What I believe, I guess.

Found this over at Bucks place a while back and gave it a shot. I've done this sort of quiz before and they usually give me a similar result.



The quiz is typical of a lot of questionnaires that come out in political seasons like this one, and it confirms to me what I've come to believe. I've found that as I get older and more informed about the issues in our time, I find it impossible to come down reliably on one side or the other of the conventional political spectrum. What's more, I have less and less confidence in our ability to do what needs to be done to fix the problems we face as a nation. It depresses the hell out of me.

I also usually find it VERY hard to whole heartedly support any of the likely choices that are handed to me when I step into the voting booth. Those choices used to be easier to make, but then maybe ignorance was bliss after all. Not so these days. It's agonizing, watching this parade of losers trotted out to the cheers of their mindless, thronging, slobbering supporters.

What I do know for certain now is that I believe in my own freedom, and I think that freedom should be just about absolute. I trust myself with that freedom, even if others don't, and I resent the HELL out of some other bastard tellin' me what I should or shouldn't be doing. It especially hits me when what I'm doing is usually going to have little or no impact on the lives of other people. I believe in your freedom too, just so long as you stay on your side of the friggin' creek and leave my ass alone. We can party and have a time, but don't even think about tryin' to tell me what to think or do, or what's "appropriate" or "inappropriate". I might have to run you off.

When it comes to your freedom, I really don't care what you do, or what you want to drink or smoke, or who you want to marry or adopt or have sex with. When I was young and stupid I bought into lots of ideas about right and wrong and what people should and shouldn't be allowed to do, but I eventually grew up. Maybe I'm still growing up. Now I believe that your life should be yours, and mine should be mine! It all comes down to this. Let's call it the Social Contract... If I want you to mind your own business when it comes to my personal life and freedom, then I'm OBLIGED to leave you alone and mind my own business too, so long as your activities don't adversely effect me. We don't have to get along or like one another. We just have to agree to leave one another alone. That was a common concept 200 years ago. Not any more.

The founding generation lived in a time when authoritarian rule (Monarchy, which is a class based form of dictatorship) and human slavery were wide spread in the world. Just about every country was ruled by a small minority of aristocrats who maintained and perpetuated their rule through a monopoly on force. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Europeans and a few Americans were commonly held as slaves in the Muslim kingdoms of North and East Africa (having been kidnapped off of merchant ships in the Mediterranean), and West African slaves made up about 1/3rd of America's colonial population.

Many of the founding generation, coming to adulthood in this environment, had been educated in the philosophy we now call "Classical Liberalism". This is the philosophy that you see laid out in Jefferson's poetic prose, that government is instituted among men to ensure "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness". This flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, that some people were born to lead and others were born to be led. Some of them, like Jefferson, had been brought up to own and keep slaves, whether they believed in the institution or not. Most people saw the reality of slavery every day, and many came away from that with an exaggerated sense of the importance of their own personal freedom and sovereignty. The most important kind of property anyone could own was themselves, and their own destiny.

At the same time, most thinking people in America, who were just about all "commoners", had grown by the late 1700s to resent aristocratic privilege and the limits that the British system placed on their lives. While most of them didn't own slaves, they lived in a society dominated by slavery and a slave owning petty aristocracy of rich commoners who tried to act like Lords and Ladies. These people knew intimately the value of personal freedom, and the importance of owning your own life and destiny!

We live in a time today when many seem readily willing to sign over control of their own life and destiny, and the responsibility for their own lives to a supposedly benevolent government. What's worse, they're even more willing to sign over another person's property and sovereignty, in the interest of some fleeting promise of enhanced safety or security. At the same time, many people have come to believe that the proper role of government is to enforce their personal moral code and shove it down everyone else's throat. They think that safety is more important than liberty, so all of us have to put up with increasingly draconian laws, twisting and shrinking the scope of our personal space and choice, so they'll feel better about themselves. Bastards!

Both sides of the political spectrum speak passionately about believing in individual liberty, and say they want to protect it. I've found though that both sides really believe in deciding FOR YOU what freedoms are important or appropriate, and restricting other freedoms they disapprove of. In a nut shell, the people who seek power in government today have forgotten the difference between what they CAN do and what the SHOULD do! To me, that says it all.

So, in voting people into power, instead of choosing between two groups with different solutions to our growing problems, I have to try to decide which party is likely to screw me over the least. I know going in that the people I'm voting for are likely to do stupid things that might adversely effect the lives of others, but I calculate that these particular losers are less likely to mess with me. Instead of being able to choose someone who will actually try to do something good, I have to try to pick the candidate and party that will try to hold back the ever expanding power of the government to mess with my life, even if they end up messing with someone else's. That's a piss poor way of having to make a decision about these things, and speaks to why the biggest problems we have as a nation can't seem to be solved. So then, how the hell did we get to this sad state of affairs?

Well, we'll talk. I've spewed enough bile for now. Cheers.