unknown persists indefinitely, the absence of love means people will constantly forbid others who desperately need something, sometimes to the point of death.
- The solution for tyrannical power abuse is to destroy it before it takes over everything.
- One of the most just places to destroy tyranny is when power transfers from one generation to the next (i.e., inheritance and inheritance tax).
- However, since parents love their children more than society, they will find ways to secretly transfer that power to their children, even if the children were given complete equality of situation (e.g., all receive the same education and starting income).
- Punishing any parents will mean the entrusted children will conspire to destroy the social system, since they’re not getting what they want and have the reckless power of youth and time to exact their revenge.