Conversation

A basic asymmetry between far left and far right is that they fight for different different things at different Maslow levels. Far right fights for recognition at love/belonging/esteem levels, far left for material necessity at physiological/security level.
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While I have sympathy for both kinds of pain (recognition hunger and physical hunger are both debilitating), there’s not much others can do to alleviate former. People can be given food, shelter by others, but recognition hunger can only be solved by self-actualizing on your own
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There is a bad argument that you can make: recognition hunger only exists if lower-level needs are satisfied, so it is tempting to argue that far left anger is more “justified” because it is more basic. It is bad because Maslow’s hierarchy is not a moral priority stack.
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Inequality and global poverty-driven migration may be wicked problems. Solutions like UBI or Georgism or open borders may be utopian dreams. But far right problems are beyond human reach, hence the very strong correlation with religion.
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Morality is at some level related to actionability. If you can do nothing to address a pain, it is not immoral to do nothing. So not surprising that far right and far left try to move things from actionable to non-actionable in opposite directions.
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The irrational moral panic of the far right at a single socialist winning a primary arguing ‘more can be done for people who need the most’ is good data. You don’t have to be a socialist to be broadly supportive of “more can be done” agendas to push far-right moral panic button
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Anyhow, time to ignore centrist and moderate politics. They’re impotent and almost irrelevant for the next few years. Focus on far left vs far right. The middle is just going to sit there like a lump and rot slowly, while the tails wrestle over the future.
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I feel like you should spend more time getting into the heads of the people you're trying to describe here. This tweet, particularly, raises the specter of <my enemies are moral mutants.> Can you rephrase it to avoid that, or was that what you were going for?
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btw this is why I'm still left & why classical liberalism is the only right I could feel at home in rather than just "get" abstractly at arms length: I'm not oblivious or unsympathetic to reactionary grievances but they're not ones that can or should be answered politically
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