The mechanics of the political center

The first few lines will be an explanation to what the concept of the political compass is. If you are already familiar with the concept, you can skip ahead to "The political centers".

The reason why i write this is because i see a lot of people who advocate an ideology and think that it will be the right way in any given time and situation. Be it RIPs or national-socialists, anarchists, any given group. A lot of them seem to think that their requested policy is valid throughout all stages of society and mustn't change. This is what i mean when i say that a lot of people have been lost in their ideology. It appears to be a common mistake.

What is the political compass?

The political compass is a concept designed to visualize a persons political ideas on a 2-d graph. The x-axis is from political left to right, the y-axis from authoritarian to libertarian.

There is a test that determines your position on said compass. Note that no test can perfectly measure political ideals. But if you are interested in taking the test, or additional information, you'll find it here.

The political centers

This is me speaking from experience. From a belief i had for a long time, that i now know was wrong. I imagine that many others have or had similar issues.

Not so long ago, i thought there was a perfect political position to be in. A static point located at 0/0 on a perfect political compass, and this was the morally perfect position to be in. People who argued about politics where essentially arguing about where said position was.

At this point i want to introduce 3 different political centers:

The public median: This is the average position of all members of a group. It could be the public median of a country, a party, etc. In a democracy, this should be reflected in the current government.

The estimated current center: This is the theoretically perfect position to be in when factoring in all surrounding factors from economy to military threats. Estimated because of the fact that nobody can ever hope to have the perfect position other than by pure luck.

The absolute center: This is the reference point. All other positions and the 2 other centers are being measured and compared to by this center, including personal positions. As an example, if something is "left-wing", this means that it is left of the absolute center. The reason why this reference center needs to exist is because everything is in relation to everything else. If something is further to the left of "left-wing", then from the point of someone on the "far left-wing" the "left-wing" now appears to be to the right.

Therefore, all positions will be in reference to the absolute center.

Why 3 centers?

As i said, i had the wrong idea of political centrism. I though that the absolute center was the perfect position to be in, at all times. But in fact, the real morally perfect position is the estimated current center.

The reason why is because of external and internal influences. A brief example:

We compare 2 societies: A society of hard workers (A), and a society of slackers (B). Subject of the debate is public welfare in both societies.

In this case, A would be able to implement excessive welfare under the assumption that the vast majority of individuals would keep on working hard, even though they could enjoy decent living standards even if they where to stop working. If the vast majority would keep on working, it could support those who for whatever reason, be it loss of their job, illness, even laziness, currently live on welfare.

But in B, this would be impossible. We assume that a significant part of the workers would, instead of working, enjoy the public welfare. This would result in a large number of workers suddenly becoming non-productive. The ones that keep on working cannot support the ones on welfare, resulting in a collapse.

We now have 2 societies that attempted to implement the same welfare. I would classify welfare that provides decent living standards close to the absolute center. This is what brings us to the estimated current center.

Society A is socially intelligent enough to handle decent welfare. Society B is not. The first mechanic of the estimated current center has been revealed.

Results

And if you ask me, everything important can be combined into a small paragraph:

"The estimated current center moves with the state of a society, which extends to states, tribes, in basis all jointly existence of individuals. While in times of crisis, be it internal or external, it often requires to be authoritarian, when the situation stabilizes and the average person grows more socially intelligent, it progresses towards libertarian. Should the enforced policies differ too far from the estimated current center, it will end the society: While not set into stone, too authoritarian societies will often end in revolution, while too libertarian societies will often end in anarchy, creating a backlash in the opposite direction for a limited time. Thus every individual should attempt to manipulate all that is within their influence towards what they estimate to be the current center, assuming that the public median is close enough to the estimated current center to stabilize the society."

In this i think we can sum up all the important mechanics of political centrism.

There are many more things that can be said, but i imagine that if the majority of people know of this, the entire human civilization will improve.

Also, i congratulate everyone who already knows this. It took me years to figure out that my former "centrism" was wrong, because it was static.

Influence on democracy

Democracy is the, in my humble opinion, perfect system to handle the change of the estimated current center. No other system is as fluid. There may come a time where democracy can no longer work, because the estimated current center requires a more authoritarian or libertarian approach. But for the moment, it is the best system we have.

Tips for the future

To end this, i have a few tips for people that, ideally, want to have the estimated current center as their political ideals at all times. These may appear trivial, but in fact are fundamental and often lost in ideological warfare:

•  You cannot, ever, expect to be perfect.
• But you can try, and get close to it.
• The way to go is take in all the information, from all spectrums, and process this information to find the estimated current center, then embrace it in your actions.
• In short: Do not get lost in ideology. Assess the situation and try to make the correct choice in what you adopt as your current personal position. This is all anyone can ask of a human being.