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You correctly note that this is descriptive, and not prescriptive. That the data is noisy and the correlations poor—not that correlation implies causation, anyway. For a given issue it is easy to find counterexamples, or even imagine an alternate history where the constituencies might have been reversed.
Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?
Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions. Neither nature nor nurture but natural law. Rejecting both autocracy and chaos in favor of mediated decision-making. The role in your gender analogy is obvious. It is the synthesis to this dialectic. After all, the poles of a tension are rare.
This category rejects duality in favor of a triality. What if we posit another category, one that rejects all three? Meta-compromise, or perhaps meta-skepticism. Then—then—
By induction, we end up with an arbitrarily large set of skeptic positions. An infinity of signaling and countersignaling. I think this model better reflects human interaction than any proposed duality. For any sufficiently entrenched set of positions, there is alpha in claiming another level of sophistication.
Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.
If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.
In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.
Then what does it buy us?
At best, you’ve applied Principal Component Analysis to sociology. But correlation still isn’t causation, and just because you can model a position as a linear combination of some axes doesn’t imply they are meaningful.
It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.
And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.
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