I think the questions may have changed since the last time I took that test, but I’m still having tea with Ghandi and the Dalai Lama as usual. Which I guess supports the idea that the test is only measuring economic and social values, and not any other beliefs or attitudes. I’m not a fan of Ghandi.
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It probably makes more sense to UK politics, at least some of the funding for it comes from an organisation founded by Glenys Kinnock (former Labour MEP and wife of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.) They don’t deny that the test is about western politics though.
It is flawed, although less so than the Nolan chart (the purpose of which is to persuade you to vote for the US Libertarian Party)
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It was pretty good at showing where the parties in the recent New Zealand election sat as well. But lets say we were to add a z dimension and plot in 3D, what would be on that axis?
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When I thought about it on the previously mentioned thread, I suggested religiosity and collectivism/individualism as other axes. Later I thought of a fifth axis but I didn’t add it and I cant remember what it was now.
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Ginger or Mary Ann?
Marmite?
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Even within just the Christian tradition, that faith alone can encompass the extremes of selfish prosperity doctrine all the way through to the social justice and relief/charity activities of the Salvation Army. I’m pretty sure there is a broad spectrum political conviction going on in there, yet congregants are likely to be equally devout despite a spectrum of voting patterns. That would make it less useful as an axis, even if other religions think and vote en-bloc. Which I doubt, somehow.
Likewise, how is economically right wing not individualist and left wing not collectivist? Isn’t that just renaming the axis?
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Because the middle ground, mutualism, is also on the left?
Because the real question is whether we regard the current arrangements of power, property, etc. as just or unjust.
We have people who think that if you are born with disabilities, you must have made poor life decisions, if you are raped by cops, you must be a w**** looking for a big payoff and must have made them do it, if you are killed by cops, you must be a t*** who attacked them, etc. so of course we have people who think that if your ancestors were robbed of the land, forced into slavery or serfdom or extermination camps, they must have done something to deserve it and you must be looking to rob the rich.
Nice recursion! Maybe it trains some people this way.
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I’ve thought that a somewhat more realistic model might be a topographic map, with hills and valleys, indicating that there are more and less likely places to occupy on that map.
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Which is my point about making it another axis. On the two axes chart I am in the same area as Leo Tolstoy would have been, but we would have disagreed about religion.
Off-topic: The Salvation Army are not a great example of charity, try getting them to help you if you are queer. In my opinion they have earned their nickname of The Starvation Army. The Church of England appear radical in comparison.
It would help break the ‘religion=right wing’ meme, which can only be a good thing
I don’t think it is.
Some of the original 19th individualist anarchists like Max Stirner were dismissive of capitalism. Anarcho-primitivists are both anti-capitalist and individualist.
From the wikipedia article on individualist anarchism.
In regards to economic questions, there are diverse positions. There are adherents to mutualism (Proudhon, Émile Armand, early Benjamin Tucker), egoistic disrespect for “ghosts” such as private property and markets (Stirner, John Henry Mackay, Lev Chernyi, later Tucker), and adherents to anarcho-communism (Albert Libertad, illegalism, Renzo Novatore).
On the other hand a capitalist state could be collectivist by ‘encouraging’ it’s citizens to strongly identify with a business. Think along the lines of nationalism.
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Have you read Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism? It’s got some interesting (if a bit dry) discussion of that kind of thinking. She warns that people who fight those kind of ideas often end up merely standing them on their heads, and believing the absolute reverse idea, thus themselves helping to perpetuate conflict. For example a person might take the stance that all rape accusations are false after encountering someone who insists that there is no such thing as a false rape accusation. People entering a discussion with such petrified mindsets are incapable of doing anything but talking past each other.
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And yet also mine about wishing to ignore it. The aim is surely to get nice statistically significant clusters in 2 or 3D which are mutually exclusive, to find where the “ideal” political parties or commonest groups of viewpoints lie? So that we can get:
…when it is graphed. (Although we would end up with nice globular clusters instead if we come up with a viable z axis and do it 3D)
If a factor isn’t exclusive, then it won’t help us make a map like that. Given that religion —or at least Christianity— can encompass a wide range of political views and it’s politics we’re interested in, then religiosity isn’t a good fit for a z axis. People in each cluster just agree until they talk about religion (like @the_borderer and Tolstoy and the Dalai Lama and I) but are equivalent in all else.
Isn’t that a particularly Anglophone thing? Mainland Europe and Latin America have Christian Democrat and Christian Socialist traditions, which are definitely not “right-wing”. And those political parties can be mapped on the 2D political compass without referencing their religious beliefs and indeed get votes from the non-religious. I suspect that the religion = right wing thing —especially in US and UK— is because religion more often pairs with social conservatism while economically left-wing parties are frequently socially liberal, which pushes the religious to vote economically right wing only as a side effect of their social conservatism.
I take your point that individualism vs collectivism is a slightly different spectrum, and I can see how the individualist anarchists fall out of the 2D graph. But then the individualist anarchists aren’t really about voting, politics and society —and they’re pretty rare. Meanwhile, those on the collectivist end of that line would surely still fall somewhere in the ‘economically left’ half of the existing 2D plane and they are about society, thus fitting into a political model just fine. So I’m still not sure that line is a useful addition as a z axis as it would just add noise …
Well, my point was that if some people can push the absolute worst victim-blaming, then some people can believe milder but more pervasive victim-blaming.
So it is hard to get any aggreement on which arrangements of power, property, etc. are just or unjust, or what to do about it. And from my perspective equality vs. inequality seems like a more important cleavage in social and economic issues than markets vs. various non-market systems.
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How about dogmatism? That might be a handy axis.
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Yeah, dogmatism can crop up in any number of worldviews… Religion certainly doesn’t have a lock on it. But a view that “I am right, no matter what…” can be found in just about any sort of vision of reality.
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At the very least, it could identify people I’d prefer to avoid.
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Sometimes people talk past each other because they aren’t really talking to the person they are pretending to be engaging. Instead they are playing for the crowd, trying to craft an image of themselves that will invite positive feedback from a hoped-for larger audience. Slashdot used to call that karma-whoring.
Sometimes people talk past each other because they are just using an earlier comment as a stepping stone towards their own release of psychological pressures; again, they aren’t primarily interacting with the person they are nominally talking to at all. You’ll often see a post deconstructed (yes, I mean literally deconstructed) solely so that it can be an outlet for a respondent’s rage or bitterness. It’s not seeking the adulation of the mob, it’s seeking catharsis.
In both such cases what’s going on is that one party has literally no interest in the ideas or meaning of the other person, except as a springboard to expressing themselves. It’s often unclear whether the person doing this is even aware of it. Self-delusion may be part of the psychology at times.
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There’s a great listening technique they teach at the Kripalu Yoga Center which is:
Either on a specific talking prompt or just free form:
- Sit opposite a partner.
- Person A talks for x minutes (2 - 5 minutes is usually the frame)
- Meantime, Person B practices listening with love and compassion but cannot speak or practice a response.
- Switch roles.
You can do it in series, like rounds of 3 with progressively deeper topics of discussion to riff on.
I’ve done it a bunch of times and it’s amazing to be listened to, as well as to listen to people without the hassle of conversation or need to resolve anything.
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Amen to that form. For starters, people have enough trouble living and communicating with one another, much less with large groups of people. As @FoolishOwl mentioned above, the rich, complex language humans use is so easy to misconstrue for the same reasons it works really well.
And listening is a forgotten art in our culture. The easiest exercise in that is to answer questions (especially emotional ones) with, “So what you’re saying is…” and then repeat your own understanding of the other person’s point. It’s hard as hell to do, but damned if it doesn’t clear things up. If marriage licenses required a brief class on communication between partners, the divorce rate would probably dry up.
Yes, I particularly like this exercise as it is easy to do and nice for both sides.
It’s weird that even though I volunteered on a hotline and have been trained in active listening techniques, it’s still very hard to do them with my spouse and they definitely don’t have the same neutral effect they do with others. We tend to take each others’ words much more personally no matter how hard we try to listen.
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