Far-right, Authoritarian please? Or is ideology dead?

Day 977, 11:46 • Published in Netherlands Netherlands • by Hans Rienveld

If we look at the political landscape of eNetherlands it becomes immediately obvious that there is one party who dominates it. That party is of course Iron & Wine.

Nothing strange about that. But look a little deeper and there is something puzzling. In a country that prides itself on being liberal and an open society the orientation of it’s biggest party is “Far-right, Authoritarian”.



This is puzzling as these two words seem the opposite of the other two words, liberal & open. The question that arises then is: why is this?



We can think of a few answers here:

- Hypocricy or schizophrenia
- Historic or ignorance
- Ideology is dead

Let’s examine these answers in more detail. Hypocricy or schizophrenia.



This implies that people think one thing but do another, either consciously or sub- consciously. One possible example of this might be the Japanese immigration issue.

The general populace is positive towards immigration when it’s the odd individual here, so liberal, but when a large group of one country shows up, opinion suddenly swings far-right and they are treated with alarm, above and beyond the normal suspicion people from a former Eden country are treated.

Another example could be the Pierre Delvaux saga. Here a active individual resurrected the Workers Party and got them their first party. Now most people are very positive towards new parties, a liberal stance, but in this case again opinion swung far-right which led to Pierre leaving the country.

So the hypocricy or schizophrenia claim may have some truth in it but let’s move on to Historic or ignorance.



With this I mean that new arrivals or babies just choose I&W because it’s the biggest and they are unaware of the ideology. Looking at the members list of the three biggest parties it does seem that I&W have more younger / less experienced members but not many more. And this maybe be due to a better recruiting strategy.

Let us then finally look at the last answer, Ideology is dead.



With this I mean to say that perhaps most people frankly don’t give a damn about what the ideology is of the party they join. For me personally ideology played a big role if not the only role in deciding which party to join. Could this be different for the majority of the citizens in eNetherlands?

Looking at the nature of eRep you would hope that a majority of the populace, or at least say half, would take an interest in the politics of the country they live in. Or am I completely wrong and are wars and battles the only thing that interests most people?! Of course, we know that most people are two-clickers and I am probably being too hopeful / unrealistic / idealistic.

To go back to the initial question, why is the biggest party in a liberal and open society a far-right authoritarian party, I like to make my own conclusion now. In my opinion for a lot of people ideology is dead because it’s hard to transfer RL ideologies to the New World and a lot of people fail to see how for example Libertarian and Social ideas can be transferred to this game.



But what people fail to understand perhaps is that they need to apply the ideology to the game mechanices. An excellent example of this the communes the communists have started. Also there is a real choice in eUNL and it deserves to be considered properly by citizens. If in RL you are for an open society and you see that the LSD promote this than you should obviously check it out (no apology for the shameless plugging here! 🙂 ).

These choices have a real impact on how eNetherlands develops. For example in GLD’s manifesto Konrad makes no apologises for not favoring openess while LSD do. This gives you a clear choice between two ideologies right there.



So I encourage people to reconsider the party they belong to and to pick the party which reflects their beliefs and values most. Use your party membership and vote wisely as it does make a difference!