How The Working Class Left, were pulled Right.
The usual disclaimer; Levels in all things. Left and Right are not binary choices but extremes on a scale. If we only care about ourselves, we're right wing "tories". If we care for everyone else on the planet, we're left wing "snowflakes". Most of us have a pyramid of what we care about, with ourselves at the top, family and friends a little lower, those who we can easily relate too below that, and the further away, the less we relate, and the lower down the pyramid they sit.
We can't encompass entire ideologies with two words, but ultimately it comes down to how large the group is that you care about. If you only care about your group, be it a family, creed, or nation, to the detriment of other groups, be they families creeds or nations, then you're more right wing. The larger the group you care about, the more left leaning you become.
What makes a person 'Left Wing'? What makes them 'Right Wing'?
Allowing for the few psychotics among us, we all have empathy. The question is more one of who we allow ourselves to have empathy for. In a world of limited resources, there is a logical argument for emotionally closing yourself off, to only care about those closer to us, and the more limited the resources, the more logical the argument for only allowing yourself to care for a smaller and smaller group.
We might ask, just how limited are resources, or how have people been led to believe resources are limited?
| Over the past decades, we have suffered an onslaught of media narratives telling us about scarcity. We had a "banking crises" following which we were told there was a scarcity of money and a need for "austerity" (where did all the money go?). We're told of immigrants who are coming to take resources. The EU were supposedly taking funds which could be used for the UK's NHS? |
Through all this time, the rich got richer, and actually resources were just being moved into the hands of fewer and few people. It's not that resources were suddenly limited, it's that fewer and fewer people were suddenly taking them all.
In Summation
If you want to know how the working class left, were pulled right, it's because they were convinced to believe via a long waged media onslaught that there was a scarcity of resources, so that they would fight to ensure that only they, the people they cared about, and people like them, should have what few resources they now believed existed.
