How often do we hear about extremists in politics, especially right extremists. The message is that extremists are a negative phenomenon, that they disrupt societal peace, that without them life would be oh so nicer, more manageable, and less tense.
What are extremists? These are the individuals and groups of individuals whose political ideas diverge from the accepted ones, and they diverge as far as it is possible. There are extremists to the far right or to the far left (though the mainstream leftist media point almost exclusively to the far-right extremists). Yet, what’s wrong with there being extremists?
In a group of people there will be different opinions, and if we want to assign those opinions to different places along an imaginary axis of ideas, ranging from the most left wing to the most right wing, those opinions will obviously hold different places somewhere in between. Some of the opinions will be close to one another, others – far away from one another. It is like with the height or weight of individuals: the bulk of society will be of average height and weight; yet, there will be individuals who will diverge from the average to one or another degree.
Now, that opinions – political opinions – are different is natural, just as natural it is that individual humans have different heights and weights. If a set of objects or people is not homogeneous, it will have the average and the extremes. Apart from abstract or artificial circumstances, in real life particular objects and individual humans will always vary. You can do nothing about it unless you seek to homogenize people, which in turn is unfeasible.
So why point to extremes or extremists? Why criticize them? Why suggest a demand that they should somehow disappear or adjust themselves to the average? Quite apart from the fact that such change is not possible, if we could do away with extremists, we would end up with… extremists! How? Imagine an axis where 0 stands for the average political opinion, while -10 and +10 stand for extremist views. Even if by some magic wand we could eliminate the extreme -10 and +10, -9 and +9, we would end up with an axis stretching from -8 to +8. in such a case those -8 and +8 would become the new extreme political worldviews. What then? Then the average would demand that the new extreme views disappear from the political spectrum, thus reducing the axis to a stretch between, say, -6 and +6. But then – lo and behold! – we are facing another pair of extreme viewpoints, those of -6 and +6. the reductionist process would have to continue until we end up with the pure average i.e. 0 in our example. If that were possible to achieve, we would end up in a dead, robot-like society with no clashes of opinion. No clashes of opinion translate necessarily into no development, into stagnation, ultimately into death.
Then why keep talking about the danger of having extreme political opinions? For one thing, you cannot get rid of extreme opinions, of extreme anything, and for the other: even if you could, you would bring about death of society, of an organization, of anything in fact. It is the duality of minus and plus that electricity works, the duality of zero and one that digital systems operate on. How otherwise?
Think also about the freedom of opinion and the freedom of expression. Why call someone’s opinion extremist? Is that not supposed to denigrate it and thus to suppress it psychologically? Why not, rather than calling names, argue reasonably about the opinion that you regard as, say, extreme?
So much so that if no calamity happens, the overwhelming part of society will cling to less extreme views. It is only when disaster strikes, when governments mismanage the common good that the masses of people are drawn to extreme political views. The extremists feed on the political, economic and moral mismanagement. That’s all there is to it.
