We have all heard of the left and the right wing political ideologies. We have a broad understanding of what is left and what is right. Left wing is generally liberal, emphasizes on equality, social justice and reform. Right wing on the other hand are more inclined towards free market, authority, tradition, duty, hierarchies and individual liberty. More generally, I think it is fair to say that the left wants big reforms in the current system and the right wants to maintain the current system. But if we try to view it even more generally, left and right wing is applicable not just to politics, it is applicable to each and everything in our life. Here is an example to elaborate my point. A young startup may be categorized as left leaning if it has an innovative business model and if it wishes to disrupt the market. On the contrary, if it wishes to optimize an existing model and build on its success, it will be categorized as right leaning. A young person who has just joined the job market will continuously look for new opportunities. They want rapid salary growth during their initial career and they will many a times go out of the way into uncomfortable situations for growth. This is left leaning. On the other hand, a person who is close to retirement will look for stability and work-life balance. This is right leaning.

Consider this, a father and his son are travelling on a road. The son, a 20 year old, is complaining, “There are too many potholes on these roads, our safety is an absolute non-negotiable. This country is pathetic. The government does absolutely nothing. It is unliveable here! I wish I could go abroad.” The father, a 50 year old, responds, “The fact is that you are sitting in an AC car and complaining about road quality. This used to be impossible 20 years back because, there were not many roads, and only extremely rich people had cars. We now see that many middle class families own a car and there are so many concrete roads, highways and expressways built. Do you not call that progress? All this progress happened without the government working? It is a privilege that you are able to say this, be grateful!” You might’ve been a part of such an argument, on one side or the other. It is easy to recognize that the son is left leaning and the father is right leaning in this specific issue. There are so many such instances in our daily lives. Food adulteration is a big problem in India. Analog paneer is omnipresent and is difficult to identify immediately. But it is also a fact that we faced acute food shortages post independence and the green revolution helped us achieve self-sufficiency and we even started exporting foodgrains. The average life expectancy of Indians at the time of independence was around 32 years and it is around 72 years in 2023. This is undeniable proof of what we have achieved during these years. And yet, we see more and more people complaining about food adulteration (which is needed by the way!). The people complaining about food adulteration are left leaning and the people who are very satisfied and grateful for the growth we have achieved are right leaning.

Both these mindsets have a few problems. The left leaning mindset is absolutely essential for growth. If there is no one to complain that potholes exist, the potholes will keep on existing, which is a big problem in my opinion. But the left leaning mindset is extremely dissatisfied. While it is useful for growth, there is a tendency that even if everything is fine, we still start finding problems in the system. It is very difficult to be left leaning and satisfied with the system. On an individual level, we want satisfaction in our lives. We don’t want to be the person who keeps on suffering. A person with right leaning mindset will be very satisfied with the system and hence they will not seek growth, which is also a problem for the society as a whole. Given a particular situation, most of the people are either right or left. It is extremely difficult to adopt good parts of both and leave out the bad ones. The main reason for this is people find it psychologically painful to be holding conflicting beliefs. This phenomenon is called cognitive dissonance in psychology. It is very difficult to be both satisfied and dissatisfied with the same thing. Most of the people think in either of the two ways -

  1. To create change, I must be unhappy.
  2. To be happy, I must be ignorant.

The solution to this, and in my opinion, a more useful way to think about things is switching between left and right. For instance, in the pothole and the road scenario, the thought process should be something like, “I am grateful with the way India’s infrastructure has developed in the last couple of decades. But I think there are still many issues like potholes that need to be addressed.” When thinking of the broad system, the zoomed out view of the issue, it is useful to be satisfied or right leaning (Note that the word I used is “useful” not “correct”). When we zoom into an issue, we need to adopt a more left leaning approach. We should have the ability to be satisfied with the progress of the system and still show our discontent with the surviving issues, both in one breath, one after the other. That is when we get the best of both worlds. But this is easier said than done. It sounds beautiful in theory, but it is not easy to implement. The best way to implement it is observation of self and others. It takes practice and discomfort, and most people don’t prefer this discomfort so they live in either the left camp or the right camp.

Here is a good analogy Google’s Gemini gave me. If you are living in a house, you may have a lot of memories and love for that house. You may be satisfied with the house. But if the house has a leaking tap, you need to fix it. You cannot say that since the tap is leaking, I don’t like my house now. You also cannot say that since I love my house, the leaking tap is a beautiful fountain within my house. Will leave you with that, see you next time.