Any educated person would laugh at the idea of an all-encompassing, scientific, medical recreational or business ‘spectrum’. Yet, for some reason, our society is obsessed by the ‘left-right’ political divide. This dichotomy only reinforces our tribal divisions whilst unhelpfully allowing the same term to refer to opposites, and opposite terms to refer to the same. It is time to abandon these labels and by extension, the political spectrum altogether argues Hyrum Lewis.

One of the main reasons that public discourse is so unproductive and hostile these days is that we are thinking about politics all wrong. Our society is under the mass delusion that there is just one issue in politics and that everyone can be placed on a left-right spectrum depending upon where they stand on a given issue: “communists” on the far left, “progressives” and “liberals” on the centre left, “moderates” in the middle, “conservatives” on the right, and “fascists” on the far right. According to the conventional wisdom, although it seems like there are many positions in politics, a single philosophy or principle (such as “change,” “realism,” or “social justice”) underlies them all—one issue to bind them together.