RE: What is leftism? What is rightism? Why are there so many different interpretations?
If I had to go to the two dimensional chart, I would prefer the Nolan chart. I see Authoritarian Left as wanting government control of public life (jobs, industry, assistance, etc) whereas Authoritarian Right wants control of personal life (families, religion, orientation). But both one dimensional and two dimensional charts are wrong, as you point out but don't actually say.
We need to combine all the charts. Every person is a plenum and cannot be described by a point, but is a twisty space in perhaps 10 significant dimensions. The Pournelle chart is in there, as rationality is certainly a factor, interest from apathy to fanaticism is another dimension, ability, intelligence etc all need to be considered.
Right and left are really meaningless except in seating arrangements.
Personally, I'm a radical moderate...wonder where I get to sit???
That (in my view) just means that some of your qualities have a lower absolute value, or that you have mixed economic and personal values. That's why a one or two dimensional chart can't define you (or me), and a higher dimentional matrix is required.
I agree...I was kidding. I created a four part model several years ago and actually wrote about 350 pages applying it.
Yeah, I knew that you were kidding-ish. I just have this "no polarities" soapbox that drags me around and makes me stand on it and speak up.
My model started as a joke to prove Stanislaw Andrzejewski's Law of Nebulous Verbosity that began to make sense. Politically people fall into two of four categories...Leader/follower and rational/irrational self-interest. It works out really well.
I just went o look up Stanislaw Andrzejewski's Law of Nebulous Verbosity , and you have the top two Google hits.
well played, sir
Whatever that means! "Verbiage increases to the extent that ambition exceeds knowledge."
I think part of the problem is that we are trying to apply multi-dimensional defintions instead of seperating things out on an individual basis. The Nolan chart overcomplicated a very simple political definition...What was the level of State control the person supported.
We start saying, I want government control over here, but not over here, well than at the best we're a minarchist (like me).
The more control an ideology demands over it's subjects, the farther to the left, regardless of whether that control is economic or religious.
I always used to piss off people by claiming that liberals and conservative Christians shared the same goals ;>
I think the terminology of Right and Left is part of the problem. They mean nothing and everyone has their own definition. They cloud the issue. Yes, government control is a range from zero to absolute, but that is a ray in the positive axis, not a polarity as right and left are.
Where an individual or group may want that control to apply is another ray in the positive dimension, starting at zero (control over no person), through individuals, family groups, cities and nations, to the world. All are positive values of people and separate from the actual amount of control you want to apply to those groups.
Combine those two rays and you get a two dimensional region on the chart, not a point. An area within which you think government control should operate. Add in values for the interest level (apathy/fanaticism) ray and you get a volume describing how likely you are to advocate for government control in what areas.
Greater numbers of dimensions are difficult to visualize, but in 3D space we can simply swap out one value for another to get more meaningful regions within which a person might fit. Right and Left are meaningless.
Which is the reason I simplify it down to one axis.
I agree with you that we can not define people that simply. There is no chart we could put together once we've gone past 3 factors, and and we've already discussed fanaticsim and intelligence..
So I am limiting my definition to ideologies, which can be judged on a single facor; the amount of state control.
If I got your other point correctly, once an ideology reached the far Right, there is the belief that no human should exert control over another.
Calling people Leftists on my part is just a quick defintion of people supporting economically interfering policy, which demands high level of state control.
the government itself is not some ogre with a will of it's own, but the decisions and actions of many people