Some See Ranges, I See Rings

It was with shock, a few years back, that I found out that anarchists are considered to exist on the far left of the political spectrum. You see, I just presumed that extreme right wingers were the anarchists, with their constant attempts to have less taxation. To me, minimal taxation meant no government.

I’ve heard of right wingers that go far enough and say the government should only fund the military.
But what if all the countries in the world had that system on largely a defensive basis? One brave country might decide to cut it’s military completely and when the others see there are no repercussions they might cut that off, too. Suddenly we have anarchy – i.e. no governments. Or, as might be more likely with extreme right wing countries, one might be able to militarily take over the rest of the countries. With no outside, there would cease to be a need for a military. Again, there would be no government .

So I suggest we see the political spectrum as a ring, where the extreme left and the extreme right meet in one of the least popular parts of the ring.

There’s another spectrum that I see as a ring: the university or knowledge spectrum. The sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and sometimes psychology) are usually seen as one side, arts courses are in the middle (by arts I mean geography, history, business etc.), and fine arts (music, visual art, creative writing, theatre arts) are usually on the other extreme end.

Fine arts and the sciences are usually seen as not meshing. But it’s creative to come up with a theory, spatial and visual skills are sometimes a must in science and it’s possible to think it a fine art to write a scientific paper.

On the fine arts end, music is very mathematical with both basic counting and the logarithmic nature of the basic scale, sculptures sometimes need the use of engineering and physics principles and creative writing can have as big a logic chain as things in the sciences.

Here, too, I see a ring.

There’s one more spectrum that makes me see a ring. It is, of course, the spectrum.

The light spectrum stretches from red to purple in the visible light part of the electromagnetic range.

But I like to see it in the painterly way. As all painters know there are three primary colours: red, yellow, and blue. In the spectrum, between red and yellow is orange. And indeed if you mix red and yellow paints you get the colour orange. Similarly if you mix yellow and blue paints you get green, the colour in the spectrum between blue and yellow.

There is one combination of primary colours left: blue and red. The only way to make it so there is one colour in between blue and red, the spectrum must loop into a ring. Now what colour is between them? Why purple which is the colour you get when you mix red and blue paint.

So I think the spectrum, itself, should be a ring. Now don’t I think that spectrum should no longer be used as the name of a range, that the dictionary should do something about this archaic definition?

Why yes, I do. I can see why it would be slow to happen, though. You see the spectrum and mixing colours is at the science and fine arts part of the knowledge ring. And definitions in a dictionary are usually considered to be an art. Eventually the arts might catch on and it’ll enter the dictionary properly.