Alex: Robert, thanks for the warm welcome.
I’ve been reading your blog for a while and I would say that your views defy categorization, which I find refreshing. Of course, you’re free to apply any label you like to yourself. I personally have been exposed to enough narrow ideologies to find most such labels distasteful. I would rather people apply labels like ‘open-minded’, ‘numerate’, or ‘principled’ to themselves instead of an ideological designator which is as much about tribal affiliation as it is about personal philosophy. If people were really honest, they could even apply terms like ‘selfish’, or ‘biased towards short-term outcomes’ and nobody could fault them because we’re all that way to some extent.
Of course I am a man of the Left and I always have been. I am a liberal, progressive, socialist, whatever you want to call it. Exactly.
And the problem is that in the US, you pretty much have to define yourself as liberal or conservative. I suppose it is possible to be a Centrist, but I don’t hear many folks identifying that way.
Of course I am a man of the Left and I always have been. I am a liberal, progressive, socialist, whatever you want to call it.
However, once you designate yourself on the left of the spectrum like that, you are given a checklist of 1,000 different issues, and you have to check the “liberal” position on every single damn one of them. If you fail to check even one, everyone on the Left flips out, says you are not a liberal/progressive/socialist/whatever, and instead you are a reactionary/conservative/fascist/Nazi/Republican. Well, I am not any of the latter. I have examined all of those philosophies in great detail, and I despise those people. I do not fit in with them at all. However, only conservatives have been friendly to me, even though their philosophy is crap. Everyone on the Left by and large hates my guts.
So I am a man without a country, so to speak.
Really if you gave me a list of Left positions, I might check most of them. More importantly, if you gave me a list of rightwing opinions, I would not check too many of them. But I would check a few. But you can’t even check a few, you see. You can’t even check one.
Let me give you another example. I think a $15 minimum wage is a terrible idea. But I am very much pro-worker. I just don’t think that is the way to deal with working class problems in the US. That would cause more problems then it would cure. When I say that, everyone on the Left gets outraged and says, “I thought you were for the workers!” As in, if you are pro-worker, you have to support a $15/hr wage. Well, I am pro-worker, and I think that wage is a terrible idea.
Everything is black and white here. I like a lot of what Putin does, but I agree that he does some bad things, and I will gladly rattle them off. When I do this, Putin-haters (everyone) is outraged and yells, “I thought you were pro-Putin! See, even you admit he’s bad.”
You see in the US you have to take positions. If you hate Putin, nothing he does is good. Same with Trump, Assad, Kim Jong Il, or other bogeymen. Most everyone on the Left in the US says all of these men are pure evil. If you point out that these people are good or correct in some certain way, everyone flips out. “You support Kim Jong Il!” Well, no I don’t, but he has the right to defend his country.
People who are pro-Democrat or anti-Assad or whatever will never admit that there is one bad thing about Democrats or one good thing about Assad. You can’t.
If you say one bad thing about Democrats, they’re not “good” anymore. If you say one good thing about Assad, he’s not “bad” anymore.
Let’s say we are talking Putin. My conversation partner is a Putin-hater. Literally everything Putin does is pure evil. I am taking the opposite point and supporting Putin on a number of issues. But if I concede Putin is bad in one way, my partner starts jumping up down and yelling, “Even you say he’s bad!”
If you concede one point, if you say you’re guy is bad in even one way, in the US, you just lost the argument. Because the other guy never concedes a point. In the US, the way people think is that the person who never concedes on anything wins, and the person who concedes a point or two loses.
Literally almost everyone I meet in this country is exactly like this. Most people I have known in my life are like this. I know several people with 140+ IQ’s, and they are complete black and white thinkers, so it’s not down to intelligence.
Humans just can’t seem to handle cognitive dissonance. They can’t deal with gray areas. Gray areas make people nuts. A gray area means the good guy’s not good anymore, and the bad guy’s not bad anymore. We can’t have that.
Ever since I appeared on the Net, people have been screaming that my politics is utterly irrational and insane. That is simply because I am Left on some things and Right on others. In America, apparently that is the definition of insanity. Recently someone commented that I am “all over the place.” That’s right. If you live in a permanent gray area, you will always be all over the place.
Which brings me to my original question: Just how many Americans are not black and white thinkers? I would also like to ask if it is a human characteristic rather than an American one. Will you generally find the same black and white thinking everywhere you go in the world?