revolution

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A rant about left and right—and circles and straight lines

 

It seems to me that conservatives and liberals are on opposite sides not of a line, but of a circle.

Because the thing about circles is that they are round. When the right and the left approach around one side of a circle, they meet in harmony. When they keep going further to the right or further to the left, and they also eventually meet and become the same, and the place they meet is tyranny and the suppression of freedom.

For that reason, I don’t think the terms far right and far left are very useful. And terms like fascist and communist are not much better, carrying as they do so much emotional residue from past experiences. And producing as they do the same effects on their subject populations. 

I propose a different set of terms—ones that represent a line rather than a circle.

At one end, you have elitists. They want power, wealth, and control to reside with a small group that they regards as better qualified and more worthy than the rest of the population. To elitists, the goal is power and wealth. The rest of human kind exists to make the elitists more powerful, more wealthy, and more in control. Anyone who fails to serve the elitists or—worse—opposes the elitists, does not deserve to continue existing.

Think of them, if you like, as Western-style dragons, dragging their bloated bodies over a mountain of gold and sparkly things. Wealth that they can’t use, don’t need, and won’t share. And all the rest of the population as rats and mice—rats who serve the dragon, polishing its scales and bringing it food, and mice hiding in holes, hoping not to be noticed.

To elitists, the world will function more efficiently if only a few people are in charge. And they regard efficiency as a good thing. And for a while, it might work, though it inevitably turns sour, for robber barons cannot avoid stealing things—from one another, if they’ve finished fleecing their subjects. Whether it ends in Game of Thrones or bloody revolution, nobody wins when the knives come out. One mouse cannot kill a dragon, but no dragon can stand against a million mice with nothing to lose.

At the other end, you have idealists. To an idealist, power, wealth and control are at best irrelevant and at worst necessary means to the goal. The goal is community well-being. To an idealist, a community cannot be well unless all in it are well, so those at this end of the line accept people for who they are, and respect the opinions and needs of others. They don’t measure people by their possessions or their power, but by how they relate to others, and how they contribute to the community. 

To idealists, the world will be a happier and kinder place if everyone has a right and opportunity to be heard. This is not very efficient in the short term, but it produces better results in the long term. Besides, efficiency is not a major driver for idealists. Not when compared to fairness.

Think of it as a herd or pack of almost any type of animal. Or, if you will, as the Shires, where hobbits make the land productive and party often.

As a student of history, I know that all societies drift toward elitism over time, and the true idealist society has never existed, though my own country and various Scandinavian countries have had times of moving in that direction.

But I still prefer idealism.

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Can we learn from the past?

My current WIP is set during 1816, the year when summer didn’t come to the United Kingdom, bringing failed harvests, disease, starvation, and other ills. After the long economic pressures of war, times were tough, and unskilled labourers of the time must have despaired at their chances of keeping their families housed and fed, or even alive.

But things were about to improve, at least according to a lot of modern economists. They see widening real income inequality from the 14th century, peaking in the 18th century and beginning to improve from around 1814. For the wealthy, things improved as income from real estate rose and the cost of luxury goods dropped. The poor found it harder and harder to meet the rising cost of housing, especially as the prices of staple goods trended upwards and upwards.

For my book The Reign of Silence, I researched revolutionary movements in England during the early part of the 19th century. For a long time, those in power took the threat of bloody revolution very seriously, especially once the French provided a vivid example of the results of allowing a population to experience untrammeled greed long enough to get sick of it.

In the 19th century, and through to the First World War, the balance shifted as labour shortages forced wages up and real estate prices trended down. The trend reversed between the wars, with the incomes of the wealthy once more pulling away from the incomes of the rich. In the period I remember as my childhood, after the Second World War, income inequality was low, but since then it has reached 18th century levels once again.

Think about these figures (latest ones from the Oxfam report recently published):

  • 1700 England-Wales households:
    • Top 1% share 39.3% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 1740 England-Wales households:
    • Top 1% share 43.6% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 1774 US households:
    • Top 1% share 40% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 1929 US households:
    • Top 1% share 44.2% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 2017 global figures
    • Top 1% share 82% of income generated during the year.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and 10,000 kilometres of ocean between New Zealand and increasingly desperate people might not be enough.