# Left & Right ## Concept Writing about how we represent things. Let's go, we don't have much time. ## The clock When I was a kid, they'd ask us to understand time through that weird mechanical artifact, the clock. It was round and absurd, with 3 hands at different speed, with at least two entirely different calculus system, 1 to 12 with a twist, and 1 to 60 with two levels of precision. And while you'd try to remember the rules, the stress hand, the one for second would stress the shit out of me. I was team Casio from birth. And when the teacher would ask someone, I was literally praying it would not be me. To this day, I still hate that system, it is imprecise, it is absurdly complex, and it is moving while I am reading. I had such difficulties. The other one was: Where is my left? ## Left and Right To me, things were simple. There was a room, the room contained things and people. Things moved less or not at all. The door and shelves side, in front of it the large window, mostly, and the corner with Lego where I'd build an army of robot. I still remember the design, I had standardized it, mass production. Like five. The outside was window side with the small road. The door pointing toward inside, the school. Near there the large staircase, leading to where tadpoles were at some point. Back to the room. It's not school visit, guys. I had opinion about the shelves, I disliked them, oppressive and once source of vexation. The room was cool though. Paintings, long table, I remember mine when I was learning left and right. But it was not a fixed position, I could be inside the room and going toward my robot army, or the day ending, aiming outward, strangely, toward the inside, the school. Everything had a position, a relation, a texture, a usage, a surprise. Things and people, we were all there and accounted for. "This is left" meant something deeply disturbing. It meant that I was the reference. Left is left of me, as a direction. Left of you is even harder. We don't know each other well. And that you had to force a lossy compression on everything else to give what I'll retrospectively call a 1 dimension vector, v(y). And so I found a way. Left is window and toy side when I am sitting at my seat when I was learning this very concept. I still remember the place, it flashes before my eyes when I have to say left. But I reduced the weight of the inference, left arm side is a light sensation, it is my weaker arm. I was not "gifted" and the school didn't do me injustice. I was doing fine with a few quirks. School did not invent left and right or analog clocks. The teaching was correct. But I really struggled with these mismatch in complexity given how I tended to visualize things. And also, we are perhaps all having this dirty secret of early age struggle, and I'm the only fool to talk about it. I say outside of school because if we take the word apple that is only weakly related to school, we end up with the same issue for me. ## The apple If I think of an apple, I see a red apple in volume, someone eating it, teeth, health, the old Queen in Snow White, Alan Turing obviously, the Beatles, their legal fight with Apple, Tim Cook, older Steve Jobs, 60's, I go back to apple, let's qualify them. I am at my usual supermarket, looking at them, yellow, red, few varieties. Let's go to Paris, my old supermarket near the theaters where I watched "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". Here there are a lot, bright red, the darker red. I liked this one. The name of the apple... I know it was from Japan. Yes near Aomori, back there, the station, the Jomon museum. That was extraordinary, very high structure, hobbit-like holes, you'd navigate between them, it is thousands years ago and they were building such greatness. Anyway, yeah, the apple juice, presents. Yes, it is not the main apple in Aomori. My favorite apple in France was the Fujii apple. But then, what is it in Aomori? I know it is the same word as the local dialect, the one that sounds "European". The sound of the name is like the ficus Bengalis. I have one on my balcony. It's hot, nothing there. Yeah, the varnish on the wood, I know. I am exhausted. I could remember one apple name. I found another but that did not work. And I don't think I'm special. Nobody stores and retrieves words or concept like it is perfectly stored and indexed. Memory is messy. Perhaps I am a bit bad at going to the word, and a bit too stubborn to stop and that makes it more apparent. I don't know, maybe. Maybe we are just all struggling and nobody says it. ## Politics What I know is that in politics, left and right sound like a joke. 0 or 1. Other angle, other 2 values: liberal/conservative, socialist/capitalist, democrat/republican. That's so dumb! Let's stick to Left and Right. It comes from the 1790s, in Revolutionary France. In the newly formed Congress, so to speak, the more progressive/revolutionary people sit on the left. The literal side of aisle. So you have all these topics, economy, redistribution, healthcare, AI, foreign policy, whatever, and your choice is two whole stances that are a yes/no on any topic. I mean even jam gets more nuance than that. Blueberry is not orange is not strawberry. They don't get sorted into two bins. There isn't "red jam" and "orange jam", what would you do with Blueberry jam? Or by weight? That's absurd. I can't reduce jam into two groups. So can I for Left and Right and so on? Jesus Christ was a progressive in year 20 B.C., given how he talked about women and outcast, how he was judged negatively for that, and in year 2026, he is conservative. But he did not change, the center around which progressist/conservative, Left/Right were set did. So if we go back to Left and Right as positions, we are seeing them always around a center that is always in motion. The Right or the Left of 1920 is not the Left of 2020. And yet, people decide one orientation at a point, that has many, too many aspects, sometimes contradictory, and as the Left changes, they would exactly moved with it and feel continuity. And same for Right. To me it is illusion, an idea that is good enough to explains politics to small kid, but it isn't nearly enough to have a conversation. ## Conclusion It is a bit insulting to have two parties, two mindsets, two ideologies. I think that politics is the dish of the day. We are more than ever à la carte. Truly, we have millions of books, movie genres, websites, we can access that with a few clicks. So I am not asking for perfect representation of the Human mind. But the gap is wide, and most importantly it is in many people's minds. Thoughts are becoming tribal, we are in groups. That should not be the case. When I see people continuing to agree even with the group they now belong to even when it changed stance, I can't believe it. Oh, by the way, France has the "perfect" political system: 12+ parties, campaigns funding hard cap, debates with all candidates. Well, you know what: it is really bad. Because we end up with a second turn that is not very different from the post-primary two candidates the US have. This is the mentality that in the end, there is one single set that gets it all. And efficient? Maybe not. The only reason you would agree with most of one set out of two is [fear](?p=fear.md) of exclusion.