Spherical Model: Year-End Review of the Spherical Model

It has become somewhat traditional for me to celebrate year ends by reminding readers of what the Spherical Model is. I tend to do this the end of December and in early March, which marks the time I started this blog in 2011. The Spherical Model is a new way of looking at ideas, in the three categories of political, economic, and social. This is an alternative to the left/right model, which is both arbitrary and inaccurate.

Also sometimes near the end of a year I’ll do a sort of “best of” post, or collections of posts that go together. Typically that would be posts related to the political, economic, or social spheres, plus maybe some related to education, or the courts. This year’s collections are possibly more topical. But that may be because the big news stories show the attacks on freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

So today I’ll share again a short reminder about what the Spherical Model is, and then I’ll show some of the ways that it applied to issues in the news this past year.

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Back in 2004, during our homeschooling decade, I was looking for a way to explain political ideas. 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, or tyranny, versus total lack of government control, or 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. When I show 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.

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 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.

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.

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

The Political Sphere, Economic Sphere, and Social Sphere
of the Spherical Model

In all three overlaying spheres, the question becomes, not which is better, left of right? But what are the principles of 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.

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The political, economic, and social spheres all have their own set of principles for reaching true north. And those are the things we deal with in this blog. Here and there we identify these principles. I’ve listed them a few places—in the most detail on the website. And also these versions:

· “The Basic Principles”—January 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”—August 27, 2015

For practical use, I’ve written questions based on the Spherical Model, to ask political candidates—if you get a chance—to determine whether they’re aiming at the northern hemisphere or just trying to control the southern hemisphere. Since we’re Primary Election season right now, I recently added to the list, including a few questions related to issues for this year:

· “The Right Questions to Get the Right Stuff,”—December 6, 2021.

And there’s one this year on the proper role of government, worth reviewing:

· “Government Is Force—Not a Benevolent Provider, Not Deity”—April 22, 2021

OK, so, what issue-related happenings can we view from the Spherical Model?

THE 2021 COLLECTIONS

I usually write two articles a week, so around 100 a year. This year I slacked off to around 85 pieces, but they trended longer. It was a heavy news year.

Family

Let’s start with a few posts about the value of family to civilization, and related to that some successes in the fight against abortion.

· “What Matters Most”—May 6, 2021

· “Don’t Forget That We Need Fathers”—June 10, 2021

· “Speaking Up for the Family”—October 29, 2021

· “Denial of Reality and of Womanhood”—November 8, 2021

· “Much Power of Speech”—December 2, 2021

The Election—and Election Integrity

I’ve covered this topic fairly frequently over the years. And I wrote about it once or twice weekly the last couple of months of 2020. So I’ll add just a couple from 2021:

· “Things Will Play Out One Way or Another”—January 4, 2021

· “Three More Updates on the Neverending Election Saga”—February 8, 2021

January 6th

The big news of January 6 relates to our freedoms. The event was a rally intended to encourage legislators to question the electors sent from states with big questions about election fraud. It was a legal, constitutional procedure—done by Democrats multiple times just this century, albeit without cause. While Trump was yet speaking to an enormous crowd, big disturbances began at the capitol building a mile away. Doors were breached, and legislators were evacuated quickly to safer places. While there was violence, no one was killed by the so-called “insurrectionists,” and business got done later that evening. No one was found to be carrying a weapon. The only death was committed by capitol police against an unarmed woman who was not a threat. Meanwhile, capitol police are seen inviting people into the capitol to walk around.

Afterward, barriers went up. Biden described this as the most heinous act against our country since the Civil War—eclipsing Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The more time passes, the more this looks like a government attempt at entrapment, a failed attempt to paint all Trump supporters as domestic terrorists. Just this past week more surveillance footage was publicly released, showing capitol police beating an unarmed woman, who was charged and held; this video footage was not available for her defense until a week ago. It seems likely now that at least one of the deaths of participants labeled as due to natural causes was actually another police killing. And word is leaking out about abuse of prisoners held without trial for all these months, some without access to representation or their other constitutional rights. The corruption is far beyond any we thought we could see while there still exists a remnant of our constitutional republic.

· “Living Through Another Historic Day”—January 7, 2021

· “What I Think Happened”—January 14, 2021

· “Time for the Annual Pointless Impeachment Trial”—February 4, 2021

· “Non-Theoretical Conspiracies”—June 28, 2021

· “Some Are More Equal Than Others”—October 21, 2021

School Board Battles

During this year’s Texas legislative session, I worked hard on a very good school choice bill that got voted out of the Senate committee but failed to get a floor vote. Legislators are afraid to touch the issue and get labeled anti-public schooling. There are things we simply can’t depend on legislators to do. Related to schools, across the country parents are fighting school boards on Critical Race Theory and LGBT agendas being taught to their children. We had that fight locally—and won all three of the school board seats on the November ballot.

· “Fighting Off the Infestation”—May 20, 2021

· “Stand Up, Speak Up”—June 14, 2021

· “Just Another Parent Speaking Out to the School Board”—June 21, 2021

· “School Board Meeting Debrief”—June 25, 2021

· “How to Retake the School Board”—July 26, 2021

· “The Critical School Board Races, Part I” and “Part II”—September 16 and 21, 2021 and

· “It’s Not a Class; It’s an Ideology”—October 11, 2021

· “We Won Some Battles in the Ongoing Idea War”—November 5, 2021

Pandemic

The pandemic continued throughout the year. I wrote about it frequently in 2020. In March of this year I wrote a sort of timeline. And I’ve added pieces fairly regularly the rest of the year. Information—i.e., science, with data—keeps coming from reliable sources, which are censored by media. But the information is there for those willing to look for it and do some of their own research. And that has meant a lot more freedom for the self-educated than for those frozen with fear and giving in to government and corporate overlords. This pandemic—along with the plague of the authoritarian response to it—has affected all three spheres: political, economic, and social.

· “The Two Weeks That Stretched into a Year, Part I” and “Part II”—March 6 and 11, 2021

· “Go Ahead and Party: or The Two Weeks That Stretched into a Year, Part III”—March 16, 2021

· “That Explains It”—April 8, 2021

· “So Many Reasons—or That Explains It, Part II”—April 14, 2021

· “Hesitancy Might Be a Good Thing This Time”—May 11, 2021

· “Something Is Up—and It’s Worldwide”—May 13, 2021

· “Who Can You Trust?”—June 4, 2021

· “Panel of Experts”—August 3, 2021

· “Have a Plan”—August 16, 2021

· “I Have More Questions”—September 3, 2021

· “Trying to Make Sense of What Makes No Sense”—September 27, 2021

· “So This Is Why People Have Ears That Do Not Hear”—October 8, 2021