Multidimensional

How many dimensions are there?

A friend and I were talking politics and philosophy, and he used an anology to express something I really liked. He said, “try to teach me the concept of 2”. Of course I picked up two pencils, and started doing “this is one, and if I add another one, that’s two”. His response was that he sees either 11, or two non-identical objects. In nature, and the Universe, there is no such thing as two, because all items are unique, there are no duplicates; things that may superficially look the same are different the deeper you look. All math, and science is a construct, based on the overgeneralization that unique objects are the same, or “close enough for government/science work”. Since he and I were in fierce agreement on overgeneralizations and constructs of science becoming a modern secular religion, this didn’t go much further at the time, but I thought about applying his analogy to politics and the origins of parties and philosophies.

In the U.S. and around the world, many people try to fit one’s political leanings into this archaic one-dimensional solution of whether one is left-wing or right-wing. This illogical arrangement puts anarchists, communists, democrats and socialists on the left, even though they have many directly opposed views, along with fascists, libertarians, republicans on the right, with equally conflicting views. Since each doesn’t like who they’re grouped with, they whine about it, while still using it to derogatorily classify their opponents. Riddle me this, is your morally conservative pastor, who believes in tithing (taxes), censorship and redistributing wealth right or left wing?

This left-right thing comes from pre-revolutionary France where the King had a parlimentary like assembly to help him decide on issues like taxation (and take away some of the responsibility/blame for such things). Since he was beheaded soon after this, you can see how well that ruse and responsibility-sharing worked.

The first estate was the Clergy (and the head of that, the King). They sat to the King’s right. The Clergy was quite a bit more common than today, and they had duties like collecting “the dime” (the 10% taxes) and they served as moral police (censoring books, etc.), operated schools and hospitals, and distributed relief to the poor.

The Second Estate was towards the back and right of the room and was the nobility; traditionally divided into the “nobility of the sword” or the justice department and “nobility of the robe” or the civil government. With associated responsibilities.

The third estate was everyone else that wasn’t aristocracy or clergy and sat to the King’s left. While that was supposed to reperesent everyone else and include working and lower class, in truth, due to limited seats, it was the middle class (and upper-middle-class) that got or bought representation, so the lower class was not well represented.

In latin the terms “right” has connotations with correct, while “left” has meanings like sinister, unfavorable and unlucky — so there were reasons for the seating arrangment based on who you should trust more; with the commoners looking out for their own interests, while the right/clergy (educated men) was more likely to be looking out for deeper things like the state/churches interests, spirituality and philosophy.

People later skewed and over-generalized the political leanings within the chamber, to mean the left wing of the room was more liberal, and the right wing was more conservative, and to try to associate that to our political leanings in general. Which is of course poppycock (which literally translated means “soft dung”). Even back then, the right wing was mixed with clergy from nobility, and clergy that came from commoners, so the right wasn’t all that right wing. And the elitists on the left weren’t attuned to the needs of the commoners and were far more “conservative” than our right wing is today. And if you entered the chamber (facing the King), the “left wing” would be to your right, and the right wing would be to your left – but what seems to matter is the King’s perspective. So like most over-generalizations, it is skewed by your perspective and is not very well balanced or vaguely representative of the people or even today’s political parties.

The biggest problem is that it is one-dimensional construct that is an over generalization. Life, nature, people are not that simple; they just don’t fit the generalized math / world view. And like Einstiens theory, there is a lot of relativity in the picture. We had a revolution in 1776 because the ridiculously high tax rate of 5% (only on imports/exports, no income tax back then). Up until the 1950’s in the U.S., only the top 7% of the population had to pay income taxes of up to 15% of their income, today roughly 60% of the population pays around 30% of their income. So we’re taking over twice as much from 4 times as many people as the far left social-progressives of 50 years ago could fathom, not to mention our founding fathers. So the context of time matters as well, and what you see is relative to where/when you see if from.

Thus there are many dimensions to view someone’s political leanings on (besides just time). There have been a few that tried to expand the one-dimensional left-right into two or even three dimensional grids or cubes. Of course those views are biased by what issues they choose as the primary axes. Since different people value different things, any assumption on what their primary axes are, is likely to be invalid for someone else. So a two or three axis system is way too simple a construct as we just don’t fit well into boxes, even three dimensional ones. Our souls and ideologies want to be free to roam, and have a consistency on the dimensions we choose to value — but unless you understand what those are, you will not understand us or the consistency.

So what are some of those dimensions? Here’s just a few:

1) Liberty to Tyranny; One significant dimension of politics is individualism (liberty) versus collectivism or statism. Who should have the power/rights, the individual and free choice, or the state/collective, maybe all the way to one individual leader making the choice? This is sometimes seen as anarchy to fascism (social power); with both our left and right wings favoring degrees of fascism. But this dimension alone isn’t very clear as there are many subtle variants and vectors.

1a) Equality versus Aristocracy, or how much to you tolerate spread in society? This is a modifier to liberty because if you believe there should be equality, then what do you do about it? Well, if you believe you have to force it, then your belief in equality is influencing your beliefs in liberty.

1b) Responsibility or Nobles Oblige — how responsible should each of us be to society or the lowest people ont he ladder? What should we do about it?

2) Authority; On top of whether the state should have power, there is where should that power reside; there is local governments (specialization) versus central governments (generalization) or even multi-governmental or world organizations (uber-governments / globalization).

3) Compassion; When you break it down further there’s the dimension of not only how much liberty we should have but the dimension of what we should do about it. If you don’t comply with laws or leanings, there are degrees of tolerance or tough versus soft mindedness. How stiff should punishments be, or how draconian should society be? As well as compassion on what you should do for the downtrodden who did nothing wrong.

3a) Not only is compassion at the individual level, but also at the national one. What is your degree of pacifism or militancy when dealing not with individuals but groups, nations, alliances, etc.

4) Rate of change; There’s another modifier on not only how far you should go, but how fast you should get there — or the dimension of change rate, with radicals believing in rapid change, and conservatives believing in slow progress.

5) Outward or inward facing; are you thinking global, national, local or individual? This thing modifies and is modified by all the others. And there are variants of this.

5A) Internationalism/Isolationism; should the nation should exert power abroad to implement its policy, or should it ignore the rest of the world? This starts to get modified by things like authority — and do you think authority should be at a global super-government level (multilateralism), or reside at your governments level (unilateralism)?

5B) Trade; How do you feel about trade? Fair trade, free trade, or protectionism? How fast should you get there? Also where the authority should be; local, state, federal, global? Should people in Uganda have a say in how you manufacture your goods and how much your minimum wage should be, or vise versa?

5C) Diversity: do you like soup or stew? Should your society be made up of many cultures and ideas, or should we blend that own until there is only one socially accepted flavor (the entire culture)? The latter implies accepting immigrants only at a rate which they can be pureed into the whole — while the former allows larger chunks of imports that retain their own unique flavors. Do you want to keep others out completely to protect what you have?

6) Participation and form: should we be a Democracy where the majority rules versus an oligarchy, where an elite few rule or even an efficient tyranny (with a single ruler)? Do you want republics where there’s an abstract relationship and compromise between the two? And in a republic do you prefer parlimentary or presidential? Who should participate and how should we govern?

7) Another huge overlay/dimension on all these is religion. Think of all the ways this colors the others. Religious versus secular is one dimension (how much tolerance towards religion). Another is how much you believe religion should impact society (role of church) and how much separation of church and state there should be. Morality could be in here as well; are there absolute right/wrong? Where does that come from? What should you do about it? I think people lose sight of how many religions there are like the religion of secularism or science, the religion of environmentalism, of agisms, sexuality, and so on. Religion is more than just a church, for me it is your belief system.

Think about that when someone mentions a generalization like “red state verus blue state”. What does that mean? What are the dimensions and cultural underpinnings? Well this is really just a poor generalization of looking at a dimensions like urban versus rural, or in the U.S. Hamiltonian Federalists vs. Jeffersonian Anti-federalists. Basically, in cities you have large societal infrastructure and services like Police, Fire, Water, and so on so they trust those services and want more of it. Where in rural areas, you have far less. In rural areas you have to trust yourselves (your own gun, well, windmill, etc.) or your neighbors for these things, not some infrustracture that is 30 minutes or hours away (at best). Red State / Blue State is often taking a State like California which is 75% red by geography, and coloring it blue because the majority of the population (primarily in two cities Greater L.A. and S.F. Bay area) have a thin demographic majority. While in Utah or Texas you have both more urban populated areas, and people in the cities tend to know more rural people or think more rural. But of course, all the other dimensions and modifiers, and dozens I haven’t mentioned also have to be factored in. The Red/Blue or Black/White view of the world is a strawman constructs so the author can make a point, but is a piss-poor representation of anything in particular.

When you think of just my 7 spectrums, instead of just the single “left versus right”, it gives you an inkling of how shallow the parties are. And more parties doesn’t necessarily mean better representation. If you assume just 3 degrees of belief in each of the 10 major areas mentioned (3^10), that’s over a half million parties required just to get a feeble and over-generalized highly-granular representation of your actual views. I’d guess you need about 350,000,000 parties to accurately represent the people in the U.S. — slightly greater than the population because some people reserve the right to change their minds. Nature not only abhors a vacuum, it doesn’t seem to be too fond of the concept of 2 or sameness either. It’s time humanity recognize that fact, and accept more of the uniqueness and individuality that we are a part of.