Left and Right and The Way Out
A view from a Swiss social worker
You don’t have to hate the Left to see its flaws, and you don’t have to hate the Right to notice it is turning into a circus. Stand still long enough and you realize both are malfunctioning engines grinding different kinds of people into different kinds of dust.
The Left is the machine that worships consensus.
Everyone must chant the same phrases, ritual passwords for entry. Doubt becomes heresy. Disagreement smells like danger.
They call it compassion, but half the time it is fear in disguise.
Fear that if people think freely, the whole narrative will crumble. So they police language, police thought, police tone.
They censor not because they are strong, but because they are weak.
They push ideas that collapse on contact with reality:
open borders without selection, theories that ignore human nature until it kicks back with vengeance, a moral universalism that assumes every group behaves the same, even when the evidence laughs out loud.
Good intentions do not guarantee a good outcome.
Naivety can be harmless in a conference room.
Scaled to a society, it becomes lethal.
The Right carries the opposite infection.
Where the Left fears conflict, the Right inhales it like fuel.
It is the machine of ego.
Everyone acts like a prophet, every idea becomes a weapon, and every disagreement turns into a betrayal.
They preach tradition but barely know what their own grandparents believed.
They talk about conserving culture but mostly conserve decay.
They talk about responsibility yet behave like teenagers with access to nuclear toys.
Impulse replaces thought.
Feelings dress up as principles.
And yes, there is a narcissism baked into the modern Right, the raised chin, the itchy trigger finger, the constant hunger to dominate the room. Say anything today, contradict it tomorrow, blame the world the day after.
If the Left over-controls, the Right under-controls.
Both paths lead off a cliff.
Not everything fits cleanly into Left and Right. There are hybrids, centrists, and ordinary people who carry virtues that no tribe can claim. Populism crosses boundaries. Some on the Left argue for more migration control, and some on the Right value restraint over rage. The map is messy. But the extremes set the weather, and most of us end up living in the storms they create.
The truth is simple:
you cannot trust people who want to look good and think in collectives, and you cannot trust people who are built from Teflon and cannot think beyond themselves.
The Left restricts the conversation
the Right wants to control who counts as human.
Neither builds a sustainable society.
Both are allergic to responsibility.
Both think in tribes instead of consequences.
Both pretend they hold the answers while drowning in contradictions.
Part of this chaos is structural. Algorithms reward outrage, institutions reward performance, and inequality pushes people toward tribal certainties.
The deeper problem is not ideology, it is psychology.
The Left seeks control by dissolving structures.
The Right seeks control by tightening them.
Neither camp wants adults. Both want followers.
The spectrum has turned into a map of dysfunction.
The loudest set the tone.
The wisest stay silent.
And the few who still think straight walk through the ruins, wondering when common sense became toxic.
A society cannot run on denial or delusion.
It cannot survive if people are encouraged to fracture into smaller identities. It also cannot survive if power becomes a substitute for thought.
A nation is not a therapy session or a tribe. It is a contract between strangers who promise to share a future.
This is not left against right.
It is sanity against showbusiness.
So where is the exit?
The way out is not in parties, slogans, or new prophets.
It is in the small, boring virtues that keep a society alive: truthfulness, restraint, responsibility, reciprocity.
Recover those four and a country can weather almost anything. Lose them and no ideology will save it.
Virtues alone are not enough. Societies also need the humility to test ideas, measure what works, learn from failures, and adjust without turning every correction into a culture war.
We need people who tell the truth even when it is uncomfortable.
People who know when to stop debating.
People who do what they say.
People who understand that freedom without responsibility is insanity.
This is not left or right.
It is adult or not.
Step outside the binary and the world sharpens.
Migration works when newcomers arrive ready to contribute, not just consume.
Free speech is essential even when it protects fools.
Science must follow evidence instead of agendas, culture shapes people, and the environment still has the final word.
Responsibility does not need dogma, and compassion does not need delusion.
A grown person can hold more than one thought at a time.
The way out is not revolution or ideology.
It is rebuilding a culture where behavior matters more than slogans, integration more than identity, and responsibility more than outrage.
If we get that foundation back, everything else will follow.