Thursday, December 31, 2020

What the Spherical Model Is All About

If you’ve been reading just the past couple of months, you may think this blog is about politics, and mainly about election fraud. This time period is kind of an anomaly. The purpose of the blog, which I’ve been writing since 2011 (almost a decade) is to look at examples and ideas that come up in the news, or in life, to support the Spherical Model concepts.

So then you may wonder, What in the world is the Spherical Model? The Spherical Model is an alternative to the right/left line model for looking at political, economic, and social ideas. The goal is to reach the respective goals of freedom, prosperity, and civilization—while conversely getting far away from tyranny, poverty, and savagery.


The Spherical Model—trying to enlighten the world one blog post at a time.
Sunrise photo found on Wikipedia

There are principles involved in reaching those goals. There are long ways and short ways to cover the concepts: the website (long), the video (short). I usually start with the political sphere, because then we can dispel the ubiquitous but useless, even harmful, right/left model. So I’ll go ahead and do that first.

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The Political World Is Round

Back in 2004, during our homeschooling decade, I was looking for a way to explain political ideas to my kids. And I began to ask questions, like: Is there a better way of looking at political ideas than right or left?

Because there is nothing innately conservative about the right or innately liberal about the left. In fact, the directional terms come from the seating arrangement of European parliaments, in which conservatives favored retaining the monarchy while liberals were in favor of people’s power.

So the typical line model we use to describe political ideas as right and left is just a seating arrangement. Yet we’ve come to think of this line as a spectrum.

Political conversations tend to describe the far ends as extreme, assuming there’s some virtue in being balanced in the middle. And we refer to our nation as center right—just a little more conservative than exactly center.



But what are the extremes? Do we assume communism or socialism at the extreme left, and fascism at the extreme right?



That can’t be right, because communism and fascism are both totalitarian statist tyrannies, just slightly different flavors. Nazi means “national socialist party” and the communist Soviet Union’s name was Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

So if Nazism and communism aren’t diametric opposites, then what are the logical extremes?

How about total government control: tyranny; versus total lack of government control: anarchy?



That’s better. Then freedom is that perfect balance in the middle.

But wait; there’s a problem with this model too. It’s common in history for people suffering in anarchy to turn for relief to total government control—anything for security. But in this model, as a people move to the left, they have to pass through that balanced freedom section. You’d think that it would be very common for someone to stop and say, “Hey, this freedom is good. Let’s stop going leftward and stay here.” Yet that pretty much never happens. But going directly from chaos to state control is historically common.

Plus, notice that there’s not that much difference between the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of anarchy. Total government control means the state has all the power—the police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is without any rights except what the state decides to grant.

Anarchy, on the other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have to yield power to them.

In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just like a tyrannical government.

So maybe government tyranny and anarchic tyranny are pretty close to the same thing. To demonstrate this, I use a ribbon, labeled at the ends, and fold it in half, so it looks something like this:



Tyranny and freedom are really the opposite extremes.

Not bad. But it puts all those different kinds of tyrannies in the same location, and maybe there are differences.

A simple line doesn’t give us the dimensions we need.

So, how about if we use three dimensions—a sphere? If we draw a line at the equator, we can separate freedom (northern hemisphere) from tyranny (southern hemisphere). And then we can draw a longitudinal dividing line, with more local interests in the western hemisphere and larger interests—from state to nation, to international, in the eastern hemisphere.

I call this the Spherical Model.


Political Sphere

The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model

Down in the south, you can see that one side of tyranny is the chaos of anarchy, and the other side is the totalitarian control of government tyranny. It’s easy to get from one to the other—which is what much of world history has shown us. You can have communism, socialism, and Nazism as separate patches in their quartersphere, based on how much control they exert on their people (southern direction), or how far they plan to expand (toward the eastward extreme of world domination).

Up north in the freedom zone, location is mostly a matter of whose interest. Free people don’t yield power to a governing authority beyond the appropriate interest. Families make their own decisions about the care, upbringing, and education of their children. Communities on up to cities and counties decide on local law enforcement and protection needs. States (or provinces) deal with their particular infrastructure and laws. Only very limited powers are granted to a nation—as are enumerated in the US Constitution. And that sovereignty would never yield to an international power, but it would cooperate with other free sovereignties concerning international issues.

If we identify ideologies according to level of control exerted onto free people, and also their level of interest, we can identify location on the sphere. And that will tell us how close we are to thriving in the northern freedom zone.

 

Economic Sphere

The Economic Sphere of the Spherical Model

We can use the spherical model again for economic ideas: the north will be the prosperity of free enterprise, and the south will be the poverty of controlled economy. Those differences have direct relationships with political ideologies, so we can overlay the economic sphere right over the political sphere and see how things interrelate.

 

Social Sphere

The Social Sphere of the Spherical Model

And what about social ideologies? Again, we can use the same sphere; the north will be civilization, and the south will be savagery.


All three spheres could be superimposed on one another.


In all three overlaying spheres, the question becomes, not “Which is better, left of right?” But “What are the principles that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization?” There’s no too-far-north extreme; there’s only getting north enough and doing what it takes to stay there, generation after generation, without southward slipping.

Next time someone suggests you are (or an idea is) far-right extreme, check to see whether their position is more accurately some level of southern statist tyranny.

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There are places where I’ve written about the principles that get us to the northern hemisphere of the political, economic, and social spheres. They’re detailed in articles on the Spherical Model website. You can also read these:

·         “The Basic Principles” Jan. 2, 2017 

·         “What Is the Spherical Model” March 1, 2013 

·         “Economic Sphere Basics” March 4, 2013 

·         “Basics of the Civilization Sphere” March 6, 2013 

·         “Economic Principles for Volatile Times” Aug. 27, 2015 

 

Freedom

Today I’d like to add just a bit about identifying freedom. It seems to me that freedom, prosperity, and civilization are self-evidently good. But in our day that is becoming less true. And maybe it’s because of lack of understanding. So let’s define terms.

Here’s how I define freedom, using my 1980 Webster’s Dictionary, which avoids the last 40 years of redefining, combined with my words:

Freedom: absence of hindrance, restraint, confinement, repression. In the political sense, it is ownership of one’s own life and the production of wealth and property that results from one’s use of life and effort. A government should protect the freedoms of life, liberty, and property; it does not grant these things, but protects them from infringement. A government that takes life, liberty, or property unjustly—when the person has not unlawfully infringed on those rights of another person—that is a tyrannical government, which is the opposite of freedom.

Political freedom means living in a society in which our God-given rights are protected rather than infringed. These would include freedoms of belief and expression, such as freedom of religion and freedom of the press, as well as freedoms of property and security, such as freedom from illegal searches and seizures and the right to bear arms.

Is there a difference between freedom and liberty? Not much. They can be used as synonyms. But they have different antonyms: freedom vs. tyranny; liberty vs. slavery. Liberty has more to do with bodily autonomy, which is a component of freedom:

Liberty: synonym of freedom. It is ownership of one’s own life, to pursue as one chooses, and to enjoy the fruits of one’s efforts. No person or government or other entity owns a person or controls how the person pursues happiness.

There’s another term that is useful here: Agency. Sometimes we combine it with the word free, as in free agency. You’ve probably encountered it when sports professionals leave a team and become free agents, open to a contract with another team. That might be the limit of how you've used it. But it implies the ability to choose. So you can see that agency is related to liberty. A good working definition is

“the ability and privilege God gives us to choose and ‘to act for [ourselves] and not to be acted upon.’”[i]

While it’s related to freedom and liberty, it might also have its own antonym: coercion.

Paradise Lost illustration by Gustave Dore

There’s a story—the oldest story—behind the concept of agency, from before the world was made. It’s the story John Milton refers to in Paradise Lost. It’s in the Bible, in Jude; Revelation 12; Job 38; Isaiah 14; as well as some additional scriptures from my faith[ii]. I do my own retelling of that story in this post, so I won’t do retell it today.

But how does this relate to the Spherical Model? Coercion, the antithesis of agency, is a southern hemisphere concept. You can’t use coercion to get to the northern hemisphere. Coercion is used by people who either aren’t aware there is a northern hemisphere, and think the only options are between chaotic tyranny and statist tyranny [right/left]; or who crave to be the controllers and therefore prefer to stay in the southern hemisphere with tyranny, widespread poverty (except for the elite controllers), and savagery.

For the northern hemisphere, where you find prosperity and civilization, people have to choose to rule themselves. Never in history has a nonreligious or anti-religious people succeeded in self-rule. Individuals, a critical mass of them, have to choose to govern themselves. Government that is granted only limited powers—to protect the God-given rights of the self-governing people—is useful. But, as with fire, it requires careful control.

Freedom—i.e., agency, free of coercion—is required in order to choose goodness. Chosen goodness is required for prosperity to spread and grow. Chosen goodness is required for civilization to develop and spread.

Where there is coercion, there is savagery and misery. No religion or government or society that uses coercion can bring about the good found in the northern hemisphere. In fact, existence of coercion is a way to tell whether a way of thinking fits in the southern or northern hemisphere.

Note that “cancel culture,” the often nongovernmental shunning of people whose opinions differ from the enforcers, is coercion. This may not yet include murder, but it includes taking away reputation, livelihood, and ability to buy and sell and function in society. Sometimes it includes “doxing” (giving out personal information) combined with inciting mobs, which can become violent.

Coercion cannot change hearts and minds; it can only force people to hide their thoughts if they want to avoid the intolerance and brutality. Coercion is oppression; it is tyranny.

When you look at a political ideology, you can simplify the search for the good and true by looking at its closeness to freedom, liberty, ability to choose—or by how dangerously close it is to coercion, oppression, tyranny.

·         Do you get to believe what you choose to believe?

·         Do you get to choose your profession and way of life?

·         Do you get to speak your opinions freely?

·         Do you get to associate with people you choose to associate with?

·         Do you get to enjoy the fruits of your own labors?

It wouldn’t be very convincing to offer you a truthful opposite, such as:

·         Wouldn’t you rather believe what we the powerful tell you to believe?

·         Wouldn’t it be better for you if we the powerful decided what work you were allowed to do and for what pay?

·         Wouldn’t it be better if you were allowed to speak only the words that we the powerful told you were allowed?

·         Wouldn’t it be better if we the powerful decided whom you could associate with and under what circumstances?

·         Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if your earnings came directly to us the powerful, so we could dole them out to those we favor?

No, it has to be done more subtly than that:

·         Let’s stop others from believing things that we believe are just wrong—shut down churches, political groups, nonprofits, businesses, schools, or any individual or organization that does or says things we don’t like.

·         Let’s stop others from making a living in ways we don’t like—like using fossil fuels, or maybe just because the business owners believe things we don’t like.

·         Let’s cancel or coerce others to stop saying things that hurt us because they’re not what we believe—because their words are violence.

·         Let’s take money from the rich and give it to the poor, like us, who are more deserving.

You get the idea. To a person with some enlightenment, the “progressive” or “woke” or “socially just” way is pretty dark. It takes away individual choice. It oppresses individuals. It rules over people tyrannically. If that’s OK with you as long as they’re on your side, not only is that evil of you, but it’s also just a matter of time until the powers-that-be come after you for some perceived infraction.

It’s a continuation of that very old war—the war that pre-dates earth history. It’s a war between good and evil, between light and dark.

Freedom is upward, toward the light. Tyranny is downward, toward the dark.


Linus and Charlie Brown, screenshot from here

As Linus might say, “And that’s what The Spherical Model is all about, Charlie Brown.” In this smallest of all think tanks, I try to share ideas that I hope will help people make better decisions, that will lead toward personal as well as societal freedom, prosperity, and civilization.


[i] This definition comes from Robert D. Hales, “Agency: Essential to the Plan of Life,” speech at LDS General Conference, October 2010. [  https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/10/agency-essential-to-the-plan-of-life?lang=eng&query=Robert+D+Hales+agency#1-PD50021411_000_2020    ] He is quoting from the Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:26. [   https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/2.26?lang=eng#25   ]

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