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.
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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
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| 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.
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| 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.
____________________________
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.
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| 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.
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Linus and Charlie Brown, screenshot from here
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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.
