Myths and Systems in Politics — or, Why You’re Right or Left

Troy Camplin
Troy Camplin
Feb 25 · 5 min read
The Right view the world through myth. That myth may be religion, the divine right of kings, the
superiority of one’s race, the promise of a strongman to bring order to the world — all of these
bring meaning to the world. The right believe their lives have meaning. More, they believe the
world inherently has meaning, that all the world is meaningful.
Milan Kundera argued that the Marxists in the early 20th century believed that everything had
meaning. From this perspective, Communism is truly a right-wing ideology. In other words,
Hayek was right to predict that socialism would inevitably lead to fascism. Stalin certainly proved
Hayek correct.
The Left — especially the postmodern Left — view the world as system. In a system, you are a
mere part, a cog in the machine. You, as an individual, don’t matter, and your individual life has
no meaning. If you don’t fit into the system, you will have to go. A smooth-running machine has
no extra parts, and there’s certainly no value in having parts that work against the machine. They
believe the world has no meaning. All that matters is system. If you look at work of leftist social
scientists, you’ll see that all they talk about is systems. More, the left believe they can, ultimately,
control the system. They may not openly talk about central planning, but they believe that they can
control the social world through regulations.
From this perspective, Nazism is truly a left-wing ideology. They were, fundamentally, nihilistic
and were convinced that they could create a orderly system.
Yes, I did flip the script a bit. Everyone thinks of the Marxists as being on the Left and the Nazis
as being on the Right, but the fact of the matter is that they both share these common features.
Both are fundamentally collectivist ideologies, though they have different sources — Nazism in
the myth of Aryan supremacy and Marxism in the inevitability of the emergence of a historical
system independent of any particular individual’s will. And yet, they end up having features of the
opposite ideology.
The problem is that each starts with a totalitarian world view: the world is to be understood
through this or that given myth, or the world is to be understood as this or that given system
(structuralist Marxism or post-structuralist postmodernism). There are a variety of ways one can
be totalitarian, as I’ve discussed before. Not every totalitarian ideology will necessarily give rise
to an authoritarian regime, because authoritarianism is different from totalitarianism. An
authoritarian is someone who insists that all meaning is created by the author of the system — and
that there can be an author of the system. Socialists who support central planning are necessarily
authoritarian, because they necessarily believe that an author — a central planner, or committee of
central planners — can create order. Many artists (authors) are authoritarian precisely because
they are themselves author, and see themselves as creating meaning. However, most art involves
the co-creation of meaning with the reader/listener/viewer. Conceptual art, though, is the most
authoritarian art because it goes so far as to refuse to allow you to participate in meaning-making
in their work.
What is the solution to all of this?
The solution to all of this is synthesis. We have to embrace both myth and system, and recognize
that there can be no mythological author of the system in question, that the system is self-
organizing and needs nobody in charge. We have to both admit to the existence of meaning, and
realize that not everything has meaning. And we have to reject totalizing world views.
The world is neither a structuralist system nor a post-structuralist system, but both simultaneously.
Humans are not only economic animals, as the Marxists would have us believe (and the
neoclassical economists as well). Humans are not only political animals, as the democractic
socialists and fascists would have us believe. Humans are not only cultural animals, or artistic, or
philosophical, or religious, or philanthropic, or creative. Humans need technological innovation,
money to make exchange easier, free trade, art and literature, philanthropy (giving and receiving),
the debate and realization of public values through politics, religion, philosophy, and many other
orders, together in a complex civil society. And that civil society cannot be controlled or ordered,
any more than can any of the subsystems.
In my satire, Regulating the Poetic Economy, I try to show how absurd it would be to try to
regulate any complex social system. If it’s absurd to try to regulate poetry, it’s more absurd to try
to regulate the monetary system, technological innovation, or mutually beneficial exchange — let
alone the more complex economy of which these are parts. More, we know from network theory
that if you mechanically try to redistribute links in a network, it will eventually collapse. Attempts
at riches redistribution will cause the system to collapse, eventually ( I say “riches” because
wealth literally cannot be redistributed, but only created or destroyed). Because the system is
complex, we cannot know when it will happen, so we can do it for a while and think nothing is
going to happen. Until you do just the wrong one. But who knows what one that will be?
This is why it’s important to understand how systems work, to understand that they are self-
organizing, complex network processes outside of any author’s control. While this may make you
think the world is ultimately meaningless, it truly doesn’t have to be. Nietzsche pointed out that
we humans are meaning-makers, and that means that it’s up to us, it is our responsibility, to make
the meaning in the world. We have to make better meanings than the Marxists and the racial
supremacists, than the kings and strongmen can provide, than the avant-garde artists have
provided for the past century or more.
It is the job of the artist to dismiss the postmodern claptrap being called art. We have to make art
that’s accessible. We have to make the art that’s good enough to form a future center/attractor that
will make the world a better place in which to live and acknowledges all of the things I’ve
discussed above. We have to make the art that challenges the status quo (and the avant-garde is the
status quo). We have to create the designs that enable and constrain us into a better, more complex
future.
It is the job of the artist to make meaning, to provide the cultural foundations for a better, more
complex economy that creates greater wealth for everyone and provides more entrepreneurial
opportunities for everyone, that provides more public values (those on which we can all agree),
and is richer both mythologically/religiously and philosophically, and recognizes human beings
are social persons individuated in our complex civil societies. That is a great responsibility the
artists have shrugged off for the past century or more. It is time for the artists to take up their
burden again, to take on the true responsibility of the artist, and create the myths that reflect our
scientific knowledge in beautiful forms previously unseen, unheard, and unread.
And it is your responsibility to patronize the artists who do.
Religion and Politics: Integration, Separation and Conflict
Print
Relations to power of religion and Politics.

Both religion and politics have one common goal: that is to acquire political power and use it to
fulfill their aims. However, to achieve this object, their methods are different. Religion mobilizes
religious sensibilities of people in order to get their support to capture power; while politics uses
intrigue, diplomacy, and makes attempt to win public opinion either democratically, if the system
allows it, or usurps power with the help of army, if the society is under-developed and backward.

Therefore, in power struggle, both politics and religion make attempts to undermine each other. If
religion holds political authority, its ambition is to exploit it to fulfill a divine mission. It claims
that it derives authority from divinity and therefore its mission is holy, motivated to reform society
under the spiritual guidance. Politics, on the contrary, bereft of any value, directs its policy on the
needs and requirements of society whereupon, it obliges to change laws and system of government
accordingly. This is a basic difference between two approaches of religion and politics:

Religion determines its authority on divine laws which could not be changed with human
intervention;

While in pragmatic political approach society should move ahead, change and adjust itself with
the new arising challenges of time.

In its secular approach man is responsible to determine his destiny. He is not under the control of
divinity to remain submissive and inactive. On the contrary, he is supposed to initiate and plan to
build a society according to his vision.

There are three models in history related to religion and politics.

In one when religion and politics both unite with each other in an attempt to monopolize political
power. We call it integration and sharing model.

In the second model, politic, after subduing and overpowering religion, uses it for its interests. In
this model religion plays subservient role to politics.

In the third model both come into conflict with each other that subsequently lead their separation.
In this model they appear as rivals and compete to struggle for domination.

The study of beginning and spread of any religion shows that every religion is started in particular
space and time; therefore, main focus of its teachings is the solution of existing problems.
However, with the change of time there are new challenges and a religion has to respond them for
its survival. In this process, it has to adjust its teachings according to changes. With the passage of
time, a stage comes when a religion fails to respond challenges of its time and finds hardly any
space to adjust according to new environments. For example, in case of Islam, it took nearly two
and a half centuries to complete its orthodoxy. Once the process was complete, it became in
possible for orthodoxy to give any place to new ideas and new thinking. It was believed that any
change in the structure would weaken its base. On this plea it persists to retain its old structure
without any addition.

At this stage there remain three options for any religion:

1. Avoid and disapprove any change in its structure. If any attempt is made to reinterpret its
teachings, such attempts either is crushed politically or with the help of religious injunctions
(fatawa in case of Islam). Those who claim to reconstruct religious thoughts; they should be
condemned as enemies of religion and believers should be warned to boycott them and not listen
to their views.

2. In the second option, religion has a choice to adapt itself according to the needs of time and
accept new interpretation relating to its teachings and accommodating modernity.

3. In the third option, if religion fails to respond to the challenges and feels insecure, it withdraws
from the active life and decides not to entangle in worldly affairs. It confines its activities to
spirituality.

The helplessness of religion is obvious in the present circumstances in which scientific and
technological inventions are rapidly changing the society and its character making it more
complex and mechanical. Especially, with the extension of knowledge, politics, economics,
sciences, technology and other branches of knowledge assume a separate entity that could be
specialized and handled by professionals. Ulema or religious scholars are not in a position to
understand intricacies of these professions and adjust them with religious teachings. This is the
reason why in some societies religion is separated from politics and economics and it no more
enjoys the domination over the society, which it did in the medieval period.

The characteristic of three reactions may be defined as aggressive, compromising, and separatist
respectively.

There are groups of people in every society who want change in their practical life but at the same
time they desire not to abandon religion. These people become supporters of new interpretation of
religion that suits their way of life. It causes emergence of new sects. Therefore, we find that in
every religion, there are new sects, which fulfill the demands of a group of people within a span of
time and then disappear in oblivion of history. However, some sects persist and survive. For
example, in the Christianity, when bourgeoisie wanted religious sanction of interest, Calvin
(d.1594) a religious reformer, allowed it on the basis of religion. It removed business hurdles and
the merchant and industrial classes flourished. R.H. Tawney, in his classical book ‘Religion and
Rise of Capitalism’ rightly says, « Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what
Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth…"