Join us for debate at our Facebook Group, Liberty Cafe!



Saturday, May 2, 2009

The Myth of the Monolithic Conservative: Hegel's Binary Idea

A great explanation of the black-white/left-right monolithic myth from Critical Narrative:
The source of this confusion is probably mostly due to the current and prevalent Hegelian idea that the world is chiefly made up of binary opposition-- the idea of a thesis confronted with an antithesis e.g. the Left vs the Right, theists vs atheists, Conservative vs Liberal, Democrat vs Republican, etc.--that results into synthesis and "progress." This is a position encouraged by the Left as it reinforces the Marxist's Hegelian tenants upon which Karl Marx based his theories. The fact that this naively simplistic model is demonstrably untrue (Hegel seemed to believe that the Prussian monarch Frederick William III was the eventual end of this thesis/antithesis/synthesis chain, and Marx's apocalyptic predictions have not been proven to be in any way accurate [communism was supposed to be an antithesis to the industrial revolution and the tyranny it inflicted]) has not seemed to stop the vast majority of academicians and the general public to give it great amounts of credence.
It's a pet project of mine to annihilate the idea that the world is black-white. On both sides, there is the idea that if two things are fighting (ideas, countries, etc), then they must be opposites. That's ignorant and false. Yukio Ngaby's essay demolishes this and dispels myths. A must read.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are absolutes but I think they are limited to the realm of concepts like right and wrong, good and evil. Parties have no such clear borders and concise definitions. The government is very good at exploiting these ideological divides to their benifit. As long as we are lined up and categorized by neat little titles we are without power. Once we realize that the true enemy is government (right and left) we will have found our voice and become an effective instrument of change. Unitl then we are nothing more than pawns essentially expendible and completely inconsequential.

Jordan said...

Well said.

Its sad, as I read at Ann Althouse's blog, that people actually take offense to the idea that if Congress agrees, something must be wrong.

The idea was for them to represent us and be our voice, now they just speak for themselves.