Animal Farm Utopia

I wonder when they'll want to privatize parliament, where corporations, including our "wealth creating foreign investors" could bid for the seats? ~ Ed Deak

That would be counter productive, Ed. As it is, governance has long been privatized. And its current illusion remains the perfect cover, convincing the deluded masses into thinking (or is it believing?) we live in a democracy. But how can things possibly be any other way? Where would 33 million well-informed and truly educated folks fit into the Canadian economic model?

I am not saying people are incapable of being happy under circumstances that are unnatural, for we are an adaptive lot. But the natural order of free-thinking, autonomous, self-directed individuals everywhere has long been compromised.

We collectively exchanged such positions in life for the security of a job (corporate-government-institutional-professional). We unwittingly traded our individual responsibility to safeguard our own natural freedom and liberty for the protection offered by others who claimed they will do our job for us.

At this juncture, short of a complete collapse which would bring with it a forced enlightenment, there is no going back. We are incapable of living 'free'. We have effectively become domesticated, one and all. Animal Farm Utopia.

Defining Left-Right Politics

As for understanding the Left-Right political debate, there are numerous models available. I don't think any of the ones I've been exposed have been comprehensive, so I created my own -- deficiencies and all.

My model is circular, lying horizontally like the equator. At the front-centre is the theoretical balance between state and private control. Here the state has full sovereignty and always enforces the 'social contract' for the benefit of all people, while the citizenry, the private sector, has the freedom to pursue its own ambitions and bloom with autonomy. As you move further to the left or to the right, there is a corresponding increase in state or private control, respectively. The extreme in either direction, at the back-centre, is where all power converges into the hands of either the state or private interests. Here, unabashedly, stands fascism.

Voting for What?

We lost control of our democracy the day borders started to be meaningless. When we allowed corporations to move capital across borders without any regard for the people, this started ~Skywalker on thetyee.ca

It's far more perverse than that, and it started long before 'corporations moving capital' became fashionable.

Clearly non-democratic or totalitarian acts can be highly localized and performed by individuals. Slavery is one such form, where one's work is usurped by another. Here one man is convinced it is in his best interest to accept the arrangement. That is the politics of one man over another.

And that formula is politics at large -- the marketing of ideas to convince the masses to accept a certain form of slavery in exchange for real and fraudulent benefits.

If one does not understand this simple truth, then he is bound to make all sorts of broad and absurd assertions like the necessity of voting simply because it is offered. At certain times, I can only wonder if he has any idea what he is voting for?