TIL Politics

The sides of the coin are crafted with the best intentions in mind, despite the coin itself losing it’s value over a period of time.

Background #

All my life, I’ve never been a huge fan of politics. The aspect of people just spewing venom at each other on live television was a scene that never piqued my interest.

While I’ve listened to podcast episodes by Jordan Peterson and read about the Communist Manifesto in an attempt to comprehend what about politics was worth investing time into by the common man, I’ve failed each and every attempt in doing so. It just wasn’t interesting enough for me to actively ponder about and go out of my way to spend time upon. I was more content wondering what my next weekend project, or the next game I played would be.

However, something interesting happened today which was a resultant of a lunch conversation that took place over the past week. The next section is to provide some background context on that.

The Prelude #

Over the past week, I’ve been going to work, and as usual, have been interacting with my colleagues. At lunch, we gathered about and were talking about games and which kind of games one liked. A friend of mine, let’s call him A, mentioned that he was interested in Call of Duty, and found other games to be not as interesting or aesthetic as it.

As an avid enjoyer of 2D Metroidvania games and a person who couldn’t care less about the war, I was inclined to fight back at his statement. This spat lasted for a little below five minutes, and ended with a promise by A to educate me on the politics behind the war and why the COD series is his favourite.

I took the statement with a grain of salt, and agreed to listen to him talk about politics and how COD was a good game series, despite my disinterest in playing a storyline-focused first person shooter game. I was interested to see how he’d bridge the gap and segue from politics to the game though, and that was my main motivation to listen.

D-Day #

My experiences with investigating into Jordan Peterson’s views have taught me about Order and Chaos and the inherent need for humans to progress. To progress is to set rules and set meaning to define Order from the Chaos and lead a life worth living.

Primitive men and primitive women have started from an inferior intellect and have surpassed themselves time and time again by setting boundaries on their capabilities and surpassing them. Taking advantage of the time they gain by confining their focus into perfecting one aspect of something and proceeding to master another talent afterwards.

The Chaos is strong and in order to set meaning to the aspect of Being, one must find a purpose and set themselves goals that are beyond their current selves and work towards it. Because otherwise, if nothing else, the Chaos wins and the only thing that one watches happen, is their life crumble right before their very own eyes.

With that being said, me and A took a walk together this morning while he segued into politics, and the inherent complexity on labelling a crowd or mob into a group or division. He started off with the French Revolution, and thus began the interplay of history, cultural norms and human psychology.

The Left Wing and The Right Wing #

The reason why the French Revolution is a great starting point to the aspect of politics is because this is where the central terms of politics originate from.

From what A has told me, and I’ve researched and come to figure out on my own, the Left Wing is that faction that believes in progressiveness and the adoption of practices that free the people and place more power in the hands of the state while the Right Wing is the faction that believes in staying true to Traditions and being Orthodox in it’s approaches to culture.

This didn’t make any sense to me until A started listing out factions that inherently follow the Left or the Right Wing political agenda.

A few minutes in, and I could visualize the difference between the aspects of Chaos and Order within the Left Wing and the Right Wing respectively. It seemed to me that the Left Wing was a faction that wished to exercise power in such a way that the entire state grew as a whole, while the Right Wing is a faction that wishes to support individual growth and leave the power to those that can earn it.

In a communistic state, innovation isn’t as supported because the governament is inherently opposed to the establishment of corporates, and instead believe that everything must be owned and approved by the state. This ensures that everyone receives an equal share of the wealth and no single person is above another.

In a capitalistic state, innovation is supported and so is the formation of corporates and faceless entites that cannot be controlled by the governament. Innovation takes place at a good pace here as the one in-charge of a company does not need to wait for the approval of the state, but instead can go forward for a fail fast approach.

A running question in my mind at this point was why does anyone prefer the Left Wing over the Right Wing?

The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat #

Somewhere around a year and a half ago, I was reading the Communist Manifesto as a joke. It seemed like fun to go over a book that so many had such a negative take on. Plus, as I recall, I was watching a video on advanced vim usage which featured a book that reminded me of it.

The Communist Manifesto is a painfully hard read for someone that had never ventured out into the aspect of politics, and knew little about communism or capitalism in a political scenario. But, by the time I was done with the book, I understood why Communism spread like wildfire in Russia back in the 1800s.

Workers were underpaid and yet made to force their way through labour in order to feed themselves and their family in the past. The policies were tackled through unionization and a gathering of revolutionists that wished to fight for their community’s welfare. Through the constant revolts by these worker unions, the Bourgeoisie were forced to comply with the demands and to treat the Worker class as humans with work benefits and policies.

This practice has been carried over to the current day, with Saturdays and Sundays as the weekend holidays and the such. This has resulted in an improvement in the mental state of the working class.

I don’t know as to how viable Communism is as a practice right now, but from what I’ve gathered, the reason for Communism to be widely accepted back in the day was due to the unhappiness experienced by the Worker class in meeting unreasonable work-life balance demands from the Bourgeoisie, which spurred the conflicts between the two factions.

Conclusion #

Despite the talk with A itself lasting for about an hour or so, I believe that I’ve been exposed to an entirely new dimension that I’ve never quite found impressive. The interplay between history, politics and ideologies was quite something.

I’ve also come to understand that his reason for loving the COD series was never about the gameplay or the graphics itself like I how I initially assumed it to be, but rather it was an appreciation of history and the political decisions undertaken by powerful parties to cause the tragedies and suffering that is the War. A is a man who was able to appreciate the storytelling and the research undertaken by the team to bring into the picture a game that tells tales of the Cold War.

That’s about it from me with regards to this post. I’m pretty sure I missed out a large portion of the conversation that we had, and if A reads this post enough, he’s probably going to let me know that I’ve missed out something critical. In which case, it’s back to the drawing board for me.