RANT: Did you hear that faint creak? It was America's problems passing the tipping point.

[kurt_cagle]

46. Centrists are ...

almost by definition, invested in the status quo.

I use the term right and left here as bad political shorthand. I believe that the default state for Americans is a moderate form of conservatism - don't change the status quo save those cases where such changes don't have any immediate effects upon them. They are not long term thinkers, but overall are neither inclined to be venal nor punitive towards others. The "right" are in fact made up of a handful of different interest groups - religious fundamentalists that would like to see a modern theocracy with them in charge, libertarians who philosophically believe that centralized federated government is wrong (govt as wealth redistributors), military leadership (who enforce empire), who prefer clear chains of command, and the petro-complex elite, who generally profit most from the existing empire. The "left" on the other hand include labor and trade unions, minorities (though this is really only true for minorities that have not yet developed significant socio-economic presence), women, creatives, academics and information professionals (barring a strong libertarian presence among programmers), environmentalists and scientific researchers.

Many of these people on the left are systemic thinkers. Women in general tend to take a longer, more global view than men, creatives are generally more aware of social threads and trends that help them think more systemically, and most academics, IT pros, environmentalists and researchers deal with systemic views on a daily basis. The right does have its systemic analysts as well, but most of these are in the arena of financial services where that systemic bent is biased towards either identifying trends for making money or for identifying potential danger points where money might be lost. Significantly, even there financial analysts still tend to be more progressive than their sales oriented associates.

People on the right generally far more doctrinaire than the left, usually take a far more short term view of the world, and are far less inclined to question themselves. Their reaction to criticism is generally to want to attack it as being wrong, whereas someone on the left looks at criticism as a data point in the systemic model they are creating. You can have left-leaning dogmatics, of course, people who become so invested in their models as to not recognize any alternative datapoints, but for some reason dogmatism seems to be a central characteristic of the right.

Finally you have sociopaths who may actually be quite good at systemic thinking, but just DON'T CARE about the consequences if it benefits them over any time scale that's important to them. They will take advantage of the analysis on the left to help shape their own thinking, but will then use the dogmatism of the right in order to hide the fact that THEY are the ones behind the fire-setting, even if it's not directly by their hand.