The first Metaphysical Musings article proposes that love/freedom is the fundamental dichotomy and that other dichotomies are either approximately aligned with them or a blend in various proportions. A rhetorical question is posed at the end of the article:
How does the political left/right align with the primary dichotomy love/freedom? Is the left more aligned with love or with freedom? Amidst the current crisis, has the left’s immaturity caused it to deviate from its essential quality? Is it progressing or regressing? Similar questions for the right.
The reader is invited to provide an answer in the comment section below. Following are my own answers, in the form of comments made on other substacks.
There is a saying that some feel clarifies the right/left dichotomy: "There are two kinds of people, those who want to be left alone and those who won't leave you alone."
A simple one-dimensional right/left dichotomy does not account for the dimension of growth, development, evolution. Those on the right are being forced to evolve as they witness before their eyes the consequence of exclusively "minding their own business."
The truth is that "no man is an island unto himself." Those on the right have something to learn from the most enlightened version of leftism, which I take to be, "love your neighbor as yourself." The corresponding evolution of the left is to realize that only the free can truly love, and that the greatest gesture of love is to bestow freedom.
Both the left and right are susceptible to losing their minds and having their ideals distorted and perverted, when they succumb to fear. The forces that have induced fear into the population have done so by threatening that which they most fear to lose.
For the left that would be their social bonds and for the right that would be their independence. The left has had inflicted on it isolation, quarantines, social distancing and facial masking. The right has experienced an assault on their bodily autonomy, freedom to speak, freedom of movement and freedom to work.
Much of the right has figured out that the assault is coming from the ruling class, not from a virus per se. That is probably because the right has a natural distrust of authorities, which are always and forever a threat to their independence. Many of them also blame the left, but most have come to understand that the left is being manipulated by authorities to fear a virus and to hate the right for "selfishly" denying them their social cohesion.
What happened to the left?
The feminine principle, with which the political left is (or was) fundamentally aligned, has been targeted by the "elite" for a very long time. Because, the feminine principles of compassion, social cohesion, spiritual connection, etc., are the greatest threat to the ruling class, which depend on separation (divide and conquer) and deception. It's obvious how compassion is an antidote to soulless corporatism and how social cohesion is an antidote to separation and division, but perhaps it's not as obvious how the feminine is the antidote to deception.
The feminine is primarily based in being and feeling and can penetrate all deceptions to feel truth directly. The masculine, on the other hand, operates by doing and thinking; it is oriented toward functioning effectively in the material world of separation, relying on logic and reason which depend on information. Information can easily be corrupted, and if there is no ability to discern the truth of the premises then logical deduction is useless. Worse than useless: people untethered from their feminine spirituality become a farce.
The targeting of the feminine goes much further back than the witch hunts. In the modern day, as the feminine has been rising from millenia of suppression to threaten the elite it has been subverted and undermined, at times cleverly and at times brutally. Extracting wealth from society so that women must abandon child rearing and even child bearing, and enter the masculine, competitive, often ruthless workforce to make ends meet. Breaking the sacred bond of mothers with their unborn children. Tricking women into smoking cigarettes and destroying their health as proof of their "liberation" (Bernays). Flattening the genders. The entire corporate and academic world rewards the masculine while dismissing or denigrating the feminine. (Can you imagine a Ph.D. in Women's Intuition?). The pandemic is the latest assault: masking, social distancing, isolation and dividing families and communities were meant to be the final trauma to extinguish the feminine.
But the elite overlooked something. The yang (masculine) contains a seed of yin (feminine) and vice versa. The masculine-aligned right has been aroused to fight for its freedom and in doing so, reaches maturity and gives birth to love. The left will be restored from the right, right under the nose of the elite. As society transitions away from immature-male-dominated hierarchy, healed and whole women will be seen as natural leaders, due to their innate spiritual wisdom, their aptitude for social bonding, and their penetrating discernment of truth. And men will honor them.
More about what happened to the left: The mind virus wetiko.
Perhaps Naomi, Noam and the rest have a sickness, a mind virus, known as wetiko or windigo to Native Americans, Antimimos to Jung, archons to the Gnostics, and flyers to Castaneda. Paul Levy describes it as an autoimmune disease of the psyche, a cancer of the soul, and gives a cure.
And not to overlook the attack by the “elite” on the masculine:
It is in the interests of the "elite" to emasculate society. They do this by taking away the protector role from men, leaving them with diminished self-esteem, and by casting the masculine principle in its less-evolved form so as to demonize it, and by literally reducing the testosterone level in men through various means.
As you post this on my birthday and as I am a Buddhist I must reply.
It is neither left nor right which is important.
When the Bus crashes it doesn't matter on which side of the isle you sit.
It matters who drives the bus!