Presenting: The Ideology Matrix
A lot of people confuse socialism, left wing, democracy, and communism with each other. This is because ideas from one generation are commonly usurped by later generations according to their different experiences, rather than creating new names for new ideas arising from those new experiences.
A modern day example is the mobile phone and smartphone. A mobile phone means mobile telephone. When computer-abilities were added to it, it became a ‘smartphone’. However, this name is wrong because the computer-ability outweighs the telephone-ability. People use their ‘smartphones’ more for watching movies, playing games, or text-chatting, instead of talking via voice as what a telephone would do. Nowadays, smartphones are more properly called as a mobile devices.
David Hume explains that such naming mistakes are caused by the mind always choosing the mental processes that expend the least energy — it tries to connect ideas and form new ones without thinking. Thus, the phone became smart and so it was called a smartphone.
In politics, this is commonly seen in the confusion between democracy and socialism. Democracy first appeared in ancient Greece and was defined by Socrates as a system where people could vote on everything. Socialism first appeared in the 19th century as a natural by-product of the French Revolution and was defined by the French via economists Henri de Saint-Simon and Sismondi as a system which valued workers and peasants, opposite of James and John Stuart Mill who valued the capital owners (After the French Revolution, the aristocrats were lumped into a term called capital owners or capitalists because of the industrial revolution. Note that even this is wrong and was only corrected in 1919 with the invention of the word technocrats).
