Should we abandon the labels of left vs right?

[enchanted]

Leo often discusses liberals and conservatives, but I question the usefulness of these labels. In his blog, Leo admits it's pointless to label dictators as left or right, so why not apply the same logic to individuals? After all, our beliefs are a blend of left and right values across various topics. This division could be causing more harm than good, hindering unity.

Should we who are concerned with finding the truth, abandon these unquantifiable distinctions that confine people into narrow categories?

[Bobby_2021]

Left or right are labels that are applicable to ideas, not individuals.

You are correct in the sense we should not be labelling people as leftists or rightists. But we need to categorize ideas and label them. So labels are quite useful in that sense.

[enchanted]

Interesting, yes distinctions are useful in all fields and therefore in politics as well. Thanks 

Edited April 7 by enchanted

[bebotalk]

For the best part of two centuries, most political discourse has been a battle between pro-free market and pro-collectivisation. Whilst various beliefs can be seen as more complex than that, it is something that generally still holds. 

To say that dictators cannot be left or right is false. Autocracy isn't a left or right ideal. Whilst Stalin and Hitler were both autocrats, their ideologies were clear. Stalin was a Marxist-Leninist and Hitler was a racial supremacist fascist. Both the USSR and Germany under their rules were totalitarian, however they had differing ideological means and ends. Stalin wasn't a fascist and didn't care much about racial hierarchy. Hitler definitely did. 

In the world today, Xi and Kim are communists, though China is somewhat "freer" than North Korea. Putin is a dictator, despite his "elections". He's neither a fascist nor a communist, but clearly is a Russian nationalist. 

Left and right aren't perfect labels, that can capture all ideologies. But as long as capitalism is the dominant economic system, there will be detractors to it, so left and right are still valid. 

[Yimpa]

Labels are important, but we should stop looking at them from a narrow perspective.

Edited April 11 by Yimpa

[bebotalk]

Leo is wrong. Dictators can be seen as left or right. 

[Ishanga]

The problem is your identified with the labels, and your Intellect which is a discretionary tool we use to survive another day, but we've taken it too another level of discretion where we are dividing and separating everything we perceive and based on your belief system identification judge ppl, which is not basing anything on reality.. The only thing you have to judge and discern is that if something/someone is life empowering or non life empowering, not on political, religious, societal ideologies and belief systems which are in the millions on how you can view something nowadays, it causes too much separation and exclusiveness, our problems and challenges will never be solved with this sort of intellectual identification problem!

[bebotalk]

Well as we live in a society, we will have the capacity to determine how we should structure society. Our intellect can be applied to anything. 

[Ishanga]

34 minutes ago, bebotalk said:

Well as we live in a society, we will have the capacity to determine how we should structure society. Our intellect can be applied to anything. 

Society, is just a word, its not really a living experience for most ppl, so its an imagined things, ppl are functioning within a society at a very low level, its basic stuff, they mostly think about themselves and how to get away with breaking more and more rules/laws and not get caught, its getting out of hand, I see this everyday in Toronto, the exclusiveness ppl feel, like the are entitled and everything is about just them alone, crazy really, and is due to intellectual identification, it divides and separates everything.. Intellect is needed for sure, but we don't need to identify with it at all, just use it to provide basic needs and figure things out then drop it, don't hold on to it so strongly as the be all end all of everything that we have to use within our capabilities!

[bebotalk]

18 hours ago, Ishanga said:

Society, is just a word, its not really a living experience for most ppl, so its an imagined things, ppl are functioning within a society at a very low level, its basic stuff, they mostly think about themselves and how to get away with breaking more and more rules/laws and not get caught, its getting out of hand, I see this everyday in Toronto, the exclusiveness ppl feel, like the are entitled and everything is about just them alone, crazy really, and is due to intellectual identification, it divides and separates everything.. Intellect is needed for sure, but we don't need to identify with it at all, just use it to provide basic needs and figure things out then drop it, don't hold on to it so strongly as the be all end all of everything that we have to use within our capabilities!

Society is a group of people with shared values who co-exist. This can range from language to dress, religion, etc. The point stands. Peolpe will think of how society is shaped or shouldn't be shaped. the OP's points are thus moot. 

[tvaeli]

Left is Yang, solving the problem from ideal viewpoint, where everybody works united and it's kind of communism in capitalism. Right is Yin, solving the problems through locally solving every single piece and aspect, and not looking at the whole as it solves through evolutionary process, where the entities they create are dieing and learning the genetics of surviving entities, so that you try a business several times and learn from your failure - businesses themselves are not guaranteed to survive, instead, an evolution is guaranteed. What happens inside the business is an anarchy, and sometimes it can be kind of a problem - nobody protects you from being completely left out, which is not statistical and is a crime. A business with agressive strategy can abuse a idealistic person for quite a while. Those problems were heavily discussed by communists, as much as problems of communism were heavily discussed by capitalists.

In Taoism and other eastern philosophies, Yin and Yang must be united, and they both contain each others - the way capitalism contains the left wing is the way capitalism, a little bit, is a communism. Communism, also, could not avoid solving certain questions like a business would do, and so the "more communists" had to be raised a little bit higher than others. It also had some companies or corporations, and people, who worked more, were having more. How to unite and integrate the Yin and Yang in Tao, this is the complex problem - for example, if people do not help each others at all, or when extreme taxes stop them, the capitalism also has problems, so the people must have some healthy connection of left and right. But they cannot deny that those two things are kind of opposites, and you can never think they are exactly the same - you find the same paradox on higher and higher levels, and left is always appearing inside right, as well as right is appearing inside left.

[tvaeli]

On 15/4/2024 at 10:53 AM, bebotalk said:

Society is a group of people with shared values who co-exist. This can range from language to dress, religion, etc. The point stands. Peolpe will think of how society is shaped or shouldn't be shaped. the OP's points are thus moot. 

In age of computers and AI, we can make societies much more less megalithic, so that people can have very different societies, which are somehow united. It's today theoretically possible that people in the same countries have different laws, and they build up different infrastructures and follow their own laws - in old times, it would have been impossible amount of papers and documents, but now, the computers can handle this and despite people paying taxes and building the infrastructures of companies based on different ideologies, those would still get the money to circulate so that even the common budget would exist. This is the great opportunity and challenge for the way we use computers - what the computers can do and what the humans can do using them. Artificial intelligence could take the viewpoints of different groups together, and build all the necessary houses and companies so that all the people would live in different countries, still being united into one country. It's like unifiing paradigms or religions.

[BlueOak]

If you are going to give people a better one yes.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/

What you'll find is resistance and confusion when you take a dual concept across society, and either try to collapse it entirely or broaden it to something more informative.

I'd be dishonest if I didn't mention duality manifests things, so having a dual concept in a government allows it to do the same. That doesn't mean the pendulum doesn't tilt across four political axis when modeled that way, because it does.

Edited April 17 by BlueOak

[Basman]

I don't think the label of "left" or "right" is inherently problematic. It is more the way people use them to pigeonhole others in a binary way. The problem is that most people have a very shallow understanding of politics and just parrot concepts that their in-group espouses.

Essentially, there is a lack of serious impartial discussion with the intent of understanding as opposed to debate brainrot. That requires a level of intellectual integrity that many people are not even aware of (or care about) so we end up with a low quality discussion that misses the forest for the trees. Most are too biased in my opinion, at least what you see on the internet.

I know people who would be genuinely upset if I told them that I hold "right-wing opinions" because of how charged that word is in their minds. "Tribalism" is counter-intuitive to a grounded and holistic understanding of politics.