We've all heard the fallout from the mind-numbing Liberal/Conservative debate. Both sides have been perceived to hold, at one time or another, the dominant position in our society. And yet we've come to a point in time in which this "debate" no longer describes the divisions. Our labels have been used and abused for too long, and we must, therefore, look elsewhere to lay out the field.
Fundamentally, the debate is not between Conservatives and Liberals anymore. The debate now is between True Believers and True Doubters. These fringe elements occupy opposite ends of the same continuum. The Rational Majority, the other group on this continuum, is stuck in the region between the warring camps at the fringes.
Have we lost the Conservative and Liberal designations? Not exactly. True Believers, to be sure, are invested in Conservative thinking, but they go beyond rational Conservatism into the realm of irrationality. Likewise, True Doubters are invested in Liberal thinking, and they also go beyond rationality into an irrational realm as well. The rest of us try to relate to the natives from these irrational realms as best we can, sometimes picking up some cognates in our own world, but most of us often find that our communications with the natives are exercises in futility.
True Believers live the life of institutional thinking. In this, True Believers are complete adherents to a codified scheme or philosophy that dictates how they perceive and describe their universe. Institutional thinking is the simplest form of conservatism, in that those who learn to think this way have often done so because somebody else first explained it to them during various novice moments in their lives, and subsequent experience didn't contradict that learning. All of us possess knowledge picked up in this way.
The difference between the majority and the True Believer is that those who are not True Believers continue to weigh the impact of their learning beyond the time it was first acquired, occasionally revising their original estimates of the situation as further experiences offer broader examples, while True Believers never see the need to re-assess their learning on a subject beyond that initial learning. A common result of the difference in thinking between True Believers and members of the Rational Majority is when charges of flip-flopping are leveled at those who reconsider their earlier positions based on new data vs. when charges of acting like sheep are leveled at those who remain rooted in their original convictions regardless of new data.
On the other end of the spectrum, True Doubters have also been taught certain principles in civilization by a mentor during various novice periods of their lives, and True Doubters have learned to not trust those teachings because of the incompatible and contradictory experiences they encountered thereafter. They observe the direct impact of the institutional view on individuals and develop anti-establishment principles that touch on many elements in society, and thus, lean toward anarchism and nihilism. All of us have experienced the frustration when our ideals are assaulted by the various hypocrisies and weaknesses we encounter, but only the True Doubter takes them to heart as modus operandi thereafter.
Part of the failure of the Conservative/Liberal name-calling debate is that nobody can be truly Conservative or Liberal all the time and about all things, unless one is mentally ill. Certainly, as we grow older and more experienced, we grow somewhat more and more conservative over time about some things as we catalog our experiences vs. expectations, but we're still not going to be always one way or the other over time. True Believers, however, are already at the extreme of Conservative thinking as True Doubters are at the extreme of Liberal thinking. They're not mentally ill, of course; they just tend to be lazy when it comes to considering alternative views. They already have their hammer and everything looks like a nail.
Furthermore, True Believers and True Doubters alike can be found both on the Liberal side of politics as well as the Conservative side. An obvious characteristic of both True Believers and True Doubters is that they tend to ignore any evidence contrary to their beliefs because they've already made their commitment to their ideal belief and nothing is going to shake them from it. The subject of their belief is irrelevant here. All that matters to these True thinkers is adherence to what they've established about the subject.
True Believers are likely to be joiners -- always looking to join with others who wish to promote an institutional protocol. Anybody who does not support their favored protocols is deemed an outsider, a heretic, an infidel, etc., and treated accordingly. The realm of True Believers is littered with splinter groups who have broken away from an original protocol over disagreements about the protocol's application or interpretation. Consider the number of religions in the world as one example of this phenomenon.
Although it's less likely to encounter True Doubters who are joiners, they can still be found within the ranks of Conservatives and Liberals alike. True Doubters don't stand for something, they simply have reason to take stands against things -- institutional protocols themselves are anathema. Furthermore, True Doubters don't support separate interpretations of protocols. In other words, they're not going to split hairs over issues. Rather, they're going to support abolition of institutional protocols. These are the atheists of religion, the anarchists of government, and the party poopers of etiquette. They don't start an Inquisition, a Reformation, or develop a strict sect within a religion, they strike at the thinking that promotes any kind of organized theology in the first place. They aren't for or against the Designated Hitter rule, per se, they're more likely to object to organized professional baseball itself.
Anything that humans feel the need to organize is automatically a flawed enterprise to a True Doubter, simply because humans are too flawed themselves to come up with anything of value. If the True Believer is the ultimate Optimist, as in "if we can only get everybody to believe my way, everything will turn out right," then True Doubters are the ultimate Pessimists, as in "trying to perpetrate somebody's idea of governing principles will only lead to more dependent sheep and fewer strong individuals who can succeed on their own."
Why This Works Better Than the Liberal/Conservative Dichotomy
- We hear more from these camps every day than we do from the tradition-based Liberal/Conservative camps.
- it's easier to differentiate based on motive rather than platform
- arguments for and against are more clearcut and sensible
Our social discourse has been littered with labels for too long. The labels offered here are more essential. They fit within the standard tendency in human history to develop cycles of coming together and then falling apart. Likewise, they fit the cultural pattern of developing codified rules to summarize the past and then rendering those codes irrelevant in succeeding generations.
Take for example the unfortunate development of political parties in the U.S. The leading parties, currently labeled Democratic and Republican, are supposed to represent a set of codified views that differentiate one from the other. The fact of the matter is that neither party is easily differentiated from the other when one looks at their actual political activities.
One could say that, at one time, one party was suspicious of central government authority, hoping to decentralize power to avoid a dominant government that intruded on the daily lives and rights of We, the People. The opposite party felt a central authority was more efficient and avoided a piecemeal approach to governance within the republic. The differences were clear, but the Rational Majorities within each party were able to, at least, talk to their opposites. Thanks to the influences of the True Believers within both political parties, our current versions of these parties have morphed into extremely unapproachable entities who stand for little, if anything, of lasting importance. Eliminating parties altogether, says the True Doubter, is the only answer.
True Believers have brought us
- the Moral Majority,
- the Military/Industrial Complex,
- the Welfare State,
- Capital Punishment,
- Legalized Abortion,
- Prohibition,
- Pre-Emptive Wars,
- Tax Cuts & Tax Increases,
- Budget Balancing & Deficit Spending,
- National Parks,
- Free Lending Libraries,
- the Transcontinental Railroad,
- Interstate Highways,
- Rural Electrification,
- NASA and the Space Race,
- the Cold War,
- M.A.D.,
- the Civil War,
- Border Control,
- the War on Drugs,
- the War on Terrorism,
- the Red Scare,
- the Salem Witch Trials,
- the War on Poverty,
- Childhood Immunization,
- C.A.R.E.,
- the Peace Corps,
- NCLB,
- Privatization,
- Radio Free Europe,
- the Marshall Plan,
- the Monroe Doctrine,
- and so on...
...Some good things, some troubling things. Again, the focus of the True Believers has been to gather together and codify the situation at the time. Their proposals usually aim at a goal that embodies that codification, as the list above demonstrates. Even though the list can categorize actions as taken either by liberals and conservatives, each element shares one trait with every other - that they were proposed and pushed forward by True Believers, and agreed to at the time by a sufficient number of the Rational Majority. We can also say that each proposal was undoubtedly argued against by another group of True Believers, who believed in a balancing Truth. These True Believers, however, could not persuade enough of the Rational Majority to seriously support their belief.
The True Doubters, of course, would have sought a nihilistic view against these. Their tack would be to argue against Religion when the issue involved morality, or against the State when the issue involved some level of removal of a citizen or a group of citizens from society, or against the Military/Industrial Complex itself when the issue involved exercise of global power and control. The Abolitionist Movement, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Ecology Movement, and holistic medicine are examples that can trace their origins to True Doubters. Perhaps we don't listen carefully enough to the voices of True Doubters before we dismiss them to the "lunatic fringe."
A True Doubter now can point to so many things that need re-addressing:
- Tax cuts as a way to cripple Government and prevent it from Spending=always the True Issue (not taxes)
- Immigration Laws that don't address the needs of society and private enterprise
- Answering Terrorism with military responses
- Spreading Democracy
- Political Parties that have become nothing more than money-raising entities
- Oppressive voter laws
- Oppressive "blue" laws
- Eminent Domain
- Accountable representation in government
- Talk Radio and Equal Time and Station Ownership laws
- Presidential Signing Statements
In each of these, it's likely that we need to undo all of the changes that have been made over time, and either eliminate them or take them back to their original thinking. If the True Doubters can nudge the True Believers toward modifying their own codes, perhaps we can once again find the True Balance that is truly needed in civilized society and craved by the Rational Majority.
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