Most political debates today happen within a familiar square: left vs right, authoritarian vs libertarian. It’s a map provided early, a compass to orient within a world of ideologies. But the entire map is only a fragment of a larger reality, one it cannot measure.
The game it charts is the very logic that must be left behind.
🧭 The 2D Political Compass — A Map of the Game, Not the Terrain
The 2D political compass looks like this:
It adds nuance beyond the traditional left/right divide by layering in degrees of state control (authoritarian vs libertarian).
The critical insight:
The entire compass exists within the assumptions of the current socioeconomic game.
It maps how people believe control should function, not whether control, competition, or private property are valid premises.
🎲 What Is the Game Board?
The political compass lives inside a larger frame, the game board of modern civilization:
- Resources are owned
- Access is earned (through money, labor, or status)
- Survival is conditional
- Labor must be incentivized
- Value is measured by price
- Competition is assumed as natural
Regardless of identification… capitalist, socialist, libertarian, or otherwise the core logics of this board are often accepted.
Most positions differ only in who controls what, how it’s distributed, or what the rules should be.
Rarely is the board itself questioned.
🌿 Enter RBE: The Logic Outside the Frame
A Resource-Based Economy (RBE) does not argue over how to play the game.
It asks: Why play this game at all?
It doesn’t fit on the compass. It transcends it.
RBE rejects the premises of the board:
- No markets, no money
- No ownership of resources, only stewardship and access
- No coercion, no wage-for-survival logic
- No centralized authority imposing scarcity
- No artificial incentive systems
Instead, it proposes:
- Access-based provisioning based on need
- Technical systems to manage resources within planetary boundaries
- Local and global collaboration enabled by automation and systems design
- A shift in human values: from competition and profit toward cooperation and purpose
RBE is not left or right, and not even traditionally libertarian or socialist. It’s a systems design for a post-scarcity civilization.
🧭 Reframing the Compass with RBE in Mind
Imagine placing RBE on the traditional compass:
Authoritarian
▲
|Left ◄─────────┼─────────► Right | ▼ Libertarian | ▼ 🌍 Resource-Based Economy (Beyond ideology — systems logic)
RBE sits outside the chart, operating on an entirely different axis:
Systemic functionality, ecological alignment, and human need not ideology, ownership, or state control.
🧠 Why This Matters
Understanding the compass reveals the patterns, the debates, the myths, the rehearsed scripts.
Understanding the board transcends them entirely.
Defending a better square on a broken board is still playing the old game.
The alternative is to design a new board, one based on needs, resources, systems, and care.