A land surveyor requires several valid points of reference in order to graph a plot of ground. A single point will not do. The same is needed in charting the validity of an idea, a single position will not do.
Ideas can either come from valid points of reference or they may not. The work involved in getting ten acres of land accurately surveyed often runs into new road and other infrastructures built through old pioneer rock piles once used as boundary markers. All this may not agree with county records and what is actually fenced off. When this happens, sometimes you have to return to the original starting point. In this case, this starting point may be a major city block, a historical building, a beach or major border. Something far enough away from the problem establishes a basic first point to move forward again. Ideas, too, need a common first point of reference.
Most thinking, especially political thinking, does not work this way. It does not back up in order to gain an intelligent understanding, nor does it move forward from a first point of reference. It just stands still with a single position of thought and claims it to be the most accurate. This is positional thinking; it is the practice of surveying from a single location. Consider the typical conservative and liberal positions of thought. Neither thinks in equilibrium.
Liberal democrats avoid most every form of personal responsibility. Their idealistic attachment to big global solutions is due to a personal humanitarian failure at home; the only escape is to ride the wave or play the game of make believing, "I am a good person." Essentially, liberal democrats focus on social ideals to hide their failure with personal responsibility. They nationalize community values of equality, fairness, health and education because they cannot solve them at home.
On the other hand, the conservative republican runs from social responsibility. He may believe in family values, but those on the other side of the tracks are nature’s freaks that he did nothing to foster. Conservative republicans focus on real values to hide their failure with social responsibility. They make national values of freedom and opportunity localized to the individual. This protects them from having to assume any concern for those without.
The democrat too often says, "Let’s make all beehives the same, and let us make sure the pollen is shared equally by every bee." The conservative says, "Let free enterprise exist between every bee. He who gets the most keeps the most." Both the liberal democrat and the conservative republican fail to see that it is not the bee that survives the hive, but it is the hive that survives the world.
The bees are equal and do not compete within the hive, and yet the hives are not equal, for they compete with every other hive for nature’s pollen. Free enterprise is between hives and not between bees. In this the bee is personally and socially responsible. That makes every bee a cut above the republican and democrat. Bees do not take a position. They do the best they can in an unequal world and they treat every fellow worker as an equal. Neither the republican nor the democrat can do this.
The liberal wants to take away the enterprise between markets, and the conservative wants to enlarge enterprise between individuals. Both are wrong because both are irresponsible and live in a state of denial because of their own guilt; again the liberal is guilty for a lack of personal responsibility, and the conservative is guilty for lacking social-responsibility. This irresponsibility comes when we assume a single position of thought and ignore the responsibility it takes to think in a predicate action.
A renaissance is coming. Follow this post to learn what it is and kick the habit of political position.
