individual rights, individual liberty, prosperity, peace, liberty, property,
A bit off topic, but I realized something recently. When those on the Left see/hear those on the Right using such words, we look askance; their interpretation of those words always seems, from our perspective, to mean the right to stomp on others and be immune to retaliation. It’s easy to label that selfish, or even narcissistic, but that may not be quite right. Selfish people are going to pick whichever side they see as being more personally beneficial, but that’s not always going to be the conservative side. Even those who act out of high-minded philosophies aren’t necessarily 100% selfless. No, the real conflict here is that some right-wing people are selfless, but on behalf of their “tribe”.
And their tribe says “we are presumed good until proven otherwise for specific individuals; everyone else is presumed bad until proven otherwise for specific individuals. Our rights, our freedoms, we know they matter, because we are good. The same cannot be said of the rights of others; we do not know they are good, so we can’t hold them equal or higher than ours, any more than the right of a murderer to kill cannot be held the above right of the victim to live.” And this “we” isn’t about any specific individual; for example, when they (and by “they” I mean the ones who are approaching this from a more selfless perspective) get intrusive about religion in government or schools or in other people’s lives, they’re talking about an abstract right for “good religion” to drive out “bad religion” and “non-religion” rather than anything personal.
When left-wing people join groups or communities, and those groups/communities fight for rights, they’re fighting for the rights and freedoms of individuals, including those outside their “tribe”. Ideally, we don’t presume that anyone is good or bad based on which group(s) they belong to, though the left isn’t completely immune to a similar sort of tribalism. So we’ve got two fundamentally different forms of selflessness - one of which subsumes the rights of individuals into the group they belong to, and one of which subsumes the rights of a group on behalf individuals whether or not they belong to it. If you subscribe to one type, it’s hard to see the actions on behalf of the other type as anything other than selfish.
In the end, though, I’d stick with the principle of less harm; being treated on the same level as all of the “bad” people may be experienced as a form of oppression (and one could argue that the experience of a thing is more important from a human perspective than the objective reality of it, at least sometimes), but it’s nothing compared to what those “good people” do when they’re allowed to engage in real oppression.
