I have neglected this site for quite a while, and thought it would be a good idea to post something, so here are a couple of my answers to questions posted at Quora:
What, in your opinion, are the most fundamental features that characterize left and right wing ideologies?
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on this topic, entitled A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I strongly recommend this book.
Going back as far as Aristotle and Plato, Professor Sowell explains that a social vision “is our sense of how the world works.” It has been described, he says, “as a ‘pre-analytic cognitive act.’ It is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as a hypothesis to be tested against evidence.” Visions are crucial, because they are “the foundations on which theories are built.” BUT: “The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.”
The two visions he calls the Constrained and Unconstrained. The Constrained vision is one that – at the extreme – sees the nature of Man as unchanging. Humanity has flaws and is not “fixable.” We have to live with what we were born with and hopefully train ourselves to be better, knowing that our actual nature is always there. The Unconstrained vision, Sowell says (quoting William Godwin from his 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice) is one in which “man (is) capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved.” In short, humanity can be perfected.
Those of the Constrained vision understand that some people can be right bastards, and a few downright evil. Best to do whatever is possible to keep those people from being able to do bad things should they reach the levers of power.
Those of the Unconstrained vision believe that we can achieve Utopia, we just have to put the RIGHT PEOPLE in charge to lead us to that promised land.
Earlier someone asked what the Republican End Game for the United States was. Charles Tips answered, I think accurately, that the Republicans don’t have an “endgame” in mind. The so-called “Right Wing” is happy with things now and the progress we have made and are continuing to make. The “Progressive” Left, on the other hand, has a goal, and that goal is Utopic. The Left is never happy, because they have not yet achieved that Utopia. And as someone observed, Utopia is always just one more mass murder away.
Always.
How can I force the Trump voters in my city to give up their guns?
Well, Caleb, there’s an essay floating around out there you probably ought to read. It’s called “Why the Gun is Civilization” and it’s written by a gentleman by the name of Marko Kloos. Marko is a first-generation immigrant to the US. You can read the essay here, but here’s the opening:
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
Now, look at your question: “How can I force the Trump voters in my city to give up their guns?”
You can’t. That’s why they own guns. You have to REASON with them, and you’ve already acknowledged that reason isn’t an option for you. Because they have reasoned that if you’re willing to use force to disarm them, you’re willing to use force to do a lot worse. And they want the ability to say “NO” and make it stick.
Really good stuff; thank you.
Oddly enough, I have just finished re-reading a book called Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. It is, at the title suggests about “survival” and is subtitled “Who lives, who dies and why”.
It explores the psychology of survivors (and those who did not survive) but the point he makes that is relevant here is that people are driven by what he calls emotion, not logic. He argues that in a primitive, animal like survival situation, where instinct and an unthinking reaction to “get the hell out of Dodge” (i.e. emotion) is the best survival strategy for a species (not necessarily for an individual – nature works with complete populations and has enough time and individuals to experiment to achieve a better result. hard on an individual but …). Logic and thought comes a long way behind. A deer does not wait around to puzzle out what that strange sound or smell was.
Extending his argument to a broader field, then the argument Caleb is using is coming from his emotive side and he hasn’t slowed down enough to actually think things through. Nor, I suspect, does he want to put the mental effort in to do so.
Deep Survival is a quirky book that takes and oblique look into the way that the human mind works and worth a read if you want to have an appreciation of why people do stupid shit and answers “What were they thinking?”. Gonzales demonstrates that they were NOT thinking but let emotion take over.
A copy can be found here, though I prefer a dead tree edition.
https://oceanofpdf.com/authors/laurence-gonzales/pdf-epub-deep-survival-who-lives-who-dies-and-why-download/
Two comments:
1. When I was in a medieval reenactment group, one of the things you constantly heard from people training fighters was, “It takes time for this stuff to get into muscle memory. If you have to think about it, you’re too slow.”
2. When I was in the Navy, somthing that the leader of a Damage Control Training Team stuck in my mind: “Why do we do drills, over and over? Because in a crisis, people tend to do what they’ve been trained to do. If you aren’t trained, you dither and do nothing. So we train you to have the correct response as automatically as breathing.” Accurate as far as it goes, but I found a problem with that idea when I was talking to my niece, who is a nurse teaching critical care. In critical care, going on auto isn’t one of your options. One of the reasons it’s not suitable for the vast majority of nurses is that each patient is a unique situation, seconds count, and you can’t just let your brain turn off and go by the numbers.
Note that when I say “critical” in this context, we’re talking no, heartbeat, no pulse, not breathing type of critical.