Three Dimensional Left & Right Wing Politics

I've written before about a widespread misunderstanding of the complexity of left and right wing positions (like here). Today I want to try to visualise those complexities with a 3D graph representation. When people talk about left and right wing, they really shouldn't be making their statements without defining the type of left and right they mean, because there are (at least) three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right.

Consequently, I think a more accurate measurement of socio-political society would be a 3D graph like the one I have pasted below, with the Z axis determining a place on the spectrum of collectivism (top) vs. individualism (bottom), the Y axis determining a place on the spectrum of economic left and right wing, and the X axis determining a place on the spectrum of social left and right wing too.

As you can see, I've put a red dot to determine where I would stand, generally speaking: economically right wing (because markets are the primary driver of prosperity), individualist (because liberty and freedom are the primary drivers of progression), and socially left wing (because I believe in togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable).

(It's only supposed to be an illustrative model - it's obviously not a fine-detail representation).

Now even if you can get people that far so they think about different types of left and right wing, there's something interesting that plays out in people's perception of left and right wing politics - something I began to think about a bit in a little more depth after I heard Douglas Murray introduce the proposition (although Douglas Murray's consideration was fairly general as he didn't break down the categories of left and wing). The proposition is this. If you start from a fairly moderate position on the social left-to-right spectrum - say somewhere perceived as near the middle - you find that the shift to the extreme right (a fascist dictatorship) is a shorter journey than the shift to the extreme left (a communist dictatorship). It looks something this:

Social left and right spectrum:

Far Left -------------------------------------------------Moderate-------Far Right

In other words, once you veer away from the moderate position to the right, there aren't many perceived steps to take before you fall foul of a dangerous, totalitarian collectivist mentality. If you get brainwashed into Islamic fundamentalism or extreme ethno-centric nationalism and xenophobia, the walk from relatively intolerant moderate to a 'send all immigrants home' or 'Death to all kafirs' mentality isn't that far, because once you tap into a hateful collectivist mentality you are already in touching distance of the kind of extremism that dehumanises people and sends masses to their grave.

But things aren't the same with the walk to the far left: the journey is much slower, and much more Machiavellian. It ends with the gulag, but there are many more steps in between, because shifts to the left disguise their maladies in a more insidious way. They might start with virtue signalling, like endorsing redistributionist policies, bogus missions to save the planet, safe spaces and extremist rallies promoting what has recently been coined 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture', and end up mirroring the dystopian nightmares portended by Orwell, Huxley, Burgess and Bradbury - but they will take more time to be found out than those steps to the right.

A similar thing is true with the economic spectrum of left and right, it looks similar, as does the collectivist-individual spectrum, but perhaps more like this:

Economic left and right spectrum:

Far Left-----------------------------Moderate------------Far Right

Here the shift to the right involves mostly positive things like a freer market, more liberty, greater freedom of ideas, but you only have to champion those qualities a bit more passionately than the moderates and you're soon accused of being a heartless capitalist with no concern for the poor and needy. This is a misconception, of course - for as anyone well versed in economics will know, a freer market, more liberty and greater freedom of ideas are the primary qualities that benefit the poor and needy - they are the answers to most of the problems the economic left are trying to solve.

On the other side, the creep leftwards, if unchecked, will end up with the old Soviet Union or the modern day Venezuela, but along the way it will present itself as a benign, good-intentioned striving towards social justice and the narrowing of the so-called 'unfair inequality' gap. Like a Trojan-horse, the collectivist, authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far left ideologies more easily creep into public discourse than the authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far right ideologies. We appear to have a more acute radar to the dangers of extreme right wing politics, which seems to mean undue suspicion of right wing economic sentiments, which are really a synonym for increased growth, progression and a higher standard of living for all.

And with the collectivists versus the individualists, we find that collectivists on the social left and the right want to demarcate everyone into groups as the primary identifier and pit one group against each other through tribal factions based on power and class, and deny that competence and intelligence and hard work and creativity play the primary role in successes. Moreover, what's often unnoticed is that it's very difficult to align yourself with a group (race, ethnicity, political, regional, national) and not want to be in conflict with others, because tribalism is built on a 'them vs. us' mentality, and is hundreds of thousands of years old in our evolutionary legacy. And as those who've read it will know, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, perhaps better than any book, explores how the totalitarianisms of both the left and the right are cut from the same cloth of impulse.

Luxury Government

 

You may have heard of a phenomenon called Wagner's Law (which I've blogged about before), which observes that with increasing economic growth we generally see a rise in state expenditure. Or to put it another way, the richer a country gets, the more it can afford to splash out on luxuries like government, and state-funded projects our forbears could have scarcely afforded.

What's driving Wagner's Law is that capitalism has made people rich enough to be able to afford more government and more public services - and with a more complex, more diverse range of competing forces, we can afford more state regulation and better public services, as long as they are not inefficient and not best left to consumer choice.

But there is also the phenomenon called Gammon's Law (after Max Gammon), which follows a predictable pattern whereby increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production, where the more resources a system swallows up, the less efficient it becomes in terms of production per unit of investment. Pretty much any big centralised institution falls foul of this - schools, health, taxation, the EU, the church - when it gets so big it passes through the efficiencies of economies of scale and gets so inflated that it begins to suffers from diseconomies of scale (see also the Dunbar number), and will show a pattern whereby increased input produces decrease quality of output.

What muddies the waters even further is that there is much overlap between the social, political and economic landscapes, especially regarding human motivations. Humans are incentivised by a complex range of aspirations; material well-being, safety, self-preservation, community, purpose, status and tribal affiliation. So it's not always easy to say that economic freedom is an exclusively 'right wing' trait and redistribution is an exclusively 'left wing' trait, because all humans are motivated by a complex interaction between those and the other factors.

Moreover, we all have stronger ties in serving our closer family, and weaker ties with the wider community, and it is inevitable that human motivations, in large part, begin locally and extend outwards as we have more to spare. That's why, even in a country that sees continual economic growth and raised living standards, more parochial issues related to social standing, status and self-preservation can make people sound as they have missed some of the story. Similarly, those who proclaim that everything is ok and that the market and science can take care of all our problems are also living outside of truth.

Although bottom up driving forces are usually superior to top down central planning, they are not always, because local iterations in bottom up dynamics are not often sufficiently collectively ordered enough to deal with large scale problems or major changes in the status quo (like a war, a pandemic or a big natural disaster). However badly we may think the government has handled the problems created by Covid, there would have been many more problems and deaths if society tried to manage purely by the invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand, despite the raving left's dumb lament that Covid has handed more power to the capitalists, it has been evident that when people have had to live in restrictive times, it has taken businesses with enough scale and size to be able to quickly adapt to the changing needs and demands of the population (supermarkets, Amazon, Royal Mail, tech companies). The government has done a lot of harm to small business by forcing them to close while the big players hoover up the custom, but it takes big players with a capacious business model and prodigious infrastructure to be able to service a nation in crisis.

That's why in previous writings I have been keen to point out that the motivational factors in the left and right wing bifurcations extend far beyond principles of economics - they extend to qualities like motivations for togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable - and neither the comprehensive free market approach of the economic right nor the comprehensive socialist approach of the economic left satisfies the full gamut of human needs and motivations.

Once people rightly frame left and right wing into the three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right, they will begin to learn that the contributions of right and wing mentalities are both necessary to strike the right kind of balance in a thriving society. As always, we'll need the right balance of freedom and restriction, individualism and collectivism, risk and safety, self-determination and redistribution - you name it, there'll be a balance to be struck.

I suppose the socialists will never be very keen on markets, because they are primed to only see the concentrated faults and miss the more thinly spread benefits. And I suppose free marketers will always have a bit of a blind spot towards the community and solicitous-based nature of socialism because they rightly abhor the economic illiteracy and crass hypocrisy that underlies it. 

Is God 'Pulling' The Universe With His Genius?

Readers familiar with this blog are probably familiar with the genius Kurt Gödel, and his incompleteness theorem, which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be captured in one grand slam rationale without leaving a brute residue of incompleteness.

I mentioned this because I saw an interesting quote from Kurt Gödel that I hadn't seen before:

“I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved. In this case, one disproof, in my opinion, will consist in a mathematical theorem to the effect that the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

This caught my attention because it got me wondering if that's right in a similar way to how my biased random walk theory might be right. While Gödel isn't denying evolution happened, he seems to be friendly to a kind of Intelligent Design: that the evolution of intelligent life forms in the time since the big bang is not mathematically likely unless one assumes a vanishingly unlikely set of initial conditions with a cosmic mathematician as the source of it.

That is to say, in a 14 billion years old universe, biologists tell us that random genetic mutations plus natural selection explains the life we observe. So, the consideration taps into algorithmic information theory (like the notion of Kolmogorov complexity) and tools from complexity theory to study if the biologists’ explanation is consistent with the 14 billion year old age of the universe - and in terms of the timeframe a computational problem like biological life requires - whether this problem possibly even requires exponential time. If a problem requires exponential time, then any algorithm for the problem requires at least (roughly) 2^n time units where n is the number of bits describing the initial conditions of the problem.

So if Gödel is right, then this is the biased random walk I've been writing about for all those years, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe. If evolution requires an exponential amount of time to achieve the complexity of life we see after a few billion years of space expansion, then it required far more time than the ordinary polynomial time with which physics measures the cosmic story.

I'm quite a visual thinker, and I keep picturing an idea of the cosmos being pulled rather than being pushed, and that perhaps that's true of everything significant about Christianity. If we consider that biased random walk, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe - you could say the universe is being pulled by the mathematical structure that exists in the configurational search space of the universe's mechanisms, and was already implicit in God's creative blueprint.

In addition, now consider the narrative structure in the Old and New Testaments. We can't think of the Old Testament except through the lens of how it culminates in the New Testament. In fact, by Genesis 3:15 we have already seen the whole summary of the story, from creation, to the fall, to salvation through Christ. Rather than the Old Testament pushing towards the New Testament - as Christ is the Creator of the universe, then the New Testament superseding the Old is not like a development towards improvement, it is more akin to the notion that the improved state is already implicit in God's mind, because it is older than creation. Hence the New Testament is not just pulling the Old Testament forward - it is, in a sense, also pulling everything that follows it forward to the culmination of God's grand plan. To that end, God's created word has the same model as God's created universe. 

The foundation of my hypothesis can be found here:

The Mathematical Bias Theory Redux: Why There Probably ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps

Dense Populations

I’ve seen several articles recently in the mainstream media, including one from the BBC and one from Sky News, questioning which countries have had the best and worst Covid-19 policies thus far, where this information is being distilled by considering things like number of deaths, population density and herd immunity. But both articles neglect to consider this properly, because they talk about population density as if it's the same thing everywhere you go. It isn't.

Interaction rates differ from place to place once you stop thinking of population density as merely population divided by area, and herd immunity differs from place to once you consider the different dynamics of interaction and exposure. Herd immunity must, by its very nature, bring about different percentages of immunity in different areas of the land.

Frequency of interaction depends somewhat on population density, but not comprehensively. It's an error to merely calculate density by dividing the population by area. Adding 50,000 square miles of uninhabited fields is not going to have a radical effect on the Covid mixing effect in terms of population divided by area, despite causing a reduction in overall population density. And at the same time it has no tangible effect on the average density from the perspective of any one individual.

 

Further Reading: The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth