Color Wheel
posted by Spinfly at 9:10 AM
Friday, May 05, 2006
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On the color wheel, I believe my political belief can best be described as "Aubergine".
Ok, let's plot things out a little. Spin, could you put words over some of those colors on the top wheel?
If so, put the word "liberal" on the red/orange color that now has a "5" beside it. Put "conservative" on the color beside the numeral 2. Put "moderate" on the yelllow color between 6 and 1, and put "radica" on the purple color between 4 and 3. You can get rid of the numerals at the same time.
Don't put anything on the bottom "blurred" wheel.
Thanks Spinny!
Good one Skogg. As we shall see, you've itentified yourself as a conservative "radical".
"Aubergine" = "Eggplant", right? Dark Purple?
Want to reconsider?
Most of us are born into a political environment and we learn and adopt the political views of the society we grow up in.
We don't really know where we're at compared to other people outside the sphere of of our immediate social environment.
If your mom and dad are rednecks, you'll be a redneck at first, if they're hippies, you'll be a hippy kid, etc.
These are not really informed political positions, they're just inherited.
But that's where we all start out. And some people never move beyond it, either because they're really not interested in learning more or because their social group is so closed that they dare not ask questions or rock the boat for fear of becoming a social outcast.
Are you still with me folks?
After a conversation with the Owl, I now understand. It’s fantastic. On the color wheel there are opposing colors. Colors directly across the wheel are opposites. Yellow and purple for instance sit on opposite sides. On this wheel liberals and conservatives are on opposite sides as well as moderate and radical. I also want to add that on the color wheel the opposing colors are complimentary colors. Which is interesting to me, because how could you have liberals without conservatives and radicals and not moderates, and all sorts of vice versa..
Right Spinfly, move to the head of the class.
Radicals have much more in common with each other than they will ever have with any moderate.
Thus, to answer Ethunk's question about the crazy lady, she ain't liberal, she's RADICAL.
That's why the ultra right can argue for the "human rights" of fertilized eggs using the same tactics that the"far left" used back in the 60s and 70s to protest for civil rights and against the Vietnam war.
That's why Bill Clinton got to be President and Hillary might not. He is more moderate than she is.
But there's still more to it than that.
Discussion?
There is another wheel sort of thing that sometimes happens with age. When folks are young they have lots of opinions and little to loose. Think Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the recent Paris riots.
As the years come and go, the youth marriy, have families and gather possessions (at least that is the American dream). They have lots to protect and conserve. Their politics often change. The radical liberals of the past become the moderate, or sometimes radical conservatives of the day. Just in time for the new youth to pick up the gauntlet.
...cha cha cha
Right. When we're young, and if we're curious, we vbegin to come in contact with other people with different positions on the wheel.
Let's say you're Hillary Clinton. You're born into a political environment that is kind of on an arc on the wheel. Your immediate social network may range lets say from red (slightly radical left all the way up through yellow and into yellow green a little bit.
So you're really "at empathy" with an arc on the wheel, not just one single position.
One other thing, and to get this, we have to look at the unmarked "blurred" wheel below. To the degree that you don't really understand your political position very well, you also move in towards the middle of the circle where the colors all get darker and more muddled.
Notice that at the very middle of the circle everything is black. Someone who's in a position deep inside the circle (the "shades") may "call" themselves a liberal or a conservative or whatever, but they don't really understand what they're talking about. They are basically just ignorant due to either brain power or basic apathy and disinterest. They really have no "empathy" at all, just blind conviction at best and total uninvolvement and hostility to politics at best.
On the other hand, people who really come to understand their positions move not just around the circle but out and away from it a little where the borders between the colors are less distinct, out into the "pastels". The more empathy you get, the more you lighten up and are able to move around the circle from color to color, understanding an ever growing array of political positions around the expanded color wheel.
If we were to track someones growth curve over a lifetime, we would see a spiral — starting somewhere on the inside of the circle in the dark area, rising out and around the circle into the realm of pure color and then beyond out into the pastels where one has the most tolerance and empathy for other positions.
Ok, there is one more key part to all this, but I'll stop here and get some feedback first.
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By the way, the really sophisticated color schemes use this "5 in a row" idea a lot. Then, to really kick the whole thing up a notch, they employ just a touch of the complimentary color across from the arc that makes up the general color scheme. Polyman will elaborate on this, I hope.
No, I believe Aubergine to be the closest to libertarian. Why?
Because deep purple is the color of royalty, and we all know the royals like to hold on to their money.
Also, purple is a nice even blend of red (Republican) and blue (Democrat).
I guess I'm making an argument for middle of the road...hmm...but isn't that libertarian? Socially liberal and financially conservative?
Aubergine stays...rename your colors, Owl.
For the record...if the color wheel stays labeled the way it is now, I'm white.
Yes. you are probably white, or at least in the high pastels, Skogg. That's what happens when you open up to other people's ideas and your understanding and compassion for them extends your arc all the way around to embrace the whole circle, the full spectrum.
Let's call that "enlightenment" and discuss the consequences of it a little before we move on.
Anyone? Anyone? Buhler?
p.s. Skogg, we could move the colors to let eggplant be moderate if you want, but it would mess up my "pinko commie" idea. I never did understand how suddenly the Repubs got to be Red. Maybe that's why Reagan was so insistent on crushing communism. Maybe they just wanted their color back.
Hmmmm.... come to think of it, check this out:
Communism
"A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order..."
Spooky, huh? Who knew? GWB's a commie!
By the way, Skogg, I think Libertarians are radicals and that the eggplant color is correct where it is on my chart Both left and right wingnuts embrace libertairian ideas for various reaons, but very few true moderates do, in my experience.
How is it radical to want to keep the money you earn, but also to let other people live their lives as they see fit?
Aubergine Power!
Check it out, Skogg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian
Even the encyclopedic definition of "Libertarians" is in dispute. Originally the word "libertarian" was synonymous with "anarchist." These days, who knows. Depends on which one you talk to. I know a bunch of them and they all disagree with each other for the most part. Typical anarchists.
Now, that's not a bad thing, ok? Personally, I'm pretty much an anarchist myself philosophically, but that's a whole different story.
Suffice it to say, in the context of American politics, Libertarians are radicals, not moderates.
I'm not making any value judgements about these various political positions, by the way, I'm just mapping them them out here to try to demonstrate a series of larger and — to me at least— more important points.
Skogg, refer to your "Nolan Chart", and think of it as a subgroup of radical political thinkers. Personally I think the Nolan chart works better if it's drawn as a circle as well. It goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that there are such "circles within circles" for all political positions.
In other words, there are "liberal", "moderate" "conservative" and "radical" Libertarians as well, like a microcosm, just as there are "liberal", "moderate" "conservative" and "radical" Catholics.
But we usually give them different names like , "lay people", "priests", "bishops" and "mystics".
We still haven't gotten to the coolest part yet.
Let me know when you're ready for the really cool part. No ruch. All this discussion helps clarify the point and brings us out of the "darkness" into the "light", right?
Rush, not "ruch"... for some reason I have a brain fart when I have to type the word "retch"..er.."ralph"... I mean "rut"... well, you get the picture.
Limburger. Stinky cheese.
Ralph Limberger.
Retch Lungblab.
..what IS that guy's name anyway?
Oh yeah, Ralf Lungblob.
Discussion on the circle itself has lead to an interesting debate about "moderates" hasn't it? As you can see, when we bring what used to be a straight line and wrap it around into a circle, we have not just one point halfway between liberals and conservatives but two. And they in turn are the precise opposite of each other.
One idea that helps me sort this out is to think of the top part of the circle as "the system" with people who adhere to and believe in the "system" ranging from liberal — through moderate — to consetvative. In general, these people agree with the Constitution as written and work within it's framework to evolve government.
The bottom part of the circle however thinks the system needs to change. They are revolutionaries of a sort, from mild to extreme both "left" and "right".
I'm not insisting that libertarians are radicals when I argue with Skogg, but given the nature of their ideas, I don't think they are really all that comfortable with the system we have now, either economically or socially.
Bill Clinton on the other hand seems to me to be more like the classic moderate, comfortable with the system, a consensus builder, a compromiser, a policy maker.
One thing I've noticed is that it is not uncommon when thinking about the political model in circular terms for people to discover that they really are more moderate or more radical than they thought they were. It is especially fun to see how people who think they are as far away from "those other guys" as they can get to find out how much they really have in common. This is especially true of the "radicals" in my experience.
I first noticed this when I worked with the United Farm Workers Union. Basically everyone there was a "radical" of sorts. But the diversity of political orientation was truly astonishing.
Skogg asks:
"How is it radical to want to keep the money you earn, but also to let other people live their lives as they see fit?"
Because we are a Federation of states with common interests, Skogg. Without taxes there would be no Social ecurity, no Medicaid or Medicare, no Interstate Highway system, no subsidies to South Dakota farmers and ranchers, no National Parks, no environmental regulation, no nationally funded research to develop alternative fuels, no federal support to education, no collective bargaining rights for workers, etc.
I know a lot of Libertarians think we should work these things out socally, among ourselves, but the fact is we don't and won't until everybody wakes up and recognizes the value in doing so.
Until the line between "living lives as people see fit" and "living lives that hurt other people" becomes more clearly drawn in the collective American mind, Libertarianism will remain a somewhat radical (if completely laudable) idea, IMHO.
"Ralf Lungblob" makes me giggle.
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