Why are (Some) Socialists and Far Right so quick to Assume they know what you're saying.

Holding Libertarian views puts you in quite a unique position where you seem to spend your time being attacked from all sides (granted I do bring it on by getting involved in some emotionally charged topics) so in the average day I tend to have debates with the Right on topics such as Gay Marriage, Immigration, Equality and so on, whilst at the same time having debates with the Left on The NHS, Austerity and EU Membership to name just a few.  Personally I love having debates like this and I see them as a great way to understand other people’s views as well as challenge the validity of my own held views.

This double attack has lead me to see even more similarities between socialists and far right debaters. I first blogged about how I consider the Far Right and the Left to be the same ideology a few years ago. The latest similarity I have noticed is in their common response to a challenging view which I call the Assume – Anger – Attack response. I should stress that I am not saying that this response is constant and there are occasionally some well reasoned and well articulated debates with Socialists however the level of AAA responses seems to me to be massively higher in the Left and Far Right than in any other group I regularly debate with (Although Extreme Atheists come close) Essentially the AAA response goes along the lines of 

1)      Assume I understand what you are saying, allowing my own bias to cloud my judgement.

2)      Get Angry about what I assume you are saying, this prevents logic from entering the debate.

3)      Attack, Attack, Attack – I have assumed you are bad so must now attack first.

As an example, recently I commented on a facebook post, now I should say up front that I was almost definitely in the wrong as I hadn’t quite understood what the original post was about – To be honest it was something that was so far from my view of the world that it never really occurred to me. One of my more left leaning facebook friends then put on a comment that attacked me, accused me of taking an opinion that was actually at odds to my own and stated that my views were actually dangerous. I was obviously confused (This was after all completely at odds with what I was thinking.) so I queried it and was again met with more assumptions about what I was saying – Assumptions based on the bias of the commenter and quite likely the incorrect assumption that I hold Right Wing social views – I responded with trying to clarify what I had meant and for the first time it was pointed out that my view wasn’t aligned to the original post, it went on for a few more comments until I eventually realised what he thought I was saying and I confirmed that I must have misunderstood. A long conversation based solely on the fact that he had followed Assume – Anger – Attack rather than a model that seeks to understand the other side before responding.  I call this the EEE model, Explore – Empathise – Exchange, based solely on the fact that I wanted three words that started with the same letter.

1)      Explore, Does the other person see the world the same as you.

2)      Empathise, Is there an emotional reason they took this view, why do they feel this way.

3)      Exchange, Now that you understand where they are coming from you can exchange your ideas.

Maybe if we all followed this model we could get a lot more understanding and a little less confrontation.

President Hollande has an affair

Speaking to a French colleague it would appear that in the UK we are as obsessed  (if not more so) about Hollande's affair than they are in France, The general feedback from the French has been that they are not really surprised, not sure if this is because of him, or because they don't see anything unusual about someone having an affair, but it certainly seems to be of more curious interest than the shock we are treating it with.

Still I have at least learnt a new phrase gauche caviar (The Caviar left) basically this is the french equivalent of our own champagne socialist, which just goes to show that wherever you live socialism exists to take money from the poor and give it to the rich.

Social-Capitalism

I have been thinking a lot lately about the idea of responsible capitalism personally I think from Westminster at the moment it is a lot of “Sound Biting” and an attempt to appease people with words they know but do not understand the meaning of, That said my ideal system would be what I would call the social-capitalist system where instead of kicking the free market with its size 90 boots the government could instead operate benevolent companies in the market place (For Example the BBC in Media, Northern Rock (had they not taken a massive loss to sell them) in banking, British Energy (Again had they not been sold) in the utilities) These companies which would by law have to strive to be profit making and would not be allowed to receive tax funding could then be used to provide a socialist element in a capitalist system.

This could include taking the unemployed on to provide skills and work experience (At
the same time making them work for their benefits) They could also ensure that price
fixing would be impossible as they would always look to lower end consumer prices whilst ensuring that there was still a level of profit to be made (Otherwise people would stop running businesses) and finally each company would provide a decent amount of money into the exchequer to remove a lot of the tax burden from the private sector. This way the government can manipulate the market rather than trying unsuccessfully to control it.

The important fact that seems to be lost of the protesters at St Paul’s is that unlike socialism and communism which try and control the way people behave to reach an ideological result capitalism is actually looking at things the other way as it does not try and change the way people behave but rather tries to explain the way people have behaved since society began, There is no way to abandon capitalism as it is our default setting and every attempt to move away from capitalism soon reverts to a close proximity to capitalism as people look to return to their natural behaviour, the challenge therefore is not to remove capitalism but to use it
to achieve the required aims, manipulate not devastate.

Why Far Right is more Left than Right

I have been feeling a little bit annoyed recently with descriptions of conservative politics as Right Wing, in fact that is not strictly true what annoys me is when parties such as the BNP and Nazi Parties are called Far Right (I accept that this simply stems for the contempt I feel for racists, and how I hate to have them linked to me in any way.) it is often described as a scale going from Communism in the extreme left through Socialism and conservatism in the centre and out to fascism in the extreme Right, the problem is of cause that this, like most attempts to model a complex system is incorrect, this implies that Communism and Socialism are as far from fascism as you can get where as in fact they are the closest to each other, I would suggest that in fact the system is much more of a circle than a line with Communism and Fascism pulling support from roughly the same areas.

For example, Racism which is obviously a key tenant of fascism is all about pluralism, the dividing of people into constituent parts (Them and Us.) this shares the most parallels with Socialist ideals of a class war, Both of these ideologies share a common factor which can be dumbed down to “My life isn’t good, and it is their fault.” Like fascism, socialism looks not at what someone can do to improve their life rather who can be blamed. This is a theme that similarly binds fascism to communism, whilst on the surface they appear to be polar opposites they are both essentially about the redistribution of resources, in fascism from foreign born to domestic citizens and in Communism from the “Haves" to the “Have Nots" (although I personally think it is more frequently the “Earned” to the “Earned Not”) only capitalism and free market economics stand apart from this trend being purposely devoid of any state intervention of wealth redistribution. In a fully capitalist system there is total equality, no one is persecuted due to race, gender, religion or as in socialism success.

Another similarity of Socialism and Fascism is that they tend to broadly pull support from the same demographic, The BNP for example do not tend to take support from the Conservatives in elections rather they take their support from Labour, this is because they offer mostly an identical message, a message that “if you are unhappy with your life it is someone else’s fault” ties both parties to people who are not as concerned with what they have as ensuring that no one else has more then them. On the other hand the Conservatives promise that they will ensure that all people have equal chances (as opposed to equal output) pulls it support from inwards facing people who ask “How can I make my life better?” therefore it is much more likely that a Labour voter would vote BNP than a Conservative voter (Who is more likely to switch to UKIP) There is a clear link from the globalization of capitalism and the globalization of Human Rights, Capitalism works when everybody is working to better themselves and therefore a successful capitalist country is one with an extensive Middle Class and it is the creation of a Middle Class that drives the majority of democratisation as they ask for more say in their own country. Socialism, Fascism and to the greatest extent Communism look to prevent people from pushing for freedoms by replacing capitalist tendencies towards equality with “Big Government” control.

So next time you hear the phrase Far Right remember that the political landscape is less a line and more a circle.