Individualism and Collectivism
Posted: July 17th, 2017, 12:56 am
I think it is reasonably fair to say we can breakdown political ideologies and cast them somewhere along the polarity between Individualism and Collectivism.
Both of these positions are a necessity for everyone living together to consider. There is nothing obviously hard to understand here, we all want this or that from life and all understand that what we want may conflict with other people in the world. Someone may want a sports car and another may want the destruction of all sports cars due to the pollution they cause.
In the political sphere we understand certain compromises must be achieved and that conflict necessarily has to remain to keep us in check over each other.
There has been some discussion lately over socialist and capitalistic ideals. This is only an economic focus, a habit enforced on humans due to the prehistoric rise of "inequality" (an interesting subject for anthropology if it takes your fancy.)
What I see in society is a highly complex game being played. In political parties no one person has absolute rule, yet one individual has more power over the others. I think it worth looking very closely at how political parties are organized and how they have developed over time. If we can understand the evolution of the political party and come to reflect upon its current state we can be sure to understand how it views the "political world" it resides within.
I got to thinking about this when watching an interview with the former presidents of the US, Clinton and Bush. Clinton said something I found to be obvious yet easy to disregard. He said he learnt most about politics in his first campaign (which he lost). This made me a little worried because it seems he regards "politics" as being about campaigning rather than about applying ideas.
Do politicians only care about how to gain public favour? Are they really concerned with doing anything other than what they think is best? Is the individual in a political role forever askew from the collective population?
I have been thinking about a way of improving the individuals political power. Right now a single person has very little choice in any decisions made by the government.
Recently we saw people in the UK "complaining" about having to vote? I found this a little strange. Of course I don't think it would be very practical to have the population vote over every single decision the nation is faced with. What I find most concerning is that an individual's vote does not seem to be expressing their thoughts and opinions. If I vote for one policy then I am ignoring several others ... this has been a trend in how campaigning works.
What we saw lately in the UK was younger people being encouraged to vote and purposely targeted. We will see this more and more in the next elections and I think it is good that more and more people vote. What puzzles me is what they are voting for? And how we can improve the general system.
My view is that the government should be more splintered. I understand this is a very complex thing to do but given that the way governments are run has not really changed for a long, long time it makes sense to rethink the situation rather than playing an archaic game of politics blinding hoping it holds up to the test of time.
What I propose as being a step in the right direction is a system where people have the opportunity to express their views more fully and vote in elections on a number of different areas. Also for them to spread their voting across several parties if need be.
What I find to be probably the most important aspect is in the individual voter being forced to play policies off against each other. It seems glaringly obvious to me that if you are only concerned with ONE policy then you may very well endorse a policy that undermines the one you're fighting for. People should be made to vote about education, taxes, healthcare and foreign policy rather than being expected to simply vote for ONE party to cover all of these aspects. It seems like a very poor choice at the moment for a great number of people relaly interested in how nations are run.
I have no idea how this could work. I am just saying that I think if people were given several votes for several popular policy debates then they'd be able to feel mor einvolved in politics and vote according to individual policies rather than suffering from having to balance extremely difficult problems in society against each other. After all is that not the job of the politician who has more information and ability and access to find said information (not to mention dedicated time to do so!)?
In term of Individualism and Collectivism is it a fair assessment to say the political parties act as individuals and the voters as a collective? Meaning the voters individual ability to express their views is simply drowned out by the choices dictated by the individual parties with rigid ideals that do not bend easily. Should not governments be constructed by the people for the people rather than gaming with public opinion?
Both of these positions are a necessity for everyone living together to consider. There is nothing obviously hard to understand here, we all want this or that from life and all understand that what we want may conflict with other people in the world. Someone may want a sports car and another may want the destruction of all sports cars due to the pollution they cause.
In the political sphere we understand certain compromises must be achieved and that conflict necessarily has to remain to keep us in check over each other.
There has been some discussion lately over socialist and capitalistic ideals. This is only an economic focus, a habit enforced on humans due to the prehistoric rise of "inequality" (an interesting subject for anthropology if it takes your fancy.)
What I see in society is a highly complex game being played. In political parties no one person has absolute rule, yet one individual has more power over the others. I think it worth looking very closely at how political parties are organized and how they have developed over time. If we can understand the evolution of the political party and come to reflect upon its current state we can be sure to understand how it views the "political world" it resides within.
I got to thinking about this when watching an interview with the former presidents of the US, Clinton and Bush. Clinton said something I found to be obvious yet easy to disregard. He said he learnt most about politics in his first campaign (which he lost). This made me a little worried because it seems he regards "politics" as being about campaigning rather than about applying ideas.
Do politicians only care about how to gain public favour? Are they really concerned with doing anything other than what they think is best? Is the individual in a political role forever askew from the collective population?
I have been thinking about a way of improving the individuals political power. Right now a single person has very little choice in any decisions made by the government.
Recently we saw people in the UK "complaining" about having to vote? I found this a little strange. Of course I don't think it would be very practical to have the population vote over every single decision the nation is faced with. What I find most concerning is that an individual's vote does not seem to be expressing their thoughts and opinions. If I vote for one policy then I am ignoring several others ... this has been a trend in how campaigning works.
What we saw lately in the UK was younger people being encouraged to vote and purposely targeted. We will see this more and more in the next elections and I think it is good that more and more people vote. What puzzles me is what they are voting for? And how we can improve the general system.
My view is that the government should be more splintered. I understand this is a very complex thing to do but given that the way governments are run has not really changed for a long, long time it makes sense to rethink the situation rather than playing an archaic game of politics blinding hoping it holds up to the test of time.
What I propose as being a step in the right direction is a system where people have the opportunity to express their views more fully and vote in elections on a number of different areas. Also for them to spread their voting across several parties if need be.
What I find to be probably the most important aspect is in the individual voter being forced to play policies off against each other. It seems glaringly obvious to me that if you are only concerned with ONE policy then you may very well endorse a policy that undermines the one you're fighting for. People should be made to vote about education, taxes, healthcare and foreign policy rather than being expected to simply vote for ONE party to cover all of these aspects. It seems like a very poor choice at the moment for a great number of people relaly interested in how nations are run.
I have no idea how this could work. I am just saying that I think if people were given several votes for several popular policy debates then they'd be able to feel mor einvolved in politics and vote according to individual policies rather than suffering from having to balance extremely difficult problems in society against each other. After all is that not the job of the politician who has more information and ability and access to find said information (not to mention dedicated time to do so!)?
In term of Individualism and Collectivism is it a fair assessment to say the political parties act as individuals and the voters as a collective? Meaning the voters individual ability to express their views is simply drowned out by the choices dictated by the individual parties with rigid ideals that do not bend easily. Should not governments be constructed by the people for the people rather than gaming with public opinion?