by robertdreed » Tue Nov 29, 2005 3:07 pm
I really wish that I didn't feel the need to go into a detailed explanation of my political beliefs. For one thing, in contrast to my moral and ethical principles, where I'm attempting to meet a standard that I think of as unvarying, I allow my political beliefs to be subject to change. But, considering the repeated emphasis on ideology that I've found on this board, I'm going to attempt to daunting task of explaining my personal political ideals.<br><br>I'm going to do this using the widely accepted convention of the Left-Right spectrum. However, I'm going to put my own personal take on it.<br><br>I see the Left-Right spectrum folded, spun, mutilated, self-contradicted and otherwise abused by both the conventional Left and the conventional Right. For one thing, both sides seem to think that they're on opposing teams- that one is either one or the other, that one side is overwhelmingly right and the other overwhelmingly wrong. In practice, both ideological "sides" fail to come to grips with their contradictions. Instead, the way I see matters playing out is that they experience those contradictions unconsciously- as the "shadow", in the parlance of some schools of psychology and philosophy. <br><br>To that end, each conventional "side" has come up with its own definitions of what the spectrum means. For instance, in the typical case of the Right, all virtue is held to be coming from the realm of the individual- personal initiative, ambition, creativity, merit, talent, intelligence. and the Left is held to be the collective, the group that saps those positive qualities, preying upon the efforts of the most talented and industrious through coercive means such as forcible taxation, demand for social conformism, zoning restrictions, punitive and arbitrary regulations, mandatory citizenship requirements such as military service, etc. <br><br>That's the Right-idealist line touted by political philosophers like Ayn Rand- "the virtue of selfishness", "capitalism: the unknown ideal", etc. The collective is viewed as being in eternal enmity with the will and effort of individuals. As such, wealth is held to be a product of Virtue, and poverty the result of sloth, indolence, parasitism, dependency, and lack of thrift. <br><br>The fallacy to be found in all of this is the illusion of the "slef-made individual." It isn't to be found in human beings! The exitence of language alone puts the lie to the idea that human consciousness is exclusively individual. All sorts of teachings are imparted by the collective society into which a human child is born. Without those teachings- the rough definition of "culture"- human beings don't get very far. Feral children are not successes, in any but the most rudimentary animal sense. Every human depends on an interaction with a wider society to teach them the basics of verbal communication, interaction, and various life skills. <br><br>(to be continued- this is really going to take a while)<br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 12/4/05 11:59 pm<br></i>
