The Lotus Eaters

Chapter Eight

The perception of a left-right political spectrum has survived for seven centuries and spread across two planets. There are sound reasons for this, despite the fact that it is not perfectly descriptive. One reason is that the core of political differences is the varying perception of the nature of man, at those perceptions' extremes: Perfectible by breeding (right), perfectible by training and education (left), neither perfectible nor even all that changeable by either (center). A second reason is that the existence of one extreme tends to organize people along the other. Perhaps better said, the two extremes tend to organize each other. Moreover, they tend to drag people away from the center, or to make those who remain in the center very quiet . . .

Take the typical X-Y graph that purports to describe the true nature of the political spectrum, one that, perhaps, posits an X axis that describes the attitude to planned social progress or attitude to human reason, while the Y axis describes the attitude to government or attitude to power. If one plots out a given sample of people one will find that two corners of the graph are uninhabited. There is no one who is both sane and not a moron who has a very positive attitude towards government (except insofar as such a person may be personally dependent upon a government meal ticket) and a very negative attitude to planned social progress, or vice versa. Instead, in plotting a sample, one gets a fairly narrow oval, running from lower left to upper right. Turn that graph clockwise forty-five degrees and look at it again. Yes, it now describes left-right again, with minor up and down differences, which differences are irrelevant when compared to the major right-left differences and which are, again, overcome by the mutual and hostile organization driven by the extremes . . .

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468