Early Retirement Extreme Forums

The Truish and Actual Political Spectrum. I’m the author, happy to debate, or answer questions or respond to substantive criticism.

brute finds it not a vast improvement over the popular left/right spectrum. it doesn't solve anything because it's still one-dimensional. for example, Ayn Rand is almost all the way to the right on the "social equality and individual freedom" scale. in fact, Ayn Rand is 100% for individual freedom and 0% for social equality - meaning she breaks this scale. or should she be in the middle? in any case, collapsing individual freedom and social equality removes most distinctions that brute actually cares about - the libertarian axis.

the 2 dimensional libertarian spectrum of personal/economic freedom seems to distinguish better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertari ... normal.png

edit:
wikipedia has a few interesting charts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political ... _chart.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political ... _chart.jpg

Projecting [political] nuances into 1D is bound to be ... misleading... as people try to re-extract the nuances based on a line.

I'm not convinced that linear algebra is the way to understand politics in the first place. I prefer stock and flow charts.

Better off with the ever-popular quadrant (two-dimensional) model that has made the rounds in the past. A three or more dimensional model would be even more interesting.

Hi all! Thanks for the comments. All models of reality of reality are reductive — they’re models, after all, not reality. I agree a flow-chart, a three-point model and a glowing, revolving hologram would all reveal more, but my point was a) to correct (or comment on) the spectrum we use and b) to insert some psychological reality into it — in this case conscience, which, I’d say, can be plotted on a line. Either you have conscience or you don’t, either you believe it is more intelligent than your rational mind, or you don’t, either you listen to it a lot or you don’t listen to it very much — and so on.

Of course depends what you mean by ‘conscience’. The sense I use the word here is pretty stark, but no time right now to go into detail.