Political Compass - Gathering 2 - Exploring Possibilities
Channel: Action For A Peaceful World
Date: 25/10/2020

During the second gathering of the action circle for the Political Compass cycle, guided by Alex Weissenfel, we delved deeper into the fundamental liabilities, the effects when they are under- or over-regulated, and the utility of the four virtues in mitigating the impact of the liabilities on our ability to communicate effectively and make collaborative decisions. 
 
Fundamental Liabilities: Ways that we describe problems - physical or mental/goal problems - known and unknown - combined to get 4 fundamental liabilities: 

Scarcity (known/physical) - Running out of stuff - Wastefulness/Austerity

Disaster (unknown/physical) - Running into stuff - Negligence/Susceptibility

Stagnation (known/mental) - People destroying selves - Decadence/Dogma

Conflict (unknown/mental) - People destroying others - Turmoil/Corruption

Every person is willing to make trade-offs. As a society, we have to consider varied perspectives and willingness to incur risk.

Political Compass: 
(1) Progressive (reject status quo; help the most number of people; fear susceptibility and austerity; use more resources, take more risks; progress, improvement, innovations; creative, research-based).
(2) Conservative (accept status quo; change may make things worse; fear wastefulness and negligence; unwilling to make changes; cautionary approach)
(3) Libertarian (allow individuals to do what they judge to be best for them; reject rules and restrictions that impact personal freedom; fear dogma and corruption)
(4) Authoritarian (create the structure to protect systems; fear decadence and turmoil; coordination, cooperation, accountability, and solidarity)

These perspectives are useful in describing our individual approaches to various problems. What trade-offs can we afford to make given particular resources and the environment?

Dealing with Scarcity and Disaster - the trade-off between potential disaster (contracting COVID-19) and known economic costs (business closures)

Use an understanding of our individual trade-offs allows us to be more able to consider options for addressing the issues. The virtues provide us the ability to prevent or limit the impact of fundamental liabilities.

Scarcity - Investment (not wastefulness and not austerity; spend more to get more back)

Disaster - Preparation: use controlled setting to plan for and prepare for disasters; don’t need to know specific disaster will occur, but need to prepare, get experience, and learn to deal with unexpected. Prepare with physical resources and by practicing response.

Stagnation - Transcendence: to avoid decadence and dogma, we develop discipline and understanding to deliberately resist doing things we want to do that may be counterproductive to our end goal or objectives.

Conflict - Ethics: to avoid turmoil and corruption, use ethics to determine what we all want and do what is best for society as a whole without damaging individuals; put in the extra effort so people can do what they want to do without being oppressed by force or restrictive rules; get what we want by working together.

For the policy that you picked for Exercise 3, brainstorm approaches that avoid the bad tradeoffs that you see and the bad tradeoffs that you saw when you were pretending to take the opposing viewpoint. 

Use the four virtues to find a creative approach, maybe outside the scope of the immediate situation, to benefit all involved while putting everyone's fears to rest.

What to do about COVID? "People can contribute what they're able to help with, to make as many small situations easier to deal with, which should hopefully make larger policies smoother to implement."

ESL classes: "Put in a summary with links to studies to show that the classes are a good investment towards long-term academic success and preparation for dealing with academia.  We understand your concerns about the costs (time and money).  We can change the deal to allow them to count their credits towards English if they qualify. "

Drug policy: "Make it easier for people to understand how drugs affect the brain. Invest in an infrastructure to more effectively treat addictions. Get people in contact with more real-life stories about how people have been affected by drug policies." 

"All the stories about drugs need to be shared, positive and negative, so that people have a better understanding of how different drugs can affect people's lives and can learn about people's histories with drugs and how they learned about them without preconceived judgments."

"People with 'drug problems' tend to have more complicated situations and the drugs may not be a major cause of the problems by themselves."