Mercury Falling: Why Right and Left wings need each other, in work and life

“We’re out! We’re out!” she cried. 7 am in the UK is too early but for matters of life or death. Satisfied the house wasn’t on fire, I rolled to reclaim my sleep. But my sister insisted: “Yahya! We’re out!”. Clearly whatever she was out of was my problem.?

Through an undescribed Law of Physics, responsibility for the replenishment of household products gravitates to only one member of a houseshare. And so I shouted back “What’s the matter! What are we out of! Loo-roll?”.?

Friday 24th 2016 reminds me, as I am sure it does others, that ours is but one perspective among many, and people think in remarkably different ways on matters of consequence. For 7 Thorney Hedge Road wasn’t out of Andrex. The United Kingdom was out of Europe.?

Business decisions are partisan

If you believe your business decisions are above your politics, you are as deluded as I was about toilet tissue being that day’s biggest issue.?

People hire people to run businesses. We are more likely to hire people who share our politics. One study demonstrates that the boardrooms of S&P 1500 are becoming more partisan which can harm share prices.?

Left and Right maintain very different theories of the world. These theories include varied ideas on how we got here, where we are, where we should go, and through which means. Because such ideas are fundamental to decisions, even the politically apathetic make decisions based on implicit political views. Rightly or wrongly, business decisions are influenced by the political theories of the people within the business.?

Below are some fundamental ways in which the people-views of Left and Right differ. My goal is not to justify either side, but to demonstrate how opposed and consequential they are for business decisions.?

Right and Left wings are losing each other

Worryingly, evidence suggests increasing polarisation between Left and Right, even influencing views on whether it is morally acceptable to procreate with those from the 'other side' .

Many now seem to believe the most pressing problem facing humanity, is those opposed to their political perspective. Is it?

Losing either wing ends in catastrophe for the whole

What happens when companies, or any agent for that matter, go hard Left or Right, ignoring or deliberately cauterising the opposite wing? The platform previously known as Twitter, demonstrates how profound the consequences can be . Whilst there is no experiment we can design to test this exactly, we can reason by analogy.?

Each level of abstraction you care to analogise, tells us that Right needs Left, just as much as Left needs Right. The dream of political homogeneity appears like heaven, but its realisation unleashes hell. Rather than solving our problems, total victory over the other initiates an irrevocable chain reaction that ends with the destruction of the victor just as much as the vanquished - Homo-geneity, the prelude to Homo-Genocidii.?

Country Level

• After Bolshevism obliterated the Right-wing, mass murder ensued. This and other factors ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
• After Naziism neutralized the Left-wing, mass murder ensued . This and other factors ultimately led to the destruction of Naziism itself.

Cellular Level

In a healthy body, a balance exists between cell growth and programmed cell death. Cancer disrupts this balance by overriding cell death signals, leading to uncontrolled growth. This unchecked proliferation forms tumours that invade healthy tissues and compete for resources, ultimately depleting nutrients and oxygen. Cancer, now the second most common cause of death , can lead to the death of the host, and therefore the cancerous cells themselves.?

Genetic Level

In pregnancy, genomic imprinting creates a balance between paternal genes, which promote rapid fetal growth, and maternal genes, which limit growth to protect the mother's health and resources. If either side’s genes are not sufficiently active to balance the other serious complications can arise, which can ultimately threaten the mother and the baby's survival, and therefore the genes imprinting these instructions in the first place.

Implication for Politics?

Bringing this back to politics: when all Rights have left, or no Lefts are left, destruction of the whole is immanent. But why?

Paradox: Why Left and Right wings need each other

Why should each wing depend on the other for its very survival? Because, as theories of the world, they are right, but also fundamentally wrong. Both Right and Left, whilst seemingly opposite, grow from the same categorical imperative that demands reality to be either black or white, good or bad, Right or Left.?

Exploring nature at more fundamental levels reveals that reality doesn’t always obey this categorical imperative. Entangled particles aren’t always sufficiently close or too far to influence each other, and light is not always particle or wave. Many argue that the quantum level says nothing of the human plane of existence. But this conclusion requires two simultaneous planes of reality with wildly different behaviour. Any way you look at it, from the edges of our understanding, reality remains an intellectually impenetrable paradox, and our comforting categories more self-reference than anything.?

Our civilisation, our very minds, are built on categories, each of us fluent in opposites. The one opposite we cannot fathom is the opposite of categorisation itself. Among a categorical lexicon of over 100,000 nouns in common use, we have but one word to describe what physics now tells us operates at the most fundamental level of reality we have reached - paradox.?

'But I’m right and I can prove it!'

We believe our political views are rational. But so does the other side. Each has built a corpus of evidence to justify themselves. We typically bias our reading of the evidence towards confirmation. But if we care and dare to have a look at the other’s evidence, we find compelling reasons why they are right.?

For example, the work of Adriane Raine (The Anatomy of Violence ) evidences the genetic and early experience basis of criminal behaviour. Works such as his, point to a seeming inevitability to criminal behaviour. Are we punishing victims, not villains? The relationship between genetics and early experience to a later life of crime seems so clear from his analysis, that it casts doubt on the morality of our criminal justice system, based as it is on the existence of personal culpability.

But for every fatalistic revelation of humanity’s victimhood, there are stories of everyday people who crest the swelling tides of their fate. Victor Frankl (Man’s Search For Meaning ) tells us that the people we become is a personal decision, no matter the background or context. And that this freedom of choice cannot be stolen from us, not even in a concentration camp.?

Humanity defies the categorical imperative because we are paradoxical. As such, the categorisations we apply to ourselves are less a final description of our nature, than a functional vignette of our chosen method.??

Bringing this back to politics: whilst people might appear to confirm the perspectives of your political vantage, a deeper analysis reveals humanity to defy categorisation and at heart to be paradox: both villain and victim, sinner and saint, hero and helot.

Conclusion: We fly only with both wings intact

Just as the paradoxes of quantum physics have not influenced our folk physics, I do not expect the concept of humanity as paradox to change our political views. Indeed, the concept of humanity as paradox is aeons more ancient than quantum physics. As such, both sides of the political spectrum, based on the categorical imperative, will persist, and I suspect indefinitely.

As long as they persist, they desperately need the other. As both sides are right, but also fundamentally, irremediably wrong, they are utterly reliant on the other’s perspective to counterbalance their errors. Only through the continuous discourse of both Right and Left, can we therefore collectively come to something approximating truth.

Without that, when one side eliminates the other, the destruction of the whole is immanent, because the errors of either Right or Left, inherent in the partiality of their rectitude, will cumulatively bury either side’s ability to persist.???

Wings are for beating the air, not each other.?

Sources:

1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4154770 ?
2. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/
3. https://pcl.sites.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj22066/files/media/file/iyengar-poq-affect-not-ideology.pdf
4. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-is-still-far-from-profitability/722602/
5. https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/100-years-of-communism-and-100-million-dead
6. https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-people-died-during-World-War-II
7. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
8. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945
9. https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4305174/
11. The Anatomy of Violence
12. Man’s Search For Meaning