The political compass fallacy

There is a reason, why parliamentary democracies always develop a left-right or progressive-conservative bipole, namely that people don't vote on their political belief, but only on the state of its implementation, whether more needs to be done - or not. And this is so, because every nation needs a unifying political belief in order to shape and maintain a functioning society.

But that argument is specific to (parliamentary) democracy. The idea however that there could be a tetrapole in politics of the kind that I'll explain in a few moments is flawed a priori regardless of the mechanism of rule.

The tetrapole that the proponents of the political compass would have us consider consists of two bipoles, which it claims to be independent of each other: social liberty and economical liberty.

Liberty means individual responsibility or, for the sake of the current discussion, decentralised responsibility.

Now, my criticism is this: It's impossible to decentralise one kind of responsibility without decentralising the other as well.

Granted, the Middle Ages show a way how to do just that, in a way, but that's not what the political compass means. Rome had seemingly centralised social responsibility while seemingly allowing economical responsibility to be decentralised. In reality however Rome wouldn't interfer much with the assessments of local bishops and would, on the other hand, hold the economy on the leash of the Jewish monopole in the credit business.

In order to avoid further complications of this nature let us state exactly what we mean by centralisation and decentralisation, namely that in the former case a central entity makes all the decisions in a certain field and in the latter case the whole authority to make decisions in that field lies with local entities.

Now, if you have the social responsibility centralised and the economical responsibility decentralised, what will invariably ensue is that the social framework, that the center casts, cannot and will not support the local economic solutions, but to the contrary sabotage them.

And vice versa, if the center makes the economic decisions, it will either get sabotaged by the social decisions of the people - if it allows that to happen - or it will use its power to wrestle the social responsibility out of the people's hands.

So the only way that a society can work is, if economical and social responsibility can be adjusted to each other and that is only the case, when the degree of centralisation of each is the same.

Applying this now to the political compass will cause a little confusion, because social liberty is exactly the opposite of what the political compass says it is. The social compass uses this term for social irresponsibility. But you see, obviously, if the center has all the responsibility, then the people will be irresponsible - and vice versa!

So, a so called social liberal really is a believer in a centralised social authority that makes all the decisions for him, so that he can be socially irresponsible.

Thus the libertarian quadrant consists of people who cede social responsibility and keep the economical - and that doesn't work. Likewise the totalitarian quadrant consists of people who cede economical responsibility, but keep the social, which doesn't work either.

What does work is to keep both or to cede both, that is the republican quadrant in the former case or the socialist quadrant in the latter.

Fascism, just for the record, is one of those complications, where you have a middle degree of centralisation in both fields.

So, if you reflect upon the message that the political compass sends, it is one of denouncing social responsibility as lack of freedom and suggesting that by embracing social irresponsibility you'll get a more decentralised society overall - which is of course a lie, the exact opposite will happen. Of the two possible quadrants, the republican and the socialist, it is the latter, whose power grows, when people start acting irresponsible and thus cede their social responsibility to the socialist center.

Though, it does put that center under pressure to perform as well, lest it be seen as incompetent. But that's the way of all things that if you've finally gotten your way then it's all about avoiding to lose it again.