…until I came to the Zone. Then the neon labels of intolerance and judgement were flung like monkeys playing with their poo.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Everybody has opinions (perhaps very carefully thought-out opinions) on how a nation should be politically organized. But when you start believing those aren’t just opinions, but demonstrable laws of nature, it strays into religion.

Imagine a world where we are not plagued with fear of death and how we mitigate that fear.

Of course there would be problems related to human sadness and pain, but without religion the problems become negotiable and most of the walls come down

For example, I can certainly see a difference between Right and Left, and I can even assign myself a position (whether others agree with me or not) as being politically between the extreme Left and the Center.

I do this because even though I agree with the Left/Right model, I see it as a spectrum. That is, the Right blends gradually into the Left, and there is a Center that is placed somewhere between the two.
What Left and Right mean may vary from person to person, in one person over the course of his life, from country to country, and certainly from one historical period to another, but the linear model is what matters.

I can even see how if our political ribbon is twisted so the opposite ends are brought together, the extreme Right and Left touch. This certainly agrees with our common sense. Leftist and Rightist political extremism are, in my opinion, indistinguishable from each other. There isn’t that much difference between Nazi and Soviet dictatorships, they just got to the same place from different directions. Fascism and Communism are the same thing, but they have different causes.

The alternative political/economic model is that of a coin, where one face is opposite the other, where the two are radically different, and there is no common ground, just a thin edge, between the two. One is forced to choose between one or the other, with no middle path or compromise allowed. I reject this view totally. It is not a useful way of modeling political differences, it is a deliberate attempt to create division and exclusion and conflict. There is no moderation, no negotiation, no compromise, and no evolution. In my opinion, this is not politics, it is dogma. It does not attempt to find a practical solution to a poorly understood problem, instead it dictates an ideological truth and forbids any wandering away from it. It cloaks itself in fine concepts like “principles”, “rights”, and “liberty”, but it reserves for itself the right to define those terms and will accept no other’s.

The true struggle, and tragedy, of our time is not between Right and Left. It is between reason and zealotry, humanity and ideology, practicality and absolutism. The true binary choice is between moderation and fanaticism. Human communities must satisfy as many of their participants as possible, and they will never all agree with one another, at best they must negotiate and compromise.

It is said the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The opposite of wisdom is not ignorance, it is certainty.