Batting a Thousand

This is a celebration day—the 1000^th post on the Spherical Model blog. 

I want to thank you for coming here and reading what I have to say. Today we’ll cover a little personal history, highlights, and future planning.

Back in 2004 I was homeschooling my kids—a few years into that adventure. I don’t remember the exact context in which it came up, something related to our history lessons. But I was thinking through the idea of political directions. The usual right-left orientation assumes left is communist and the right is fascist. That leaves a balance somewhere in the middle as a desirable goal. People talk about America as center-right.

There are problems with that model. For one, the right and left designations are arbitrary, and refer originally to the seating arrangement of European parliaments. The left—or liberal—side was in favor of more voice of the people, while the right—or conservative—side was in favor of maintaining the monarchy.

I don’t know any conservatives who favor a monarchy in America. And “liberal,” which has etymological roots in freedom, has nothing to do with either communism or fascism—both totalitarian extremes.

And, while we’re at it, can we just say, there’s very little difference between one flavor of totalitarian statist regime and another. Communism uses the power of the state to take away everyone’s freedom; fascism uses the power of the state to take away everyone’s freedom.

I had a short piece by W. Cleon Skousen (author of The 5000-Year Leap) that changed the ends to tyranny as the far left extreme, and anarchy as the far right extreme, with freedom being balanced around the middle.

That makes more sense to me that the other left-right model. But I still had problems with it. It seemed to me that, if you have a society trying to escape anarchy, they would pass through the balanced freedom center long before they would reach the other tyrannical extreme. And they’d look around and say, “This is great! Let’s stay here.” But that isn’t actually very common. What happens more often is that people turn from anarchy to tyranny, directly. Trotsky and others even used that as a plan: create chaos and promise relief, thus talking people into granting more power to the tyrants.

So, as I was mulling this over. And the idea came to me that tyranny and anarchy aren’t the extremes. 

They aren’t even very different. Back in 2014, I wrote a summary description. At this point in the explanation I said this:

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.

All right. So, then what is the actual opposite of tyranny? Freedom. You could use the word liberty. It means there’s just enough government—combined with a great deal of personal responsibility—to allow people to enjoy opportunities, and choices, in the use of their lives.

But what about the difference between statist tyranny and anarchy? That’s real. But it doesn’t seem to be a polar opposite difference. It’s more about who is exerting power. We could look at that side-to-side movement as a difference in interest. Is it local? Is it state (or province, depending on where you live)? Maybe a region? A nation? A group of nations? The entire globe?

That’s basically a neutral difference—unless someone tries to assert control that would be more appropriate for a more local level.

I was thinking this over, and it occurred to me that, with three dimensions, you can describe the polar opposites of tyranny and freedom while also looking at the lateral difference between one level of localization and another. You can see it on a sphere.

Freedom is north, tyranny is south
on the Political Sphere
screenshot from video

The first time I tried drawing this, I used a plastic Easter egg. I even wondered if that was appropriate, because so much of history ends up in the southern, tyranny zone, maybe that should be a larger end of the egg.

Eventually, though, I wanted something larger to show this on, so I painted an old globe all white, and made a way to attach lines on it to delineate an equator and some longitudinal lines. This is what I used when I finally made a video of the explanation.

I think the concept is easiest to see and understand in the political sphere, which I’ve just described. But the same spherical idea can work for economics—with polar opposites of poverty in the south and prosperity in the north. For a while I called these poles controlled economy and free market economy, which accurately describes the differences, but I now prefer describing the different outcomes rather than the rules for getting those outcomes.

Additionally, there’s a social sphere, with polar opposites of savagery in the south and civilization in the north.

The neutral side-to-side movement from local to larger interest works for all three spheres. And, on many issues, you can see how the political, economic, and social spheres interrelate. The Spherical Model makes it easier to show that. A person might believe they can be a fiscal conservative while being a social liberal; but, if they do, they’re really ignoring some basic truths.

This three-dimensional model is slightly more complex than a simple left-right model. But it’s a lot more accurate, and solves so many confusions—particularly related to associating conservatism (as in conserving the US Constitution) with fascism, or anarchic resistance to any government. When you look at the sphere, you can see that fascism and anarchy are both very south, just with different levels of control: anarchy is likely to be local, while fascism is likely to involve a national government. Those are both very far away from the freedom ideas of the Constitution, which are brilliantly designed to protect life, liberty, and property with a very limited government.

I wrote the first description of the Spherical Model in 2004, just for my kids, and eventually some other homeschool teens. In 2010, my daughter started classes at the community college, shortly before she turned 16, and a parent was required to be on campus with her. So I carried my computer along and set up a writing station in the library while she was in class. And that’s where I wrote much of the material that shows up on the website. I got the website up in November of that year, and the following March started this blog.

As with many important ideas, the person who thinks it up feels more like it came through them than from them. The Aha! moment I had when I got this idea still strikes me as a gift from God, providing me understanding that I appreciate, and that I feel obligated to share.

I have a long-term intention of writing a book. Certainly a thousand posts, on top of the website, would indicate there’s enough material. But it’s a matter of choosing what to say, in what order, in the best way to share these ideas for the audience most likely to benefit.

I haven’t yet figured out how to finish a book. After that I’ll need to look at how to get it published, and marketed, so it gets into the hands of people that can use it. I’m slower than I would like. I’m amazed at people with very busy jobs who nevertheless regularly put out books. But, if God gave this to me, He knows my limitations. So I’ll trust Him to get me to a finish line in His own due time.

For readers, if you want to understand the Spherical Model concept enough to use it for organizing your own thoughts, and to share it, I suggest (again) the following:

This is me, Linda Nuttall

·         The Spherical Model website. There’s an intro, then a section for each sphere: political, economic, and social; the social sphere divides Civilization into two sections.

·         The video.

·         Summaries similar to today’s:

o   The Political World Is Round  December 29, 2014

o   Year Two Begins   March 5, 2013 

o   The Basic Principles   January 2, 2017  

·         About the author:

o   Behind the Sphere   October 21, 2013  

o   Anniversary Celebrations   March 2, 2017 

o   About Me   April 2, 2018  

·         Various Best-of Collections:

o   Best of Spherical Model, Part I, Part II, Part III  June 2013

o   Defense of Marriage Collection  July 1, 2013

o   Education Collection  July 24, 2013 

o   More of the Best, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV  March 2015

o   Sampling the Spherical Model 2018   December 27, 2018  

·        

The Political Sphere Is Round

This is the last post for 2014, and I thought it might be a good time to re-introduce the Spherical Model. I’ve done this from time to time, since the blog title is obscure when you don’t know what it’s about. This is just an intro. For more full information, go to the SphericalModel.com website. And there’s also a best-of-the-blog collection, Part I, Part II, and Part III. But for now, here’s a first step.

_________________________

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.

Political Sphere



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.

Economic Sphere

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

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

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.

The political, economic, and social spheres all have their own set of principles for reaching true north. We can take on the economic and social spheres another day, but I’ve started with the political sphere because it’s the easiest to see as the alternative to the right/left model.

So, if we want to be north on the political sphere, there are some questions that let us know whether we’re heading in the right direction:

• Is the policy being debated something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has the right to delegate to his/her government? For example, a person has the right to protect his own life and property. He can, therefore, combine resources with his neighbors and hire a government entity, such as a sheriff, to do that job for him. Similarly, the several states can combine to delegate the power of defending the nation to a national government entity. Conversely, a person does not have the right to take his neighbor’s excess grain production, for example, and bestow it on himself, because his neighbor was more prosperous in a particular season. He can, of course, ask his neighbor for charity, but he cannot coerce the neighbor to give. That would rightfully be considered theft. Therefore the person cannot delegate the redistribution of wealth to the government to do for him—that would place him too far south on the sphere.
• Does the policy infringe in any way on God-given natural rights, such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights? Does the policy infringe on the free exercise of religion or try to establish a particular sect as a state religion? Is political speech hindered? Does the policy infringe on the right of citizens to bear arms? Does the policy constitute an illegal search or seizure? Does the policy deprive a person of life, liberty, or property when the person has not committed a crime for which that deprivation is the just sentence? Does the policy try to claim for government a power that was not specifically granted in the Constitution? etc. If the policy infringes on the God-given rights, then government cannot take that power without usurping power from the people—which is too far south on the sphere.
• Is the idea being debated a proper role of government: some aspect of protection (including national defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency to protect the value of wealth, the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws), as enumerated in the Constitution? If not, then accepting the idea is outside the Constitution—and is too far south on the sphere.
• Is the perspective appropriately local? It is important that any issue be handled at the most local level possible. Parents should decide the means, methods, and curriculum for educating their children, for example. An issue that affects a state should be handled at the state level, not the national level. National decisions should not be ceded to some international body. An inappropriate interest level is too far south on the sphere.

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. Missing the possibility of the entire northern hemisphere of freedom is common. Most of world history shows an oscillation between statist tyranny and anarchic tyranny, or from one statist tyranny to another. Change the discussion by changing the terms and then dealing with principles. Then move north to freedom.