3. The Left-Right Political Spectrum is about Class Conflict | What is Politics?
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- Опубліковано 25 сер 2024
- Most journalists and academics don't even know what left and right really mean, or why it's so important to get it right - but you will after you listen to this!
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Jordan Peterson made me question the purpose of politics and the human condition, Adam Curtis made me question my simplified worldview and understanding of history, and your channel made me understand why I'm actually a left-wing Marxist anarchist. Thanks youtube.
zoinks - i think that’s the best comment i ever got along with another one along those lines from a long time ago! thank you!!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks mate, It is good you put in the effort to make videos to explain these concepts. Because I'm not someone that would ever read enough to question things that deep. Podcast format is the way I consume most media and information.
@@gtjus Yeah, same on JBP. I love him, but he has no idea about politics & power issues, plus uses false definitions based on propaganda that changed meanings, rather than historically correct definitions.
@@gtjus The problems that most people, JP included suffer from is one of Preconceived Notions (PNs). They're almost always incorrect.
What do children come to think of politics? Whatever they're told, mixed in with PNs. Like "my parents wouldn't want a system that didn't work towards Our Best Interests. Ergo, our Current Systems must work towards our best interests."
Now if anyone questions any aspect of 'Government,' the adult this child grows up into reacts as if what is for their Best Interests is being attacked. & this makes people absolutely incapable of separating out "politicians" from 'Government.'
This makes people incapable of questioning _politicians_ because doing so feels like they're age six, Questioning One's Own Parents.
This is why we keep allowing _politicians_ to run things, act with impunity even though we know they're corrupt. No matter how often people *state* that they know politicians are lying, they fail to separate the notion of what they've believed politicians to be since childhood from the concept of 'Government' forever.
That's why people who claim to know industrial polluting is killing us can't bring themselves to try to change things to make it illegal. When _politicians_ speak in defense of industry, they immediately react as if "Daddy is speaking" never realizing that Daddy only said what he said because _his_ parents said so.
@@pebblepod30 he essentialises a lot of vague ill-define concepts like "the West" or "christianity" as if they were individuals with specific agendas
Really loving this channel. It kinda hit me the other day that “modern conservatism” hasn’t changed much over the past 400 years, and conservatives in general stem from monarchists/aristocrats. Conservatives love hierarchy that’s what they’re all about.
thank you! well conservatism is a bit different from right wing, even if the words come from the same era - conservatism is more of a personality disposition and people often have left wing positions on things despite being conservative - but right wing is by definition about hierarchy, and yes, you see the chain coming down through the centuries and beyond!
Your channel is refreshing. I've been a pilitcal hunkie since I was 16 and studied politics in college. This might be the best explanation of political thought and theories on UA-cam that is easily digestible by everyday people.
thank you, that’s my aim!
great video, i am sharing this until everybody on earth start to make sense ^^
thank you! how did you find out about it? and please let other people know about it, i’m having a hard time publicizing it!
well i got the video because i subscribed, but i discoverd your videos with the one on the worbs, probably because i look for political content a lot. your videos rocks!! the praxis is strong ^^. i didnt't know there was another human on earth with this knowledge, i started to feel a little lonely xd
@@lindelstephanie8784 thank you!! i love to hear that!
@@lindelstephanie8784 Psychologically, there's a reason. Children pick up Unspoken Rules along with the fear those come attached with. Well, our parents don't _question _*_politicians,_* do they? Maybe a policy or decision, but not the "right" of politicians to tell us what to think.
This fear is so entrenched that people convinced that industrial polluting is killing the planet can't emotionally hold the politicians defending corporations' rights to pollute accountable. They _can't_ bring themselves to *question* any politician on any policy.
This allows corporations to have Complete Control. Politicians have Decision-Making Power. they can sell their votes on issues in favor of corporate interests despite this being illegal in every Western nation because people's fears keep them from holding politicians accountable when they do this.
This is really awesome. Adding to my playlist. Thanks for all your work.
thanks! please let people know about it if you can, my audience is tiny right now! stay swole!
Best video I've seen in a long time.
Subscribed!
thank you, comments like that keep me motivated! for more on left and right see episodes 4 and 5. and let people know about the show if you can, it’s hard to get the word out!
I subscribed the first video I watched of theirs. The research and ability to relay the info is special
@@SgtVeritas seriously though. I don't understand how this channel isn't massively popular, it's amazing.
I shared it with my right-wing friends, I hope we can start having the same representation of the same concepts. If he sees it.
if he disputes the definition you can show them episode 5 where i explain why these are the right definitions etc
I think one can add to the democratic vs dominance hierarchies.
I would add temporary vs static (or permanent) hierarchies.
This is in regards to the establishment and purpose of hierarchies.
When a hierarchy is being established is it to set up a system of decision making that is to last over time vs one that only lasts under very specific conditions and exists to serve a very specific purpose which upon satisfaction, the hierarchy is then dissolved.
An example. If a bunch of people were trekking through the woods. Everyone was equal in terms of decision making power. But suddenly they come across a surging river which they want to cross. There happens to be one person in the group who is particularly skilled at crossing such rivers safely and effectively. And so this person is then awarded temporary decision making power over everyone else to achieve the goal of crossing the river.
This form of power exchange is intensely conditional. It’s
1. Temporally conditional: where it only lasts during the time period of crossing the river.
2. Skill-based: where only the person who has the capacity needed is qualified to obtain control.
3. Scope of effect: where the decision making power only applies to the task at hand and nothing else.
4. Anti-tyrannical: where any abuse of power would disqualify the individual from the position.
5. Consensual: where the power only applies to those in the group who agreed with the conditions beforehand.
6. Non-transferable: where the one in power cannot give others power over others without their consent.
7. Anti-democratic: where majority vote doesn’t give the one in charge power over the minority who didn’t consent.
There’s probably more conditions but I think the point is made clear.
What i’m calling a temporary hierarchy is the most anarchist-friendly hierarchy of power that I can conceive of and agree to. It’s the type of hierarchy which could work in small independent co-ops. I think it’s necessarily more refined than just the democratic vs dominance based approach.
yes, but i disagree that it doesn’t fit in the hierarchy vs equality paradigm but i’d just put that on the equality side, somewhere near the left end, but not all the way
This video has one of the most creatively thoughtful thumbnail I've ever seen. "Left" is pointing to the right, indicating the label applies to the Soviet Union (which is on the right of the thumbnail). But at first glance it appears "Left" is the label above the swastika, which would mean Nazis were leftists. The ambiguity and unintuitive labeling perfectly represents the thesis of this video.
you've explained everything in a clear, concise way with plenty of examples and digestible, logical arguments and context. Nice work!
I just discovered this channel (thanks to Saint Andrew).. I'm honestly amazed at how good of a communicator he is.
I've watched a lot of UA-cam stuff and as an older millennial, content like this give me hope
This guy is an amazing leftist teacher. He's got talent, for sure.
My whole world makes so much sense now. And i live in a very complex society (india). Great video. Cant thank you enough.
thank you, i love to hear things like this! for more on left and right see episodes 4 and 5 as well. and please share if you have the time or network!
I discovered your channel a few days ago and have been pretty much binging your content. Love this video and I think I'll be rewatching it just to digest everything further. Really great work here taking what is normally extremely complex topics and distilling them.
On a side note, I found your channel after searching UA-cam for content on David Graber's new book. And I only was aware of that because I was watching an old episode of The Michael Brooks show.
Keep up the good work. Your channel is top quality content and you deserve massive visibility on the platform. Hopefully the algorithm deities smile upon you.
thank you, i really appreciate comments like this, it keeps me going! If you can, try to let people know about it - it’s incredibly hard to get an audience in this environment where everyone’s grandma has a podcast now!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I'm going to drop a link in a couple subreddits and hopefully that does something for ya. Have you done any cross collaborations with other channels? Often times that's how I discover new people. We really need to get you on Joe rogan's podcast to counterbalance all the other nonsense he platforms.
@@Buget-Holodeck haha, sure, if you’re pals with joe hook me up! that would be a wild 3 hrs… but for real, i recently had youtuber saintandrewism post one of my episodes, and i got as many subscribers and views as i normally get in like 8 months, so it does seems like that’s the only route to a proper viewership these days! I’ve done stuff with Alpha to Omega which is an amazing podcast and Fight Like an Animal which is maybe my favourite show. The best people i’d want to be associated with, but in terms of numbers it hasn’t been a big boost.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I'm going to shoot an email to Thoughtslime to see if we can get you on a segment called "The Eyeball Zone"
@@Buget-Holodeck yes!! have a friend who tried for me already (luckblackcat she was featured by him as well) but no response - hopefully if a bunch of people do it, he might pay attention! thank you!
“if you ever worked in a badly organized health food co-op” literally me lmao 😭
My brother as well. Why is that such a common thing? Lol
The last few minutes of the episode really reminded me of a lot of Jonathan Haidt’s writings on moral foundations and political positions. The more left you are, the more you probably value human inherently, and vice-versa
i disagree with him on some stuff but yes that research is very interesting. check out the Fight Like an Animal podcast he talks a lot about that sort of thing
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Super quick question, what do you disagree with him on? Just super quick answer, thanks a mil!
@@ruthpower4892 i’m blanking a bit as it’s been a while since I read his psych stuff, but it’s a lot of dumb blind spots that comes from being upper middle class. like in one of his articles of books he says something like “i used to think social hierarchy and wealth inequality was bad, but then i went to india and saw that the maid in the rich family was very happy and they treated her very well…” or in his coddling of the american mind book he blames a lot of the phenomena he’s criticizing on the fact that it’s extremely hard to get into top universities and that top universities determine your kids’ outcomes - which is why parents like doggie train and control their kids lives and activities from infancy which and them, into giant babies … but then his recommendation for solving that is - relax, let you kids explore and learn and he sets up an organization for “free range kids” which is great but that totally ignores the fact that graduating from these universities has such a huge effect on your life outcome. basically he’s not very insightful about the economic and political hierarchies of our society. i think i remember him saying he was an economic libertarian too, but i might be mixing him up with someone else.
I’m glad you have already mentioned, and teased that you will continue to explore, the whole issue of the Soviet Union allegedly being far left but also being extremely authoritarian. Looking forward to what you say about that in the future.
i started with episode 11 and 11.1, but more to come
This video was pretty helpful in my opinion. Even despite the fact that it was lengthy with a lot of information. Keep up the good work broski
thanks papa smurf! i’m a big fan of your village!
Often the most informative is lengthy and you gotta deep dive into the rabbit hole but with recommendations from the Citable source Librarian of your choice giving you a map of places you won’t get lost
Wow this is the best explanation of the political spectrum I've ever seen yet!
thank you! isn’t it crazy that something so simple and basic is made so confusing and complicated for no reason most of the time?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 preach to the choir will you lol.
I really wish more people knew the basics!
Keep up the good work!
The problem I always see with political solutions is how they seek to solve some problem through traditional structures rather than creating empowered systems for solving problems, because all of these intellectual divides make us so untrusting of how others will decide to solve given problems. IMO the biggest divide in this regard, (once you stop listening to religious fascists), is economic theory. If we can't educate the people along lines that ignore the mystifications of neoliberalism then we'll never be able to create a large-scale democracy, the neoliberal state will eat us, as it has been doing for at least a century now.
Finished. Really good video. Subscribed. Will be watching your previous ones, too.
thank you! please let other people know about it, trying to get the word out and have no idea how aside from reddit!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 try discord?
@@shnglbot i tried a bit a failed - is there a good discord room that would be receptive to this stuff?
Any and all social media would be worth a shot. You could join the Rm Brown discord and share it with people there. He is a hilarious left tuber and his discord channel is very active and his audience is great. He's not huge
But his a large chunk of his audience would be all about your content. I really love that guy. So funny. He's also begun doing sketch comedy type stuff on a seperate channel. He streams on yt once or twice a week and he takes calls. I'm sure you could get through. I think he takes the calls from discord. That's the chat he interacts with on the streams.
I cannot get enough of your wonderful videos! thank you so much!
not just a breath of fresh air but a whole new lung!
I always say that I am a moderate, but that is primarily because I measure all things against myself.
everyone is a moderate relative to themselves, so that works!
Dammnnnn. These are so good
thanks, i’ll take it!
This is so important, especially for today.
I have long considered myself to be a libertarian, recently a moderate libertarian, and currently.... possibly Alt-Middle. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm not whatever the major parties are. The parties are both authoritarian, and while they spend unimaginable amounts of money while racking up unimaginable debts.... they leave the people wanting!
I can't imagine anarcho-capitalism, or anarcho-communism working in the real world. Actually, nothing in this world.... no matter how great... is going to last without corruption into the kind of gross imbalance we have today.
The problem is power and its distribution. I think the US Constitution is genius in the concept of divided power, but what made America better than most of the world came about with labor (Union) power, and monopoly busting antitrust law. What makes me heterodox as a libertarian is my understanding that social safety nets are necessary, and it seems that they are best supported by a market economy as in places like Denmark. Both government and private power (wealth) need to be limited and separated. Yeah, I think Alt-Middle is good!
I believe that the middle between thesis and antithesis need synthesis! We can make our world better, but the powers that be wants to keep us at each other's throats while raking in the profits and expanding their power over us. The Covid crisis and government's reaction to it seems to have brought everything to a tipping point. If we don't get in a nuclear war, and if we can start to communicate with each other better, we might arrive at a new better age in human history. We might also fall back into the meat grinder of the early-mid 20th century.
The Best thing about learning? A great teacher. Excellent video.
i’ll take it, thank you!
You consistently challenge my worldview in a way that makes me think deeply about my own position, thank you. There are several UA-camrs I'd think you'd have a good conversation with. The first is TIK history, the second is Short Fat Otaku, and the third is Vee.
thanks you! my brain is already overloaded with podcasts and videos and books and not enough time - but i’m always curious. if you have a particular episode link it and maybe ill check it out
I have lots of questions I don’t even know where to begin
This one has really been very helpful to me. I think I've come to a kind of understanding of the nature of these polarities. I really appreciate your dissection of elements in categories. It's helped me appreciate the two sides in a complementary way I hadn't seen before. My tendency is to see that hierarchy has been split into two basic approaches of merit and assignment. One can be based in ability to direct by skill. The other as power of influence. I realize even these can be broken up into various nuanced categories. But this is really interesting.
I don't know if I'm right in doing this, but I have been interested in the cycle of civilization collapse that seems to recur over time. Like evolution, the effect of environment that we create seems to bring about a process that repeats. The most powerful element of environment seems to be the psychological effect of wealth. It's a fascinating process.
it’s important to note that in politics (which is about group decision making) when we’re talking about hierarchy, we mean hierarchy of decision making power, and not of ability or skill. and also that there’s a difference between democratic hierarchies, where people choose someone to have authority for a temporary amount of time, in order to benefit the people at the bottom of the hierarchy vs dominance hierarchy which exists for the person at top, who exploits the people at the bottom against their will
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Dominance hierarchy. That's the kind of term I was looking for. Thank you. And yes, I see your point. It is decision making in groups. That was an important outline I'd learned from you. But I've come to see the political apparatus as a system that panders to those with the greatest influence on it. And, from what I'm seeing, it tends to shift to those with resources. The wealthy seem to tend to use their resources to shift it away from the bottom by destroying any unity among the working class. Unionism seems to be a powerful influence over the political apparatus, at least to the point where it balances out the influence imposed by the wealthy. As long as the wealthy can render that influence impotent, then it can dominate that political apparatus.
At least, that's what I seem to be seeing in the current iteration of civilization. I know they may not have had what are currently called unions in previous civilizations, but weren't their various types of guilds that were a form of institutional power structure? Because I'm under the impression institutions are a very potent element of power consolidation. And are key to civilization growth.
I realize I don't have the level or depth of insight and understanding you do and so I realize I could easily suffer the Dunning Kruger effect. At present I get the picture of a civilization as a system of institutions that drive human behavior. And I'm merely an amateur trying to assemble puzzle pieces. It's a fascinating struggle. I also realize I have nowhere near the depth of comprehension you do and understand if you don't have the time to sort my scattershot approach. This is more a kind of hobby for me.
Thanks for your amazing insights and making sense of something so confusing as politics.
@@RichardRoy2 that’s the problem with inequality in general, is that the more wealth and power you have the more wealth and power you can accumulate for yourself at the expense of everyone else. unless you have strong checks against the accumulation of wealth, your society ends up with maximum wealth and power inequality at a certain point.
about unions and guilds - i don’t know enough about guilds, but i think those were more top down structures meant to manage competition. unions are of of many different kinds of organizations that people can band together in, in order to challenge the power of much wealthier people
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks. This was what I've been getting the impression in regard to the issue of wealth. Off the top of my head there seems to be a need for that recognition culturally and politically along with some kind of establishment of restriction to assure the prevention of stratification of wealth among the populace. The problem here, I think, is that resource control and accumulation is always a prize. The slightest inequality will lead to leveraging, it seems.
Yes, there are different types of unions. Jane McAlevey has written some interesting books on her escapades as an organizer. She believed in the democratic approach where the workers are the union as opposed to the top down approach. It's difficult to prevent the building of institutions for consolidating power. She also believed in a broad inclusion to have the skilled and "unskilled" labor make gains for all.
The big problem with this definition, left wing as high entropy, right wing as low entropy, is that there is only one state of absolute equality, but there are many states of absolute inequality.
Giving all money and power to people whose name starts with an A and giving all money and power to people whose name starts with a Z are both very right wing, because you impose a strict hierachy, but these two camps would see themselves as enemies just as much, if not more, than they would see the leftist as enemies.
After all, in a state of absolute equality or equal enforcement of rules, they would be better off than with no money or enforcement of rules against their favour. So you classify people as in one camp who are further apart from each other than the people of the opposing camp, and who hate each other to the extreme.
In the real world, you can see this with immigration. Sure, Islam is a different non communist civilization. Muslims are traditional and religious and enforce their own hierachies. And in that sense, by your definition, right wing. But the right is the anti immigration camp in both the US and Europe. It is right wingers who want to deport foreigners and limit migration, and it has always been this way, at least on the cultural axis. The native right and the immigrants to not cooperate to enforce patriarchy and anti LGBT laws against the leftists or whatever, they hate each other far more than either of them hates the left, and the left is actively bringing more "right wing" people in.
In that sense, right here is a negative definition, it is just the abscense of left, similar to how gentiles are just non-jews, whether they pray to Bhaal or Jesus
Every culture elevates a central principle above all others and defines themselves through it. For you, it is equality. But for a catholic, it would be godliness, with only catholics being godly, and everyone else being sinful, just in their own ways. For a libertarian, it would be freedom, and they would define themselves as free and everyone else not, just in different ways.
We use these negative definitions of principles, which to us seem central, but for everyone else don't really matter, and so we all define a 1d spectrum of us and not us. But real politics are not one dimensional. Muslims and christians are not just on different points on a linear "hierachy" scale. Muslims and christians simply do not care about hierachy. They make use of it, when it benefits their goals, and their don't if it does not benefit their goals. Similarly, libertarians are in favour of hierachies when it furthers their principle of freedom, and are against hierachies if it hinders their principle of freedom. Every ideology is this way. You just happen to be interested in equality
i didn’t say anything about any kind of entropy. you can have low and high entropy egalitarianism, so this all seems pointless to me.
the thing about A and Z as enemies - i don’t see the point or relevance of that to left and right being hierarchy vs equality. you can have two super hierarchical movements being enemies, yet both being far right wing (i.e. fundamentalist christians vs fundamentalist muslims). right and left aren’t “enemies” they’re just different perspectives on any given issue.
no idea what you’re talking about with islam and immigration. again, people can hate eachother but both be right wing or left wing.
and equality isn’t some religious value to worship - sometimes more hierarchy is better, it depends on the situation. and the stuff about libertarians - the libertarian concept of “freedom” is very hierarchical … but libertarians tend to be more egalitarian in terms of social mores, while extremely hierarchical in terms of economic and power inequality.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 You did, you just did not use the term. Entropy is the number of microstates that produce a macrostate, so states with hierachies of some kind are low entropy, there is only one state where guy A is king, and states with no hierachy are high entropy. But that is not the central point of the argument
Your definition is pointless, if people on the right are ALWAYS, not just sometimes, enemies, since their respective hierachies are always incompatible with each other. Notice how this is only a problem on the right, but not for the left. There is only one way to structure a system without any hierachies. By having no hierachies.
Your political spectrum is not a line, it is a lot of rays intersecting in one point. You have a lot of spectrums. Catholic hierachy - no hierachy, Hindu hierachy - no hierachy, capitalist hierachy - no hierachy and so on.
As I explained above, and what you apparently do not understand, is that every ideologue seems that sort of structure, if they try to categorize the world by the values they hold, but noone else does. Only socialists care about "no hierachies". To other ideologies, systems are not better, just because they are less or more hierachical.
You discuss libertarians in terms of hierachy. But why? To them, freedom is the central value, and just like you, they perceive themselves as one pole, and everyone else as unfree, just in different ways.
Your definition of left makes sense, but right is just a negative definition. Right wingers have nothing in common. It makes a huge difference, if you want a christian theocracy or a libertarian free market. As you go to the left, sure, people become more similar. But the same is not true as you go to the right. So how is this a useful definition?
All you are doing here is putting people into the camps "has my values" and "does not have my values", but it does make a huge difference, what values they actually do have. It is not enough to say "not my values". Negative categories are not useful for this
@@aldoushuxley5953 no, two people who are on the right are not automatic enemies. two people can support the same hierarchies. two people can support being in different ranks in a hierarchy. hitler and gorring can be partners. this is just mind numbing hyper autistic nonsense. two people can support the same hierarchy but want to compete for a rank in that hierarchy, like two contenders for a throne, or two CEO candidates.
and all this nonsense about catholic hierarchy vs muslim hierarchy - what a waste of thought! use your practical brain: politics is about decision-making in groups. therefore when we’re talking about politics and left and right we’re talking about relative hierarchy and equality of decision making power. someone on the left in any given situation will support more decision making equality relative to someone on the right. i don’t even know who “catholic hierarchy vs no hierarchy” means and how it’s in any way relevant to this.
and yes, hierarchy vs non hierarchy is today more of a socialist (specifically anarchist) concern, which is why it lost its meaning in the cold war, when two right wing powers were not interested in debating hierarchy vs equality and wanted to turn peoples’ focus elsewhere (like more vs less government) but hierarchy vs equality happens to be how the left right spectrum was historically developed and conceived of (see episode 5) and at that time the right was much more consciously concerned with maintaining hierarchy.
it also happens to be a fundamental point of conflict in human politics since we evolved as a species (see the book “hierarchy in the forest” and episodes 6, and 10.2). i didn’t just invent the spectrum this way, and it’s not just people on the left who conceive of it that way, Jordan Peterson, who is no left winger also understands it that way, and also understand the value of categorizing things along a hierarchy equality spectrum, even though he is very often a proponent of hierarchy and antagonistic to equality. and again see episode five for the historical origin and evolution of the terms.
And yes, libertarians think that their core value is freedom. But guess what - it’s not relevant, because the left right spectrum is not about what you think you are, or what you value, it’s about whether your ideas support more political i.e. decision making hierarchy, or equality. And it turns out that the libertarian conception of “freedom” is very hierarchical - it’s freedom to dominate via a hyper expansive conception of infinite property rights and magically self enforcing contracts - and therefore it ends up on the right - which is also where they would place themselves, even if they would place themselves there because most libertarians don’t understand what the left right spectrum is about, because they use on of the muddled cold war definitions.
Many people see themselves as left wing socialists and communists, but they’re actually right wing authoritarians. Many people think they’re the king of england, and they just have bipolar disorder.
And yes, right wingers have much in common, they favour politics systems (sometimes opposing ones, sometimes the same one) which are very hierarchical. christian theocrats and stalinists and libertarians all support political systems that are massively hierarchical despite all their various differences. the value system that the hierarchy is based on is different, but the common thread is dominance hierarchy. and ideologies are sets of ideas, so usually you have some right wing and some left wing concepts of practices in each ideology.
and yes i do understand that people try to categorize themselves by values that they hold - and to some extent i’m doing that, but it also happens to be the correct historical definition and the only coherent definition (also see episode 5 and see episode 4 for how i choose definitions). but i don’t place myself at one pole. I value equality of decision making but not to it’s most extreme manifestations - a film crew where everyone had equal decision making power would make awful films. modern workplaces need some kind of organization structure, and that means some kinds of decision making hierarchies, though i do think they should be democratically elected, there are conceivable positions to the left of me on all sorts of issues.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Sorry, but are you stupid? Hitler and Göring were both National Socialists, of course they supported the same hierachies. Now do Hitler and Ernst Jünger, or any other German monarchist of the time. I am not talking about people with different positions in hierachies, of course people can support hierachies where they are not at the top, I am talking about people who believe in different hierachies. You can not have hereditary monarchy and fascism at the same time. Both far right, both very strict hierachies, and yet both incompatible
I don't understand what you do not understand about the different hierachies. It does not make sense to talk about a lot of hierachy or very little hierachy, if you do not specify what kind of hierachy. As cultures liberalize and old hierachies are removed, they become more similar. There is one state of no hierachy. But where they are coming from, before liberalization, when there was a lot of hierachy, was very different. You have to specify what hierachy. You can not just assign a hierachy score, and if your system has a lot of hierachy it is right and if it does not it is left. Liberal Islam and liberal catholicism are the same, but radical islam and radical catholicism, where the hierachies are enforced, are unique.
You have been increadibly rude for no reason, and clearly have not thought about any of my arguments for more than a second, so I will not watch any more episodes of your series. If you make good arguments in episode 5, then write them down here. I will not watch any more of your videos (despite enjoying it so far. But you are a massive Ahole. If I would write down what I actually think of you, my account would be banned).
Have a nice day, but I will unsubscribe and not watch any further
irony #1 is you tell me you’re unsubscribing as if you’re not doing me a favour by fucking off so i don’t have to read or respond to your masturbatory drivel any more.
Please, please come back and waste more of my time arguing with stupid boring and pompous ideas!
irony #2 is how offended you are, when my first draft of my response was actually full of insults about what a boring inane wanker you are, and then i removed because as irritating as i found you, i figured you’re just an idiot who means well, and it’s not your fault that you’re so annoying and that your thinking is so convoluted.
irony #4 is you calling me stupid! you’re the one who articulated your own half baked ideas badly such that that it looked like you were saying that no two right wing people can be compatible. (re read what you wrote, dingus).
and, because your head is so far up your own arse, you don’t seem to have noticed that I already rebutted your stupid argument that two people with two different right wing ideologies are incompatible. the answer to that is who fucking cares?
yes, right wing ideologies are often incompatible - like fundamentalist muslims vs fundamentalist christians (and example i gave already) but this has no relevance - the point of left and right is to measure degrees of hierarchy, not to put people on the same team together. all we’re doing is grading ideologies or movements or positions on degrees of decision making hierarchy or how much they promote more or less decision making hierarchy.
two different competing monarchs have incompatible goals, but they both want top down monarchical authority. and the terms right and left were coined to articulate the opposition between the forces of monarchy vs the forces of democracy.
And what are you talking about i need to specify what hierarchy? half of my last response to you was that we’re talking about hierarchy of decision making power. what are you missing?
You don’t understand what i don’t understand because there’s nothing for me to not understand - you have your head up your ass and you’re making this much more complicated than it actually is…
radical islam and radical catholicism are at odds - ok great - what does that have to do with anything? they’re still right wing movements because they’re hierarchical movements.
you want to make a spectrum based on freedom or some other value go for it, it’s just not a left right spectrum, it’s something else.
Goodbye and good riddance, i really fucking hate answering stupid comments like these, you are doing me a favour.
you're so right, this is how humans interact, and always have.
which way? it’s been a while since i made this episode, nor sure which part you’re referring to!
you are so unbelievably based
Btw - except for that one small gripe - this is an absolutely amazing and clear video!! Thank you.
Good on you mate, really enjoying all your videos, very informative,
I love the Bevis and Butthead references. That show was ahead of it's time. It was the greatest thing ever to me as a teen in the 90s. I love your content, possibly equally. Probably. I'm so glad you're still releasing great content. I'm well versed in the basics of leftist theory, but your videos break it all down as well as, if not better, than any other material I'm aware of. Besides, it's great to have such a great tutorial and to bone up.
i gotta say being compared to beavis and butthead in the amount of appreciation you have is one of the top compliments possible!
i loooove that show - people think it’s just stupid boy humour, but it’s actually really deep in it’s way. it portrays something real about being a teenager in this idiotic society in a way that nothing else has, besides maybe the movie “Gummo”.
Great video. Just a small inaccuracy at 25:20 to point out on french revolution: the first vote that is known to have created left and right wings is actually the vote on whether Louis XVI should be executed.
So basically, at that time, left wing were all the people in favor of executing the king and creating a republic (with all shades of republicanism in it) and the right wing included the people that were in favor of a constitutionnal monarchy.
Anyway, this does not change at all the relevance of all your saying here ;).
hi - thanks! are you sure about this? I’m pretty sure they split into left and right before any votes, and that they were debating the royal veto and many other issues way before the idea of a republic even came about. And executing the king happened in 1793 after a whole lot had happened. The left right split was happening right near the beginning in 1789.
if you have a source send it though, id like to see it.
either way i appreciate the compliment and correction
also, how did you find this video?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
The video's great. Looks to me a good idea to remind people that they can be on the left on some areas and on the right on some others.
Well... I'm french and I had heard this history countless times. However, now that you mention it, I've checked wikipedia and it seems that you're right : the first opposition was on the right of veto of the king, hence constitutional monarchists were probably considered on the left for a short time.
Anyway, that's entirely true to say that in french politics the right wing used to be the monarchists (was actually true until 1870), and that "republicans" was the word that united the whole left wing. While now, it's the key world for right / extreme rights politicians ("let's give more weapons to the police to defend the republic" / "islam is incompatible with the republic", etc.). Does not mean that what they are saying would have been said by the left a century ago, though :p .
@@roger2121271 ok good! I’m about to put out an episode on the history of the terms left and right, and I was afraid I might have screwed up!
Yes, what you’re describing about the contemporary right with islam is the enforcement of cultural hierarchy.
I’ll be discussing the 3rd republic of france in the next episode out soon, editing it now. Republicanism starts off on the left and then moves to the center as socialists emerge on the left.
How did you find this video?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I'm not sure to remember. I was actually thinking I should go check how was the english speaking political youtube, and I think I stumbled on your video in my suggested videos.
Milton Friedman was such a big brain /s
Democracy is a good example of why "equality" is not the opposite of hierarchy. A concensus based society and a democratic society are very different, yet one offers an attractive kind of equality without hierarchy, while the other does not. Regardless both seem to meet your criteria for freedom as they both offer the same access to decision making.
All models are false, some models are useful. This model seems like a semantic argument. The true opposite of hierarchy is not-hierarchy. It looks like the things we do together voluntarily, and without rank or coersion. I think that can look like all kinds of equitable arrangements that aren't equal by your definition.
Left and right are functionally useless terms best talked around or straight through.
the opposite of hierarchy is equality. politics refers to group decision making, so if we’re talking about equality in a political context we’re talking about equality of decision making power. i don’t know how you’re defining democracy, but democracy refers not to a particular system (“representative democracy”) but to a condition where people have an equal say in the decisions that affect them, so yes that’s political equality. so in a political context hierarchy vs equality refers to autocracy vs democracy. where’s the hierarchy in democracy? consensus isn’t really equality because one person can trump everyone else’s will. why is that more desirable? and what’s an example of a consensus society? even the most hyper egalitarian immediate return societies don’t really work on consensus exactly, except that when it’s possible people who disagree with something are sometimes able to go move to a different group, sometimes. you can decide that left and right don’t make sense and discard them, but i think it’s more useful to give them coherent meaning (which is their original historical meaning anyhow) because hierarchy vs equality is central to human politics and always has been. given that left and right are deeply ingrained terms we should bring them back to mean something important, not the nonsense that it means now, where left and right are just identities with no content.
very good video! thank you
you’re welcome!
amazing work! sharing for sure
The thing that's always thrown me is the (particularly) media portrayal of the right as being about protecting the status quo. If that were true, then long-time supporters of the communist party in a communist country would be right-wing.
actually i would classify them as right wing as well! but not because of status quo (that makes you conservative, which is different from right wing) - but because they’re protecting an entrenched hierarchy - they just do it using left wing language and imagery and symbols
I haven’t heard a simplification of a concept, but rather an argument for the ‘left’.
see episode 5 for why no other definitions make any sense - but as for it being an argument for the left - i’m sure you can think of various scenarios where political equality isn’t ideal - like imagine trying to make a movie if everyone on the crew had the same level of decision-making power.
By the way I enjoyed the video, but what are your views? Do you think ‘left and right’ are useful terms? If so do you define yourself as left?
I think when there are too many exceptions then there is no rule. I posit a spectrum labelled ‘government control’ and ‘population control’. This is actually a polar dichotomy and tells us more about a society than ‘right left’.
In practice ideologies only matter when the government has enough power: countries on the ‘government power’ side include all extremists: nazi germany, a hypothetical Islamic state, socialist/communist states, medieval societies etc. they are not inherently bad, but they often are in practice.
On the other side is governments that are more influenced by the population. Governments that utilise democracy.
I think this dichotomy is more valid and tells us more about a society.
- if your an atheist, the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism seems irrelevant. This is how we should view the different flavours of authoritarianism. For me, it makes little difference if I’m being killed for being gay, or killed for being a Jew. It’s the killing part by the government based on ideology that counts.
@@tl7163 see episode 5 and 4 - but there are no exceptions if you define left and right as being in favour of more equality of power vs more hierarchy of power. your “govt control vs pop control” is similar to that but less precise. and yes i think they’re extremely useful terms because hierarchy vs equality is at the heart of human politics since we emerged as a species! see ep 6 for more on that.
if you use the terms the way that they’re currently used, they’re meaningless, but if you use them as hierarchy vs equality they are extremely useful tools
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 The suggestion that the left is concerned with equality over hierarchies suggests that the left would be more in favour of free-market capitalism than government totalitarianism. However this is not the case. Also, one could argue that capitalism creates more unequal hierarchies than ever and so wouldn’t be in favour on the left anyways. Indeed it is not favoured by those on the left typically.
The problem with using the term ‘hierarchy’ is that it can be misconstrued and easily abstracted. What hierarchies are you referring too? There are so many different scopes. I would say that those who identify as left today, and those individuals recognised by the majority to be on the extreme left, such as Marx and Stalin, all advocate for top down government control. This is extreme hierarchy. Those considering themselves on the right, often do so because they are sceptical of hierarchies and consolidation of power. That’s the argument for free market capitalism, the foundational belief of America, an argument made by the right typically. So with respect, in your definition, with todays population, those considered on the right are actually on your left and vice versa. That makes it’s confusing. What do you think?
@@tl7163 i said hierarchy vs equality of power meaning decisionmaking power. politics is group decision making so hierarchy and equality refer to decisionmaking.
free market capitalism allows for unlimited wealth accumulation, and wealth is power - a person who owns property that another person depends on to lives derives gets to boss around the dependant person via various contracts. your boss tells you what to do, not the other way around, that’s a hierarchy of power.
stalin is actually a figure of the extreme right, who thought he was on the left and justified his hierarchy in left wing terms, but you look at what someone does, not what they say. marx was not authortiarian at all, he was actually on the left.
it’s all pretty simple…
Insta-shared.
thank you!!
Also nice
Daniel, hi! I would like to translate the captions for some of your videos into russian so that I can recommend them to russian-speaking people (it will be difficult for many to watch such information in english, unfortunately). could you write an email / where I could drop you a file with text+time codes?
oh cool! yes please - my email is at the end of each episode, worldwidescrotes in the g place
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 ❤
hey, the linked transcript is somewhat different than the audio here - do you have an updated transcript that matched this video? And also, thanks for your work!
thanks! unfortunately no - the transcripts are the scripts i read from, and i often change them as i record but i dont have time to go back and edit the script to match the changes unless it’s to correct some factual error
I like your points. But what would you call a redistribution of power from one hierachy to the other? From the church to the nobility. Or from one Billionaire to another. Would that be a neutral policy?
that’s just conflict between two different right wing contenders
Quick question (sorry if this is answered in a future vid, this is what I'm up to in the series), why are you satisfied with a 1-axis representation of politics (i.e. just left vs right)? I agree with the conception of a 2-axis political spectrum, where left/right is based off economical policy (left being socialism and right being capitalism) and up/down is based off hierarchy vs horizontalism (or authoritarian vs libertarian)?
This conception adds the nuance that you're trying to inject into the left vs right debate in a more digestible format and, in my opinion, is less reductionary than limiting the debate to a single axis.
Would love to hear your response.
i think the 2nd axis is redundant - right and left represent hierarchy and equality - that encompasses authoritarianism (right) vs liberty (left). and that also encompasses resource distribution. so you don’t need multiple axes.
it’s more productive to like take a set of policies or an ideology or system and then break it down where various aspects of it fall on the left right axis. soviet union is far right in terms of the political system, but somewhat to the left in terms of economic distribution.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Yeah I get what you mean, and I agree to a certain extent, sure that's what things meant when the terms were created, but things have gotten more complicated since then.
Like instead of having to know the economical policies of the USSR to know that they have left policy, why not place them on the authoritarian-left to explain why they can have both authoritarian (right) structure but left economics?
Idk, in my opinion it's a less confusing way to lay out things. Maybe I'm just too new in political theory, even though I've been studying left-wing political theory for 4 years, but the 2-axis conception just seems more useful in modern political discourse.
@@jacobkassiou6466 well you’d need to know the USSR economic policy in order to put it on the 2 axis chart anyhow so i don’t see a big advantage there!
to me the advantage of the simple one axis is it keeps your mind focused on hierarchy vs equality which is a fundamental division in human politics. authoritarianism vs liberty are hierarchy of power vs equality of power, and economic inequality vs economic equality is also hierarchy of power vs equality of power as well! separating them makes you forget that they’re fundamentally the same thing.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Okay, yeah that makes more sense to me.
I think I might just be striving for a simple way to separate libertarian-socialism from state-capitalism. The confusion with socialism meaning state ownership leads me to desire a label to distance myself from specifically authoritarian state-capitalism (or what they call state-socialism these days). Hope that makes sense 😅
@@jacobkassiou6466 for sure it makes sense - that’s why i like the single axis spectrum. libertarian socialism is on the left, authoritarian “socialism” is on the right. politics is group decisionmaking - hierarchy and equality when it comes to politics are about decision making power. stalin might decide to redistribute income but he had a top down political structure - a right wing structure. same with hitler. the difference is just style - the USSR got rid of the old elites and created a new one. hitler kept the old financial elites, but then created a new class on top of that elite. the 2 axis spectrum puts anarchism and stalinism on the same side on one axis, when i don’t think they should be on the same side in any axis!
Using old definitions based on a no longer existant environment, ie french revolution, does not necessarily make sense
see episodes 5, 4 and 6 - but yes it does make sense, because hierarchy vs equality of power have been fundamental divisions at the heart of human politics since we emerged as a species. Thinking about hierarchy vs equality lets you understand who’s actually for freedom, and who’s for domination. If you’re not looking at the world through that lens, politics is just a muddle.
I'd say the most straightforward explanation of the difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is, basically, those on the left aim to broaden the scope of who is able to effectively participate in and be served by the cultural, political, economic processes of civilization, while those on the right either oppose this for whatever reason, or don’t see it as a priority in their preferred establishment.
i think hierarchy vs equality is a lot more precise and succinct than that. “participate” means what? “economic process of civlization” means what? left and right don’t apply to subsistence societies? why not?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Participate as opposed to being excluded from or marginalized by the establishment, basically. Of course, you can apply left and right to just about any mode of human organization, just that the terms themselves are generally understood in the context of political parties and social movements that typically involve a scale of organization you'd find in societies that have attained what we call civilization. That and I just used that for lack of a better term I could pick off the top of my mind in the moment. I think there is also some potential for vagueness in how we understand "hierarchy vs equality". It is possible for societies to be egalitarian insofar as it treats members of the in-group, while at the same time not allowing those of an out-group the same liberties as they have (sometimes out of necessity, when it concerns the risk of resource depletion from colonial occupation, for instance. In any case, it's still not the kind of universal equality the left aspires to). That and with hierarchy, there's a valid distinction to make between informal hierarchy established for general convenience and formal hierarchy that's a feature of the system itself. It might be transparent enough when you're looking at subsistence societies, although it'll invariably get fuzzy when you take it up to the level of industrial civilizations, and would be impossible to do away with altogether overnight. So I don't think that some features of hierarchy would necessarily invalidate the left-wing orientation of a particular movement, unless there was a consistent disparity of benefits that was endemic to it. Apologies if this misses the point you're trying to make in this video, or was already addressed elsewhere.
@@Franeck457 i talk about the history of the terms left and right in ep 5 and the role of hierarchy vs equality in human evolution and politics of subsistence societies in 6 and also i think 10.1 and probably some other episodes
but it’s important to distinguish democratic hierarchies where there’s a hierarchy for the sake of efficiency to benefit all of its members, chosen by all of its members, and where leadership is at the behest of lower ranking members - vs dominance hierarchy which exists for the benefit of the people on top and only tolerated because there are no better options/escape
Left or Right, it's all critical and prejudiced. Anarchy is freedom from political wars, hate, and terror.
I think I'm firmly on the left based on these decisions but at the same time I'd rather be at the bottom of the hierarchy than live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. I'm guessing that cooperatives are meant to be the non-hierarchal version of the modern world but I don't see how it would be a lot different than the current system for most people. Voting for managers sounds like a nice idea but that just puts power into the hands of the most charismatic liars. The people people with the least scruples are going to be the ones willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want. It might be good for the demogogues and their allies and bad for the princes but us social retards are still going to get trampled.
why the most charismatic liars? at the level of your workplace, it’s not hard to tell if someone is doing a good job or not. there are also systems where people rotate the positions of power or of important knowledge.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 that's assuming people are going to vote based on who is best for a job, assuming they even understand what makes someone good at their job.
Example from my exp: During pandemic I worked for a healthcare company that was contracted to the gov. Most of the staff were non-medical but are in contact with supervisors liaising with a small number of medical staff to make a variety of decisions or give information. We used a shared text program to organize this and the staff would fill up the chat with non-essential chatter. Some of supervisors were very strict about allowing the chatter because it made it harder for everyone to see important instructions and answers to questions as they got scrolled off the page. The advisors at the bottom didn't like those supervisors because they just wanted to have a good day and didn't put much thought into the consequences. Similar situation with how some supervisors would give answers while others would ask "did you check X resource?" both lead to the same answer but one of them was facilitating them to be able to find that information and be more efficient in the future, again most staff preferred the easy answer without considering the greater good.
@@shock_n_Aweful that seems like more a situation of “employee syndrome” - where you don’t really give a shit about your job aside from clocking in your hours, because you don’t get any more benefit from caring.
when you get to vote on your working conditions etc, that makes you a lot more interested in what’s going on
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I did consider that, but I think the amount of success would be directly relative to how much more they get paid and how that translates into a better life. Another complication is how much that person recognizes how their actions impact the work. Given more time maybe we could have trained them up to understand better. I've never worked in a cooperative or understand much of how it would go. I'd absolutely be willing to try it but I'm not sure how it could be done in the existing system. Like you previously pointed out with while pink pill idea in another video. Any cooperative is going to be operating within the current system and all it's influences. Is there any examples you can point to that I should check out?
@@shock_n_Aweful well members might also get to vote on what the salaries are
yes in the current market system it pushes coops to resemble regular companies to extent with a bit less democracy, but if you look at coops, even in today’s market, the workers will have higher salaries and better working conditions, and stay with their companies much longer, which the people in director positions have much lower salaries than in corprate environments. one huge cooperative in europe is mondragon, but look up michael albert writing or podcasting on the coop experience in argentina, you’ll get a lot out of that
Very good video and clears up a lot of points. IMHO it has some simplifications and lacks the specifications of things like "capitalism", "socialism" and I have a feeling some words were put in Karl Marx's mouth that weren't there. I must confess I'm not a specialist in the area and know very little about this stuff and also confess that I learned a lot and therefore liked the video a lot. I must say, however, that one dimension (left/right) is not enough to describe social/economical/political views and adding more dimensions could describe in a more historically constant way the points of view - not completely constant because that is impossible but a lot of the points that were leftist on some era to become rightist on another. We seem to agree that what really damages the debates is how these concepts are hijacked and used as PR tools: here in Brazil, Argentina has become - according to some - a communist country because they want to make anyone a bit to the left of them look like a North Korean agent.
On that point - about worrying only about the dignity of the poorest - I think Marx would argue that Capitalism imposes a set of behaviors (for everybody) that will eventually lead to corruption and that the wealthiest would never let the dignity of the poorest become a central concern. I tend to agree with him (If I'm correct on what he would say). We don't live in a capitalistic society - at least not on the Adam Smith's concept: capitalism is the system of free and fair trade not the system of free markets. Smith was actually e fervent denouncer of the West Indian Company's monopoly over international commerce at the time and defended that the State should intervene in the Economy to guarantee the fair competition but should not favor any player as not to damage the free competition. Free markets as we have today are the work of Hayek and Friedman.
Sorry for being repetitive but, once again, great video! I'll watch the whole series.
capitalism and socialism need their own episodes - if i had to define every single term every time, each episode would be 15hrs long!
i don’t really see a need for more axes beyond left and right, just about any political position of significance divides into left and right. if you want to evaluate something more complicated like a party or a political philosophy or régime then you can evaluate each policy separately because many people and parties and ideologies are left on some issues and right on others.
Like if you want to evaluate Stalin, you’d say he was left on economics, far right on political organization, somewhat to the right on culture and to the right in terms of international relations/imperialism, but meanwhile he used left wing rhetotic to justify all of it, and had left wing ultimate goals.
If the Left and Right is relative does that mean there are combinations of left and right positions only? Does this mean people who do not change their positions on the four domains are temperamentally inclined towards the Right, regardless of their initial positions, given that since the French Revolution everything on all four domains has generally moved Left, and seldom moved Right? As an example most professed conservatives in the US hold positions that save for the economic domain overlap broadly with many socialist thinkers in the 19th century.
i’m not sure i understand everything you’re saying, but i think that at the extremes left and right are pretty much going to be the stable throughout time because of like the limits of reality - like i don’t think you can go more left than direct democracy, total economic equality, total cultural equality and no borders, or more right than extreme genocidal dictatorship with extreme wealth inequality - but in between i think you’ll usually want to measure left and right relative to an average or median position. so someone in canada who wants to cut the budget of the universal healthcare system but who still wants to keep a universal healthcare system is right wing compared to the current situation, but on the far left relative to the politics of 150 years ago because they still support universal tax funded health care. so yes most conservatives today are way to the left of where conservatives were 300 years ago in many respects. but be careful because conservative doesnt equal right wing. conservative and liberal are separate concepts from right and left. the thng about not changing your positions, i dont think makes you tempermentally anything besides consistent or rigid or whatever. just that where you are will shift relative to the average over time if that shifts.
I'm not arguing for this position, but i think someone of the Right spectrum would translate as such: hiearchy = order; equality = chaos.
yes, that would definitely be a right way of seeing the world
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Ba dum tisss🥁
I know it's a little odd question, but do you remember what is the font you use when you write "left" and "right" in those pointing hands?
JSL ancient
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thank you! I'll upload a translation to brasilian portuguese of this video's transcript later. Is there still some tool in UA-cam where you can upload a subtitle file to the video? Because It used to have one where I could do that to somebody else's vídeo (and It would appear after the owner of the video approved It) but they cut it down since. If there is a tool for you to upload It, maybe in the Future I can turn the transcript translation into subtitles and send you.
@@MrZevers that’s extremely cool and generous of you and i very much appreciate it! yes i can upload one apparently - ive never done it so don’t know if it works well etc
At least you acknowledge fascism is right wing. That makes you smarter than most right wingers
well a real right winger tends not to want to have people think much about hierarchy vs equality - they want everyone to just assume hierarchy is inevitable and there’s nothing you can do about it, so it’s rare that right wingers have the proper definitions of these words (jordan peterson is an exception). they’re rather we think about stupid things like the state vs the market, which aren’t even in opposition to eachother
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 that's true. And at a global scale it's basically Independence vs interdependence. Nationalism encourages countries to isolate themselves
It's so cool that you talk about politics without pushing a specific ideology. And that left and right both have advantages in different areas and one doesn't have to identify with one or the other. I am a little less skeptical to let that political content in my brain ;)
i think our brains are wired to make us want to idenity with political groups, so it’s an uphill battle!
Something I think is interesting to bring up is that while most right wingers in America think of Democrats as left wingers, most Democrats themselves think that they're left wing when most of them aren't. Especially in mainstream neoliberal circles like r/politics. For example someone in there said that economies do so well under "left wing" presidents like Biden and Clinton......even though Clinton himself called his policies "third way" which was a combination of conservative/neoliberal economic policies and "left wing" social policies.
indeed - people think that being socially liberal makes them left wing when they’re often just liberal right wingers
Wait didn't Norberto Bobbio give a similar definition of Left and Right?
yes - i think i mention it in episode 5 - it’s in the bibliography for that ep. other people have been using that definition forever, it’s just not often explicitly defined. why?
The more I watch your videos, the more I become convinced that free will is a religious concept used by the right wing to justify the status quo. Maybe I should start a podcast myself explaining why free will is incompatible with science and how it generates justification of inequality.
I also wonder why so few people on the left tryed to debunk free will, that is the foundational justification for the modern hierarchy system.
haha, well i don’t believe that, i don’t think it’s a justification for hierarchy, how do you see that?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Well think about it. If there is free will, there is moral responsibility. If there is moral responsibility, guilt and merit are part of the human nature, not man made concepts.
That means that if you something wrong, ex. You steal something, your background don't matter, or at least, it matter but it's only a partial justification. You could have done otherwise, but you CHOOSE to steal (or to be violent, etc.) Therefore you deserve to be punished.
The same thing applies for merit and achieving higher status/position: your background matter only partially, because in the end, you choosed what to do: you choosed to not study enough, or to not work hard enough, and so you deserve to be on top of the hierarchy because of your "hard work".
You choosed to be guilt, you choosed to be an hard working person, and therefore you merit your position on the social hierarchy.
Now think about it: almost everyone, even the most right wingers, when someone commit a crime but commit it because of some pathology, won't ever say that the one who commited a crime is guilty and deserve to be punished. It wasn't his fault, he had a pathological condition, he couldn't do nothing about it. Of course this degree of comprension vary depending on the degree of the pathology: if it's an epileptic attack, almost no one will ever say that the crime it's his fault. If it has a milder pathological disorder, maybe the guilt is mitigated. But if the accused has no pathology (that means: pathology we can check given our currently medical technology) than the accused is totally guilty and have to be punished. There could also be other mitigating circumstances, such as, did the person had abusive parents? he needed to commit a crime to feed his children? However here opinions start to differ and background and some mild pathology sometimes counts as mitigations, some times not.
But here the problem is: where do you draw the line? When a person is guilty and deserve to be punished, or deserved to be on top of the hierarchy? You can't draw a line with science, because there is no line at all! People are always constrained by material conditions, these conditions could be pathologies, social status, culture, genetics, biology, family, friends, very specific circumstances.
No people deserves to be higher or lower in the hierarchy due to guilt or merit, because guilt or merit are DETERMINED by a lot factor, and one of this factor is the hierarchy itslef (the hierarchy has different effect in the biology of lower status and higher status individual, this was studied by Robert Sapolsky in baboons).
It's very easy to reconcile a hierarchical system with the existence of free will: just work hard and you will get on top of the hierarchy. You will deserve it.
It's very difficult to reconcile a hierarchical system with the absence of free will: how can you deserve less than another person if neither of you could have done otherwise with your life? How can I appraise one persone and send to prison another, if none of them had a choice in doing what they did?
That's why right wingers that don't believe in free will such as Steven Pinker still says incoherently that even if free will does not exist, moral responsibility exist (how? ) And that's why other right wingers are critizing Pinker in the matter of free will (I read an article in a right wing journal called Steven Pinker blind spot or something like that, you can find it online), because without free will is almost impossible to maintain the hierarchical capitalistic view.
@@Mannaggialtubo oh i see - well the solution isnt to just pretend will doesn’t exist, but just to recognize the context in which choices take place. there’s a will and it’s “free” to make a theoretically infinite number of choices, but there are practical constraints to your actions and limits on your actual choices, and incentives to make some choices over other so that you need to focus on the system of constraints and incentives more than on will
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
Mh but point is not that I'm pretending free will does not exist. The point is that almost everyone pretend that it exist, when is a scientific impossibilty.
Now I have no problem with people having different religious belief, however, almost everyone that have faith in a religion at least know (or should know, let's say) that his religion is just a belief, and not a scientific concept. If you want to know more about the scientific impossibilty of free will I can recommend you videos and articles of Sabrine Hossenfelder, the article "the Lucretian swerwe" by Cashmore and various talks and article by Robert Sapolsky.
But beside the scientific impossibilty of free will, I also think that your thought (we are limited in our choices by practical constraints but not our action are not 100% determined by them) is vulnerable to several criticism from the right wingers, because it's impossible for you to draw a line between a choice made by limitation of a practical constraint and a free choice.
I can give you some example.
Imagine you are talking to a right wing guy and you say that in an unequal hierarchical society is very difficult to rise at the top from the bottom because there are practical constraints that limits your possibility and your choices.
But you already know how they will reply to you. They will say that there were, there are and there will be people that despite those practical constraints, they managed to reach the top and that reaching the top is not impossible, is just hard, but if anyone want it enough anyone could make it.
So for them your practical constraints are simply little stones on the road that can and must be overcome.
However this is not how things works, people that from the bottom rose to the top simply had less practical constraints than others! It's just a qualitative and quantitative matter of how many contraints you have. And is not a matter of choice - you cannot decide to don't have those practical constraints and make them disappear.
Also there are people with the same background, and it could happen that one of them rise to the top while the other don't. And right wingers will say that the second is just lazy or not determined enough, but probably his laziness is due to a mutation in one of his genes, so he can't work hard enough as the other guy, or simply he does not want because his will is different from the other guy, and no one of them can do nothing about them, no one of them can change themselves.
But right wingers will say: "see? They grew up in the same places, they had the same background, they had equality of oppurtunity!" But in reality equality of oppurtunity is a chimera, because no person is equal to another, and one of them in the right environment may thrive while the other don't.
I hope I explained myself well enough!
@@Mannaggialtubo i agree with most of that when it applies to hierarchy, but that right wing argument isn’t fatal to the idea of free choice in general - if it’s -30 outside, you can wear whatever you want but most likely you’ll wear winter clothes. that’s entirely predictable. but you do have a choice and a small number of people will choose against incentives. you might want to run outside naked for a lark. and i can’t use materialism to predict whether you’ll choose a blue snowsuit or a red one. that has nothing to do pro or con with hierarchy justification. hierarchies are easily explained by constraints on choice.
bookmarking my spot 12:41
And what exactly is it that nazis practiced that put them on the right side of the political spectrum?
did you watch the video? the left represents equality of power, and the right represents hierarchies of power. the nazis were the epitome of hierarchy - top down dictatorship, racial hierarchy, economic hierarchy, international hierarchy, etc
@WHAT IS POLITICS? But the Nazis had government run Healthcare, government run banks, government run education, etc. They were by definition socialists. Wouldn't that put them on the left of the political spectrum?
Hey! Me again!
Have you read 'Asymmetric Politics', by Matt Grossmann and David A Hopkins?
Their splitting of symbolic (self-identification) and operational (policy issues) orientations makes sense to me. They reference Ellis and Stimson (2012), who found that self-identified liberals supported liberal policies 29% of the time and conservative policies 4% of the time, whereas self-identified conservatives supported liberal policies 29% of the time and conservative policies 15% of the time. The rest of the percentages are made up of self-identified moderates and those that did not answer the relevant aspects of the base surveys (General Social Survey 1973-2006).
i haven’t but ill want to check that out for a video i’m working on - i don’t think self identificiation really has anything to do with policy anymore, it’s just an indication of cultural affinity. i think of liberal and conservative as dispositions which are rooted in the “openess to experience” trait of the “big 5” psychology traits - which has a normal distribution curve so like a 50-50 split, with a big moderal middle - and political marketers have inadvertently turned them into political political parties in the US… policy is almost totally unrelated
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Great! It's a decent read.
Yeah, Openness to Experience is the big one. Shalom Schwartz notes the influence of openness-related values as being more-or-less opposite to anxiety-reducing values in the 2012 summary of his Theory of Basic Values (see page 13):
core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10687025.pdf
I find this series of videos very useful and I am learning a lot of new things, although I feel a bit of bashing against the soviet union, which indeed turned a socialist revolution into a new hierarchy though as far as I could read it happened also due to outside counter revolutionary forces and still in the end, even under Stalin, it worked more like a a hierarchy in a working cooperative and rather than power of a single person the head of the hierarchy manifested authority supposedly of the workers from the various regions of the union through representative democracy, even though it was within the same party so in that sense it was totalitarian
a lot of communist countries have/had good democracy at the local level, but even in the most democratic ones like cuba, the rank and file worker can’t elect the leaders of the party, and even the rank and file party members can’t elect them. that might be more democratic than nazi germany, but it’s still a dictatorship. also civil liberties are strictly controlled and curtailed and the state has a lot of power over people in all sorts of spheres. it’s quite clearly a hierarchy.
11:15 being a devil's advocate here, even if left and right even id left and right did originally mean that, by now their use is so mangled up that they've kind of lost all their meaning. Whenever I talk to someone about left and right, I have to ask them what they understand by left and right in order to know how to frame the discussion. I ask then, what is the benefit of obfuscating what we really mean behind the distribution of people in a random room in France two centuries ago? Why not say what we really mean?
"I want a more equal society" is still unclear, but it's far more understandable than "I lean left"
p.s. I do agree with you that both US parties are right wing and that the Soviet Union + the countries under the iron curtain were far right states, in spite of their propaganda. It's mindboggling how something like that evolved out of a communist movement, but then again revolutions do have a tendency of doing that.
equality and hierarchy of power is *the* most fundamental cleavage in politics, so we very much need words for them. if you can save time saying you believe in equality of power, then go for it - i just think that the terms left and right currently mean absolutely nothing, so why not use those words because everyone always uses them all the time, in order to really show the clear division in society. otherwise people will still think that the main division is woke vs antiwoke or whatever nonsense of the day is.
I am really digging your content! I am curious, have you ever seen any of Peter Joseph's documentaries or lectures, or books? If you have, thoughts?
thanks - no, never heard of him
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I don't think my reply posted. Peter Joseph's docus are on youtube. His lastest is called INTERREFLECTIONS based on his book the New Human rights Movement- Reinventing the Economy to end Opression. Will you please check it out? I would love to know what you think! :)
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 If you are familliar with Star Trek, how would you clasify their economy?
If you are not, here's some info:
- They don't have currency unless they deal with an alien society that does.
- Starfleet and the Federation does have a hierarchy and milatry ships, however, as far as I understand it its based on people volunteering because they enjoy it and it's an ego boost.
- Reputation is valued. So is morality, science and scientists, critial thinking, intelligent design, systems thinking, and cooperation.
- Negotiations, strategy and diplomacy first over, violence based solutions.
-There is no coercion to work to survive since technology has largly freed society from resource extraction like agriculture. Many things you need can be printed immediately with little input.
- Other things: Pro choice, pro freedom, pro individual, people own property but it's minimal.
- As Picard puts it,
" The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity" and,
" Alot has changed over the years, people are no longer obessessed with the accumulation of things. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.. we've grown out of our infancy"
"This is the 24th century, material needs no longer exist... the challenge is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself.. enjoy."
@@dracdraconeia8150 i watch all the star treks - it doesn’t seem like the writers really figured out exactly what their system is - but it looks more or less like representative democratic socialism (lassalism)
I am good until the middle when you discuss Obama, then russia then france and back... 1989 we already saw USSR disintegration. So stalin should not confuse us anymore. US has a confusing political system due to the biparty system. But in other countries, like the Philippines, we already see communism dying... i appreciate the book recommendations... thank you so much. (I believe some of your politicians even Obama my favorite highly uphold the US world dominance that was why US have the homelessness crisis and hunger issues nowadays, unlike in the early times when US is unconsciously doing things, not even bent of being #1).
P.s. is bernie sanders advising Biden? 😂
I think the assumptions about people's "inherent interests" are a bit tainted by capitalist ideology.
in an ideology of "I only need enough and am better off if my fellow is better off", landlords are great service providers.
Honestly man your framing comes down to “left good right bad”
in today’s political context, more or less - but it’s all relative - like imagine a film crew - a left wing position on a film crew would be to have the janitor and the lighting and makeup people have the exact same input into the film as the director - you can’t make a movie like that - so a more right wing position makes more sense there
Co-Op is the equalizer. I reckon where 90% of the businesses were co-op would be the most equal nation in the world. What do you think?
Thanks for the upload.
100%!
the only problem with coops is there’s no incentive to generate the capital to start big ones. thats why i think corporations should all be transformed into coops after a certain point, like when the founder dies, or after 20 years or after it reaches a certain size.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 True, true. I think the best candidates are struggling ex-industrial town (in America), or smaller villages/towns in a developing nation and get 1000 households to each cough up $1k to $10k towards setting up a proper business that manufactured things, and they could also pass local ordinances that required all businesses turning over $1mil/year to be CO-OPs.
You don't need to build a giant corp from the start you know, apple, amazon, IBM, Google, Facebook all started small.
I'm kinda working towards that, but right now still building my little online ventures - I'm hoping that will let me fund my COOP ventures with 1000 members max.
@@jzk2020 that would be super cool, would love go hear about it if you get a project like that rolling
@Reuben Thomasson why is what a problem?
@Reuben Thomasson oh i see - i meant incentive to start a new coop/enterprise i wasn’t talking about incentive to grow an existing one.
workers generally don’t have the capital, experience or cohesion to risk starting a new enterprise. that’s why most coops started as a private enterprise that was taken over, or else was funded with a big loan from the state.
Fascinating and insightful video! But, I'd say, from a dialectical standpoint, though your final conclusion is not wrong, the argumentation nevertheless errs by way of an over-simplification. In resorting to an analytic analysis, you make a Foucaldian Turn, whereby you make it seem as though the success and hypocrisy of the right and left respectively are all due to power simpliciter--it is the sort of Kaleckian, Bukharinesque argument according to which capitalism can survive only by resort to overt political/imperialist power. Restated, it does not account for how the right has been and is still so able to logically expropriate from the left the concept of liberty, regardless of the impotence of the concept when divorced from material equality. Furthermore, your video somewhat ignores the ugly past of the left: in its inception with the French Revolution, the left most certainly did deem necessary, justified, and legitimate to deploy political violence in the pursuit of their vision, not only against 'external' threats thereto, but equally against 'internal' enemies, i.e. those who were, ostensibly, much too 'unenlightened' to comprehend the deeper, underlying purpose of the Revolution. This step cannot be explained away as due merely to the left's 'compartmentalization' of their vision across political, economic, and/or cultural categories--proper dialectical analysis unequivocally demonstrates their necessary interconnection; nor is this an indication of mere historical relativity--Jacobin, for instance, knew perfectly well that the Committee was acting in a manner that was self-contradictory, due to the insight of which he paid the ultimately political price of becoming a scapegoat.
In sum, you appear to presuppose Foucault's episteme, as though the populace is under the spell of a 'false consciousness' due to their propagandizement by the right.
see episodes 4 and 5
Is there the risk of a Coop that may lead to it hiring people outside of the Coop that are not members? And overtime it becomes like a corporation with a minority in that were the work force but now they are the decision makers. When one coop goes bankrupt? Do the workers in that one become members of other coops or employees causing a regression. Coop members are not always nice to people outside of their coop. Heck, the Joly Roger some American pirates worked in a way like a coop. They can vote their captain out of power.
Another question is how would a military work with a less hierarchy to protect your assets? And how would you keep this military from regressing to a polital Right by your definition (the USSR as an example)?
yes i agree with all of this - coops in real life do end up hiring labour and creating two classes of workers to compete in the market. you need to outlaw wage labour completely, and then you need the coops to starts cooperating vs competing, and then have consumers have input in to decisions, not just the coops and their workers … in others words you need socialism or else it will degenerate in the ways you’ve listed - but still a world of coop capitalism is way better than what we have now in 100x ways. i don’t understand your question about military and asseets. military would be coops also. and no one would be allowed to own anything that someone else depends on to live, because that’s the basis for hierarchy in all societies.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 So your group has some resources and products, and land you want to protect it from outsiders that want to take those away or force another way of life on you. How would you organize this defiance force (military or perhaps more like a miltia). Would you have a conscriptions? Or would it be more of a rotation? How would hierarchies of this miltia be organize? And what means and mechanics are there to keep the leaders of the miltia from overpowering the populous, and maybe become another state?
@@williamharper6625 haha, look i havent figured out all the details of a perfect world… you can check out michael albert and yanis varoufakis, they’ve done stuff on figuring this stuff out and how it might work - but i think any military will always be a threat to democracy, because you always need some degree of centralization to be effective. i think the organizing principle of society should be reduce all hierarchies to a minimum that’s necessary for things to work effeciently. a chomskian sort of ideal - though of course what that minimum is is hugely open to interpretation, but what a great world it would be if our debates were about how little hierarchy to have vs whatever idiocy currently comprises our political debates, how much to cut from education, what level of slave wages should be the minumum wage etc… militaries i would think would need to be democratic, with elected officers and generals etc. maybe sortition, where everyone serves randomly like jury duty (ancient greece was run this way), maybe a specialized force that somehow is answerable to the population who controls their resources, i havent thought it through.
@@williamharper6625 and to be clear when i say any military is a threat to democracy, i should have said any military *conflict* is a threat to democracy because that’s what centralizes power. you try your best to organize it in a way where they can’t run away with that power - have some kind of check, someone else controls their access to resources etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thanks for your reply. It was insightful.
Based
The concept of equality Vs hierarchy seems to get a little... Idk, sticky? When you begin to propose the federal govt consolidate and centralize power to achieve some economic goal.
Like, more power to DC rather than individual states (which are more democratic than the federal govt) seems like a move toward the hierarchy side of the scale.
So, maybe the idea of left vs right takes a back seat to the overall goal of providing more goods and services to a greater number of people?
if the centralization of power is achieved democratically, with the intent and result of the giving the average person more bargaining power and wealth vis a vis employers, landlords etc, then you’re still promoting equality of power. if the government is amassing power without democratic input and just redistributing wealth in order to consolidate it’s own power over all of the citizens (like USSR did) then you can call it right wing political structure using redistribution, doing some left wing policies.
if you don’t look at the world as hierarchy vs equality then you’re becoming blind to the major division in human politics since before we were a species, and all the power dynamics of the workplace, and other private sector organizations.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Maybe do a video on what a democratically elected consolidation of power looks like. Maybe I'm just bitter and disenfranchised, but my brain has a serious hard block when trying to conceptualize a massive institution like the U.S. federal government as being both benevolent *and* effective at granting more power to the greatest number of people possible.
Im on the Bookchin side of confederalism, more than anything, just to put my own views out there.
@@MrKoalaburger remember that left and right are on a spectrum and are relative - so what you had with the new deal is exactly a centralized government taking more power to itself in order to give people more power via laws that redistributed wealth and took power away from owners in favour of workers, unions etc.
it’s certainly not as left wing as an anarchist type of federation etc - but it’s more left wing that what was before, a government that mostly enforced property rights, thereby taking money from taxpayers in order to bolster the bargaining power of their bosses…
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Yeah thats very true. I guess I was imaging a massive power grab, ie: more power to the federal govt. Regardless of whether it benefits the people or not, ergo, hierarchy. But the new deal definitely wasn't that lol.
I should point out there are things I like about the current US system. We have direct democracy in the states. My own state, everyone voted down a terrible proposal presented by our state reps just this month. And we are about to, through direct democracy, legalize weed and abortion beyond 6 weeks. But a federal govt taking more power would diminish our ability to do those things. So, thats kinda where my mind was.
@@MrKoalaburger the issue with the referenda is democracy only works if people know what they’re voting on, so you really need to beef up educationfor it to work well
and an example of what you were talking about before is the USSR - authoritarian centralized power but providing welfare services to the population. i’d call that a right wing regime - in a sense the welfare is there to keep the party in power!
democratic centralism breeds political equality
explain
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 because you know the people you are voting for better, its personal, its human, and the multi layer process ensures leadership is based on trust and conduct, this personal system full of trust is about as equal a society can get without it being communist which requires the abolition of capitalism, and as we know, as it currently exist, capitalism is a global system
@@magnusorn7313 i’m a bit confused - what do you mean by “democratic centralism”? That’s the term that Lenin called his system for how the Bolshevik party should be run, so it’s associated with that.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 i know, i have no quarrel with the marxist leninist conception, i think we agree on that, i mean local communities electing leaders among themselves who are subject to recall and who cooperate with other local leaderships in their region to higher organizations, a way to extent the force of the people towards a organization of trust and unity to promote equality and defense against aggression towards the end of a victory against global capitalism, a truly international revolution built on the unity of national revolution
@@magnusorn7313 ah ok i see - yes, i agree this is the closest to political equality and true democray that we can have in an industrial civilization, but what your describing is usually called anarchism or libertarian socialism, it’s more or less how the spanish anarchists were organized in the 1930s during the civil war
Alligator rhythms
Man is a mote of endless possibility, drifting trough a galaxy of great peril and wonder, limited by only our imagination and the symbiotic equilibrium from which we are born to die upon. A provenance of life chasms upon this celestial void. As to the shape of man; The andante has been given, what crescendo, staccato, legato in this atonal fugue may come: to an inevitable silencio. Only for the next iteration of this bio-organic symphonic experiential experiment at the hart of a paradoxical mystery, in the coldness of space and time to continue it is unerring progression.
I don't know about you, but I am not defined by a chromosome. I am, in any iteration, a mote of inexorable decay stranded upon celestial detritus, in the wake of some calamitous event, I may never know the shape of. I am, and you are, a sequence of deoxyribonucleic acid, events. Safeguard your perception of a thing we struggle to comprehend the shape of eternity, through the ocular sinew of an infinite conflagration of synaptic, dopaminergic drivers. We are all foolish victims of our own design, screaming into a void, yearning for connection, to satiate the unknowable shape of us, constrained by flesh and blood.
Most of what we think I understand is a lie, and everything you hold sacred is a scat-illogical matter, used fuel for future civilizations to feast upon your indolent, adolescent naivete. The face of god is strewn throughout the digestive enzymes of every rotten decomposition of a man, woman and child. A fucked mind blossoms new comprehension trawled from grey-matter, muddled into a new moat of possibility, out to uncharted waters. We bring our old experiences into a new world and find our customs to be substantially incongruous, yet effortlessly refined. Redefining what it is to be a man/woman, creature of the earth. Repugnantly irresistible. A sanguine wreck upon occupied shores, we arrive at the pinnacle of the now, culminating in a moment's time, then.
When will you ever feel this alive again? One can only hope, or make believe our everlasting demise can only be avoided at the hands of one another, so say we all, chafe against the bonds of restraint, as one nobly opines the virtues of your subjugation as you virulently resist with all the vitality hope can provide less incisive lessons, one can not learn by proxy. And thus experiencing a new vision for what life might become before the cold clings to our skin and burnishes our lips a blighted blues melody plays in the back of my mind.
Symphonic overdrive.
I kinda get the feeling that Switzerland where I am, is super left wing, despite calling itself very liberal (classic economic liberal)
interesting - in what way? actually i had a swiss client and it seems the tenant protections there are much stronger than they are here in quebec which are some of the strongest in north america (even if they’re actually quite terrible in many respects)
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
I lived in New Zealand and was shocked. I think Swiss tenancy laws are weak, you have 6 months notice period, no entry for the landlord and free reign over painting the walls and stuff (just nothing structural), and the rent must go down if official mortgage interests go down.
There are just thousands of little socialist institutions that make sure that a rising tide lifts all boats. like mandatory union wage treaties, mandatory pension funds that makes everybody a stock millionaire by 65, wealth taxes,
Direct Democracy on the Constitution,
Tax funded university,
and so much more.
but there is a high degree of bureaucratic efficiency and corporate favouritism that makes the place economically liberal and attractive.
and yeah, hard xenophobia, so the right wing also has it's bone.
@@TheMntnG ah interesting, we have much better than the 6 months notice period - we have eviction only for cause (but there are loopholes) though the rent going down with mortgage is excellent!
shocked in new zealand by?
i guess switzerland is mostly liberal in contrast to the other continental states like france and germany etc
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
the tenancy law in NZ is ridiculous, 2 weeks no cause evictions, rent increases, horrendous house standards, landlords have all the power (nothing gets fixed)
@@TheMntnG oh wow, i didn’t realize that - i know that they used to have a scandiavian level of welfare state until the mid 80s when the labour party went insane and adopted neoliberalism with the consistency and fanatacism that’s rare, and they destroyed their own state - but don’t knwo the details
Weird that you chose Dr Phil...a psychologist. Btw, who are you? I'm a fan...just wondering who you are and what your background is.
i think he’s technically a disbarred former psychologist - my background is music film and anthropology, and i’m a part time lawyer for tenants
08:30 I see a flaw in your Dr phil analogy, you said - Dr phil might go kiss someone else's booboo (and not the most rich one),
I claim - if there was 100% equality- Dr phil was not even created, he was just another mediocre Doc with no incentive to discover his true potential.
haha, i disagree that you need financial incentives to achieve your potential in whatever field - so many artists and musicians for example expressly choose to pursue careers that will earn them much less money than they could otherwise make, yet they practice and hone their skills incessantly out of a desire to perfect their skills, get recognition etc.
also, even if what you said were true: given that Dr. Phil is a crook who screwed over his business partner in order to get the capital to start his enterprise, and before that he was kicked out of the order of psychologists because he was dating a young patient, while also keeping her as an employee, and controlling her life … is that a bad thing?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69
take athletes for example - Olympics makes them push beyond (even beyond what is good for their body, but worth the sacrifice, so they believe.
With Artists is a bit harder to say, because its harder to distinguish between real art and frauds, but you'd agree that most artists are not so good, some are ok, and only a tiny minority are over the top, we don't have thousands of Mozart's dont we?
But if there's no monetary incentive there's another incentive like fame, or even just the love of the crowd, that's why you have so many actors and "talents" that are willing to work so hard for no money.
I was assuming dr phil was high level quality service, I know nothing about him or his past.
@@NidalSamaradokhtar well again, i think athletes and scientists etc would still try to perfect their craft without financial incentive. it’s financial disincentives in capitalism that prevent people from perfecting their skills - when you’re poor instead of perfecting your skills and pursuing something that’s less lucrative you’re incentivized to just do whatever makes more money. with large school debts you’ll ignore being the best lawyer or best surgeon, and go be a corproate lawyer or plastic surgeon.
and left and right are about power hierarchies - so sure incentives like fame and reputation exist and they’re fine, they don’t register on left and right. money registers because more money is more power.
dr. phil by all accounts is in many ways a fraud and a hack though he does have some talent. his best talent is just commercializing himself and stabbing people in the back to get fame and fortune.
@@NidalSamaradokhtar another point worth mentioning - think of very wealthy people - they actually have zero material interest in achieving anything, yet many of them continue to work. if you make 10M a year vs 1B a year, it doesn’t improve your material quality of life in any real way. it’s just like points in a video game - it’s fun, it’s prestige, it’s largely psychological rewards. the material rewards - more houses more jets etc - are not something you have time or capacity to enjoy and the return is infinitesimal in terms of how much each new house or roller coaster or jet improves your quality of life.
Solzhenitsyn in his book about being a prisoner in the gulag pointed out that even when you’re a prisoner with no material interest in working, that he and the others were incentivized to work because they intrinsically enjoyed the engineering work that they were tasked to do. Of course i’m not advocating gulag or prison, but the point is that monetary reward is only important for people who don’t have enough money - and often it’s a bad incentive, it incentivizes them to do lucrative things vs socially useful things or things that they are good at.
A great artist who is poor will waste an enormous amount of time working at jobs that they are less good at because they need to survive.
37:35 This is basically the difference between Internally controlled Borders (legal immigration) Vs Externally Controlled Borders (pro illegal immigration) explained in a clear example, unless supply of housing, low wage jobs & other resources was near infinite & buearacy efficient & adaptable. This is why illegal immigration i think is a right wing position (& high immigration is supported by Capitalists): more workers competing with each other means less bargaining power.
How are you gonna do a whole video talking about equality vs hierarchy and not mention Engels on Authority?? lol
cause it’s not super relevant? people often make like this was some pro authoritarianism text, but he’s basically just saying that when you’re working on a project together you need a plan and coordination to be able to execute it properly and that each worker can’t just decide individually when to show up and what to do at any given point, the workers need to decide together on the rules.
DELETE THE 1%
So, I take it that you don't really believe in anarchy (or what Larken Rose would call voluntaryism), right?
i’ve never heard of larken or voluntaryism, but looking it up it seems like anarcho-capitalism - so no. when some people control property that other people depend on to survive, the dependent people are forced into servitude, which is the opposite of voluntary. you see this over and over in human history and pre-history. the only truly voluntary and free societies which don’t have authoritarianism, are the ones where there’s no way or reason for individuals or groups to amass property that other people need.
also these types of ideologies completely miss that once players get big enough via amassing enough property, the biggest players will end up joining together to forming the equivalent of a state in order to preserve their power and to prevent any competitors from outcompeting them and reversing their dominance. there’s nothing to keep them from breaking the rules once they have enough power, and there’s nothing stopping them from getting that power.
finally, relations of domination, including the employee employer relationship are anti social dehumanize both parties.
If you want a truly free society, and a stateless society, you need one where there is relative material equality, because wealth is power and authority.
my general philsophy is that power hierarchies are very dangerous over time, though sometimes may be necessary and need to be treated that way. so it’s some variation of libertarian socialism / anarcho socialism etc. “voluntaryism” is just a recipe for massive hierarchies, and eventually a powerful non-democratic state.
it’s not a coincidence that a lot of “libterarian” capitalists are also monarchists these days.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Well said. I like Larken, but I don't understand why he believes in Anarcho-Capitalism. Another guy you should check out is Mark Passio. He did a presentation called Fake-A** Anarchists.
@JAB128 haha that’s a good title - a lot of people genuinely think that capitalism means freedom, because they believe that it’s noncoercive - but they’re oblivious to all the dominance built into it. market are free and voluntary, but only in conditions of relative equality. most of these people have never had shitty jobs or at least not for very long. other people are into anarcho capitalism because they straight up believe in hierarchies and that most people are stupid and that the great one should rise up and all that reprehensible stuff.
honestly as much as I am more or less an anarchist, i kind of hate the whole anarchist movement in north america. seems like people who are more enamoured with thinking of themselves as being anarchists than anything else, like an identity label. that’s why i don’t like that label so much. it has university student connotations, and nowadays university is where good ideas, good politics and intelligent brains go to die.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 OK. Yeah, I don't know why people have romantic ideas about capitalism, especially (for a lack of a better term) the religious right. I know people like this, and they think that capitalism is good. They are misled (they also believed that Trump is going to save them).
One more point: Larken believes that society will go back to the dark ages without some form of exchange (which could be one reason why he is an An-Cap).
@@jab1289 well those theories point to how much wealth gets created when people exchange freely etc, and how prices guide the allocation of resources to places where there’s demand etc - i think markets are fine - markets are just the choices that people make about trading, buying, selling or keeping their stuff - but people confuse markets with capitalism, which is a system where private property rules allow you to amass infinite property. markets work great if you have relative equality and keep relative equality. like adam smith the big theorist of free markets thought you needed relative equality for free trade to work - and that part of the story gets buried today for obvious reasons…
Dualistic thinking could only produce zero-sum. either/or conflict of opposite concepts and often troubled by a middle third concept. It is always the law of opposites or at most the Law of Three, But the real world is subjected to the Law of Three (triads) and the Law of Seven (octaves) and in spiral motion. Phenomenal events or material-nonmaterial beings are born, grow, mature, decline and die. Dualistic thinking is always locked and trapped in zero-sum partialities.
That healthcare analogy was ridiculous-a complete straw man argument.
umm .. what exactly was ridiculous about it?
also, a strawman argument is when you make up things about something that aren't true to attack that thing - like "joe biden eats poop for breakfast, he's sick".
i wan't attacking anything, i made up a hypothetical situation (a fantasy free healthcare system) to highlight something about political positions - that a policy that benefits some people usually is not beneficial to other people, even when i benefits the vast majority of people. i think this is pretty obvious and can't even imagine an argument against it, but go ahead
also it's not an analogy it was a hypothetical situation used to illustrate a point. an analogy is when you compare one thing to another thing in order to explain something about it. i wasn't comparing it to anything i just made it up.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 the straw man was the claim that when some people are better off it causes others to be worse off... or something like that, then created the magical healthcare scenario to illustrate it. But because the premise is untrue the example becomes useless.
@@JoeRocksCoronado listen to that part again, that’s not at all what i said. i said that any policy that advantages some people, even a large majority, will usually disadvantage some other people. and the health care example was to illustrate that. another less topical example would be if the world is about to be destroyed by a comet, and everyone will die, if you stop that comet and save the world, you would still have a tiny minority of people who hate humanity and would want everyone to die and will be disappointed that the earth was saved.
It's a steelman.
Don't all tge kids have high and tights, or just you??
what are “high and tights”?
hmm, this video or that video: watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k
Different, but still the same... but different.
that’s a really good video, but he’s wrong - see my episode 5 for a very clear explanation of how we know what these terms mean. Left and Right 100% refer to hierarchy vs equality, and Halim’s argument against that definition isn’t off - guns aren’t inherently a left right issue any more than the use automation is a right left issue: guns are on the left when in the service of equality, and on the right when in the service of hierarchy, just like automation is on the left when in the service of workers, but on the right when in the service of owners. The part of his video on guns used by settlers vs by black panthers actually supports a hierarchy vs equality explanation of guns on the left right spectrum rather than debunking it!
its class and god.
You cover historical positions of left and right from a post hoc and internet brain wormed formulation of “hierarchy vs equality”, instead of contextualizing the historical positions by which material and social determinations motivated these organizations, individuals, or movements deemed “left” or “right”. You’re creating a historical fiction rather than conducting a science of history or political economy. Equality of what? Equality of bourgeois right? Hierarchy of what? Centralized labor unions? Marx for this very reason threw out and criticized such meaningless demands as equality or justice in-and-of themselves as ideals because they are devoid of practical content. You’ll find no such “left wing concepts” such as “the left-right spectrum”, and its laughable you include a slide of his Capital in this video essay. Watched this to prep for your discussion with C Derrick Varn, can’t say I’m excited.
politics refers to decision making in groups. equality vs hierarchy refer to equality or hierarchy of decision making power. you clearly weren’t paying much attention to this video…
also, marx didn’t like using the word equality, because the bourgeois liberal politicians of his day used it to mean equality before the law.
engels on the other hand did use the term equality, but he emphasized that it had to be “real” equality, by which he meant equality of power, which is exactly what I’m saying.
if you want left and right to have coherent meanings, they mean equality vs hierarchy of decision making power.
if you want them to be confused nonsense, you can gunk up the meanings with whatever complications you like. I go into detail on all of this in other episodes.
I think the following content creator has a good challenge to your conception of left vs right, and I hope you might consider engaging with this and the creator to make the left stronger: ua-cam.com/video/9nPVkpWMH9k/v-deo.html
hey - i’ve seen that, and you might like it better, buhe’s just wrong about the historical meaning of the terms (see my episode 5 about the history of the terms - i have three episodes on left and right so far), and also making them mean change vs stasis (or whatever he chose, I forget what it was, I saw it when it was new) just isn’t very useful (see my episode 4 on how i choose definitions for contentious terms).
hierarchy vs equality has been the core struggle in human politics since before we were human. new vs old is just not an important divide in human affairs. fascism was new and bold, and presented itself as a futuristic movement, but it’s classified as extreme right for a reason - it’s explicitly hierarchical. stalinism is right wing disguised as left wing - it professes equality but in reality was a top down hierarchy, imperialist (in a limited way other imperialist big power), nationalist, and even socially conservative.
halim tries to use guns as an example for why hierarchy vs equality is wrong, but he’s off base - it’s not whether you are for or against guns, it’s *why* you’re for or against guns. a country full of guns, with unequal access to guns, and that are necessary because everything is so unsafe because there’s no social safety net so there’s lots of crime is right wing. if you want everyone to have guns because you think that’s the best way to equalize power (think black panthers 1970s), then that’s left wing.
23:40 Hang on, this part is meaningless here bc you don't distinguish between legal/consensual immigrants (who came with some sort of official consent, as a managed intake from the elected), or illegal immigrants who "Forced Entry & Settlement" (no official consent, unpredictable numbers, unmanaged intake where the amount of people coming is unknown & uncontrollable "the more you solve it, the worse it gets" ).
So this makes sense if you mean:
"Should legal immigrant citizens (i am one of them, permanent resident) should be equal to naturally born citizens?"
or "Should a certain a person of native ethnicity be in a hierarchy above naturalized citizens?"
But for illegal or legal immigration, the issue isn't Equality vs Hierachy, it is Consent vs No Consent; Or Order vs Disorder/chaos.
And the countries that try a form Externally controlled Borders or Internally Controlled Borders can attest to that.
This is just the Anarchy vs Authority axis, and has little to do with what it means to be Right-Wing from neither a cultural nor an economic perspective. Hierarchy is not desired for it's own sake, it merely exists. It can be good or evil, depending on other axioms. Here is a definition of the Right Wing that is more useful:
I. Fundamental Moral Axioms: Humans exist to pursue of transcendent meaning through discipline and virtue. Human societies exist to ensure collective survival and the flourishing of virtue within that collective.
II. Core Political Observations: The problem of politics is the tendency of humans to corrupt. The problem of meta-politics is the tendency of institutions to corrupt. Under these constraints, civilization is advanced only by the concerted effort of human leadership, which, by necessity, is a small minority.
III. Common Methodological Approaches: To Pursue the core transcendent values, collectives should implement systems that encourage virtue. To guard against degeneration formalized order-based politics should be employed and leaders should be fully invested in the improvement of their followers.
There are detailed elaborations, but this is generally used as a Bayes Group / HPC that, when enough features match, can be used to detect someone with Right-wing axioms.
what defines the right is belief in and justifications various hierarchies. no one wants hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy, you want a particular type of hierarchy because you think it’s justified, more efficient, better, natural, ordained by god, etc - i.e. all the things you just listed. And if you want to understand how know that equality vs hierarchy are the correct definitions, see episode 5 of this show.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 No, what I want is exactly the category I wrote, and what methodology proves closest to achieving it is entirely irrelevant. In some cases it would be universality, like applicability of Natural Law, in other cases it would be whatever people would decide of their own accord. Your ideology is to force yourself on other people, which the many misrepresentations in your video confirm.
Theres a big difference between forcing yourself on everyone else and preventing a minute minority, the 1% and the government, from forcing themselves and their ideology on the entire world. No one is forcing left wing ideology on anyone. We're simply freeing regular people from those who are actually oppressing them, and the natural world. Breaking down these hierarchies is acting on behalf of freedom, freedom from minority rule, freedom from oligarchy, from kleptocracy, from plutocracy, from corporatocracy, from authoritarianism, from any sort of oppression and coercion the people decide to target. True leftists don't want to force anything on anyone other than the ruling class. And that's setting things to rights, because they are the ones doing all the forcing. We're basically their serfs, their pawns, their subjects.
@@LukeMcGuireoides "No one is forcing left wing ideology on anyone. " yet "Freedom from Majority Rule" aka "Democracy" is not on your list. You're fine with voting to force your morals and ethics on others. I'm pretty sure you would count a competence hierarchy on the list to be dismantled, along with contracts and free trade. The left always ends up being the useful idiots for the Big State, otherwise they would have embraced the actual free market centuries ago.
@@tenetgg the free market is fine in conditions of relative economic and power equality between actors. once you start to get a power imbalance it just turns into dominance hiearchy and can reach levels of tyranny as horrid as any other. all the original free market proponents of the 18th century like adam smith understood this very well. the freedom to escape the tyranny of the majority is better addressed by defining democracy as “participation in the decision that affect you, in proportion to the extent that they affect you” and limiting the powers of democratic entities that way. And note that much of the left is more anti-state than the so called “libertarian” right.
Fascism is da way
So if right wing is pro hierarchy
and left wing is pro equality
Then wouldn’t the most extreme right wing government be an Islamic country?
Islam produces the most authoritarian governments who enforce hierarchical laws
This is why I disagree with your idea of what the left right spectrum is referring to
In American politics we started out with a hatred for a monarchy and equality under the law is in our founding documents
The 2 political factions that formed immediately after our first president resigned was between those who wanted government to stay out of the lives of the citizens(Jefferson) and those who thought the federal government had more authority than the constitution had granted it as long as it was doing what was best for the citizens (Adams)
So our left right spectrum is a measuring tool to judge the amount of power or control government should be allowed to have
Frances revolution was several years after ours and should be seen as a totally failure
It got out of hand and ended up killing everyone who was involved in it until a stinky dwarf strategist won a bunch of battles and declared himself king
but that’s exactly right! islamic governments are absolutely right wing governments, just like religious theocrats here are on the far right. in any muslim country, the islamists are considered to be on the right, secularists are on the left, and socialists are further on the left. exactly like in france in the 3rd republic where you first had government parties deliberately seated on a left right soectrum. im not an expert on early US history, but the left and right in the early US are not about more or less government, they’re about more or less democracy. when small government is promoted as a means of increasing democracy, (jefferson was to the left of adams) it’s on the left, when small government is pro oted as a means of reducing democracy, like with modern day “libertarians” it’s on the right. it doesn’t matter if you qualify the french revolution as a failure or not, it’s where we get left and right from and it’s hierarchy vs. equality. watch episode 5 it’s very clear when you go through the history of it. islamic governments aren’t the most right wing in the world though, islamism involves some economic redistribution, but it’s still very right wing. the most right wing thing possible would be something like nazism but with with no social programs or economic redistribution, except from the poor to the rich.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 oh shit didn’t know there were more episodes thank you
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I wouldn't take a simple idealistic view that Islam produces authoritarian governments. As much as people would love to believe, religion didn't fall from the sky and has a dialectic relationship with the societies which constructed it over millennia to date. The same religion which formed reactionary governments also formed the basis of a large number of liberation movements as well.
@@volvolakaemma9209 sure i agree with that totally - did i say the opposite (I made this video like a year ago so i forget the details of what i said!). like if you look at the major religions the practice deviates wildly from the text. and also the same religion is completely different in one place and time vs another. christianity is anti authoritarian pacifistic and anti wealth, but then 300 years later it’s authoritarian and war hungry and wealth glorifying etc. all coming from material conditions and which class of people is interpreting it etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I think I replied to the wrong person. I was supposed to reply to the original author because I was replying their thesis islam produces authoritarianism. My bad.
doesn't this mean the USSR and other "socialist" countries right wing?
yes exactly - i mean, you can rate things by issue or policy - so like in terms of decision making structure it was very right wing, but in terms of economic distribution it was somewhere on the left - though politics is about decision making ultiamtely