Grounding Politics in Reality

Note: this has been delisted. I think the argument is incomplete and represents the concept poorly. The page itself will remain online to ensure links continue to work.

The political compass is laughably limited. It is primarily focused on matching a progressive/conservative spectrum with an authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. It assumes ideologies are variants of left/right and auth/lib spectrums, rather than complete philosophies unto themselves.

For example, socialism is not simply a more extreme form of social democracy. It is a fundamentally different way of looking at politics. It has always been this way. I don't think describing Marxism as "further left" than Bernie Sanders is enlightening. Marxists see Sanders as part of the bourgeois political system and as an enemy of the revolution. Social democracy works to appease the proletariat rather than empower it.

Likewise, fascism is not merely an authoritarian brand of conservatism. It is a revolutionary ideology that often rallies conservatives along, but overall their ideologies do not match up. They have different epistemological systems that play on each other rather than interact intimately.

Different ideologies have different tendencies, but they all are their own worldviews. They should not be confused for variants of each other when there is no consistent relationship between them. Words like "left" or "libertarian" might be used to describe an existing ideology, but almost never define them.

A practical problem that arises when we use broad labels to describe ideologies is the false sense of unity it provides. When we see others who share our compass position, we may feel united with them on some level, despite having fundamentally opposing views. For example, as an anarchist, I wish to abolish the state and capitalism, seeing them as intricately connected. I believe a liberatory movement must address both.

On the other hand, right libertarians would like to keep capitalism, but diminish or eliminate the state. We may be agreed on some aspects of anti-statism, but we disagree on an important aspects of the struggle. Unity is impossible because our conceptions of the state and capital are completely different, as libertarians (and social democrats) see them as conceptually separate while anarchists see them as interconnected.

Anarchists and others see society as a result of many inseparable forces. Capitalism is an oppressive force, along with the state, patriarchy, colonialism, and other coercive hierarchies. This is a concept known in feminist literature as the kyriarchy. All of it must be overthrown if we wish to have a society free from domination. We cannot fight one without fighting them all unless we wish to see the others return. Reductionist approaches to radical change will fail.

This is where almost all mainstream (and most radical) thought fails. Libertarians wish to abolish the state, socialists wish to abolish capitalism, feminists wish to abolish patriarchy, and indigenous peoples wish to abolish colonialism. However, conceptualizing these as individual issues expresses ignorance of both the history of their development as well as their interaction today.

For example, statism and the judicial system were developed from early patriarchal societies, in which older men were appointed as decision-makers for a society. An example of this can be found in the early Jewish civilization, which (according to the Bible) established its patriarchal justice system to relieve Moses of the responsibility of managing all of the Jews' affairs.

Colonialism and capitalism are correlated similarly. Colonialism enabled the exportation of capitalism around the world, planting the seeds for its domination. Conversely, capitalism requires continuous growth to exist, so states and corporations are driven to expand market reach to exploit distant resources for profit. Fighting capitalism inherently involves fighting colonialism, and vice versa.

Another result of colonialism is the institution of white supremacy. Many white people, including some self-proclaimed leftists, shrug off the idea as either nonsensical or irrelevant. This is also historically ignorant. White supremacy has been a primary aspect of colonialism from its beginning, with Europeans forcibly seizing land, suppressing the natives, and bringing in foreign slaves to work the land, creating a settler-native-slave triad structure. This structure is designed to provide for the settler while exploiting others to supply that provision. Through culture, inheritance, and social status, the structure perpetuates through today.

Pointing out whiteness as a real social issue is not an example of reverse racism nor does it involve hating white people. Instead, it is the result of understanding colonialism's effects on modern society. Eradicating white supremacy does not involve eliminating white people, but rather addressing white culture's domination of other cultures and ways of living. Criticism of white culture involves understanding what caused this domination to develop and considering how to uproot those causes.

Tying this back to the political compass, you can see that dividing political ideology into two axes is insufficient for understanding reality. Every ideology relates to the world, and some do so more consistently than others. Most ideologies misunderstand the disease, and thus provide irrelevant cures.

A friend of mine once described all the corners of the political spectrum as "cringe". I agree. None of them have a conceptualization of reality that fits the world we wish to change. They are dishonest about what they wish to accomplish, generally not realizing that their wishes do not correspond to reality. Certain ideologies are fostered to control, not to liberate. An honest evaluation of many ideologies reveal them to be little more than a particular flavor of the mainstream: one that is well-tended to create false political tensions to avoid addressing real issues.

We see this poor relationship to reality whenever these ideologies attempt to solve issues we face in the real world. Once the discussion moves from imaginary threats well-developed by an ideology to real ones, they fail miserably. For example, conservatism's best response to the real threat of climate change is, by and large, to deny it. That fits best within their working model of reality. According to their worldview, laissez-faire economics must overall produce positive results, even if they require some tweaking to run smoothly.

Progressives hardly have a better approach to dealing with threats. Most often they cannot see beyond existing social and political institutions for answers. Addressing climate change is reduced to a regulatory and diplomatic issue. If only we could regulate corporations and work as an international community, we could appropriately address climate change.

Similarly, techno-optimists do not interact with the world honestly. When shown an issue, technology is proposed as the solution. Technology has certainly solved real problems in the past, but it is not a universal solution. In relation to climate change, burning fossil fuels is not what causes ecocide, nor are the particular chemicals that happen to be used in production. Ecocide isn't caused by coal and corporations any more than genocide is caused by gas chambers and firing squads.

Environmentalists also fail to understand the world holistically. Their worldview requires them to find individual ecocidal practices within society and address them via legislation. They sometimes represent a cross-section of progressives and techno-optimists which blind themselves to the root of the problem. Eliminating ecocide at its source is outside of the confines of their ideology.

This leads to my conclusion: an effective political ideology must interact with the real world instead of creating its own imaginary world full of problems to solve. Only when your politics are informed by reality do you have a chance at addressing real problems now and in the future.

~ Josias, 2022-10-13 (CC-BY-SA 4.0)