the layers of my thought

Where my different ideas and beliefs come from, from the largest layer to the smallest:

Catholicism (1.345 billion):

• The oneness of mankind.
• The value of each human life.
• Poverty is not a moral failing.
• Life is more than sex and money.
• We live in a fallen world.
• The Bible and the Catholic Church as a source of wisdom (even if I do not always agree).

The West (1.012 billion):

• Reflexive Eurocentrism.
• The truth is knowable and important.

Anglosphere (500 milion):

• Reflexive Anglophilia.
• Freedom – for individuals, businesses, ideas, art, trade, etc – is good.
• Rights of private property.
• Judges should be independent.
• People do not need government or religion to tell them what to think.
• Life is what you make it. It is not fate or Providence.
• Empiricism: facts matter more than reason.
• Religion is a private affair.
• Incremental social change, not revolution, is best.

USA (331 million):

• Freedom of speech.
• Freedom of religion.
• Constitutional government.
• Meritocracy as a good thing.
• Value of hard work, almost as an end in itself (an “Asian” value according to some).
• Individualism.
• Moralism in politics.

US blue states (~165 million):

• No man should be above the law, not even the president.
• Good: democracy, science, immigration, labour unions, education, pluralism.
• Power corrupts.
• Capitalism needs to be regulated by government for the good of ordinary people and the planet. Left to run amok it leads to things like slavery, pollution, unsafe working conditions, starvation wages, stock market crashes, etc.
• Government can be a force for good: the abolition of slavery, defeating Hitler, the moon shots, public health and public education, etc.
• The US civil war was about slavery.
• The more people who vote the better.
• Racism and sexism are morally wrong and also mess up society, making it way less meritocratic.
• Russia is not our friend.
• Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Black America (47 million):

• Freedom, equality and justice for all.
• The US is split down the middle by race.
• Racism is the main thing wrong with the US.
• The US is not going to magically change. It is not naturally just. Protest, at least, is required.
• Blacks are every bit as American as Whites.
• There is absolutely nothing wrong with Black people. Stereotypes are self-serving lies made up by White people.
• critical race theory – I agree with most of its ideas.
• Afrocentrism is better than Eurocentrism, if only as a corrective.
• Much of White Christianity is fake, or at least profoundly warped.

Metropolitan New York (18 million):

• The cosmopolitan model of US society – maybe this is a blue-state thing, but it is at least a New York thing.
• No one ethnic group is a shining model for others.
• Creative anarchy.
• Live and let live.

Uptown Manhattan (~0.7 million):

• Most of what the US believes about itself are self-serving lies.
• The US will try to turn you into a soulless machine, as it has done to so many.
• See things as they are, not as people wish them to be.
• Money and progress are not necessarily good things.
• In the end it all comes down to power.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• My political compass
• Reading Abagond
• human universals

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