I find it difficult to segue my political views into the conventional left/right spectrum and I've got serous reservations about the usefulness of that paradigm. It's obvious to me that the labels left and right are applied relatively and are dependant upon the context within which people express their political views and I don't see that view is seriously contestable. Yes I know that a lot of folk align themselves with collective entities, usually political institutions that seek to identify themselves as either left or right but that's by no means the majority and those who do, seem to me to be motivated more by a desire to seek out collective assurance than by personal conviction. Which is why the most ardent and vociferous of political proponents tend to be young and naive, that's where the failings of older and smarter people, you know the ones who should know better are most apparent. I can forgive youngsters for being naive, I'm not so charitable with the dried up cynics who deceive them and exploit their youthful exuberance.
I hesitate to describe myself as a libertarian, not because I'm shying away from the now greatly diminished stigma that is attached to that label but I do see a certain necessity in the collective principle. It's quite a limited necessity in my view though, I usually express it by referencing Pharaoh's dream. Yes that's right, I'm citing The Old Testament, the part where Joseph deciphers a dream about the seven fat and seven thin cows and interprets it as a portent of famine, as a result a policy of grain storage is implemented. Of course you can't store grain unless you overproduce it and luckily for us in the developed world, most of our leaders have retained some inkling of that wisdom seeing the necessity of deferring the commercial imperatives of the market place within the context of agriculture. Which is why we don't have a famine every decade, unfortunately without adequate restraint and discipline such an arrangement is open to abuse and corruption, which is why we suffer the appalling insanity of The Common Agricultural Policy.
So I'm not left or right or libertarian, what else aren't I or can I describe my political views in positive terms? How about Nazi or Fascist, well I do occasionally fantasize about sending certain folk a on one way trip to Lower Silesia, accompanied by their families and loved ones. I picture myself waving a hanky at them as the cattle trucks pull out of the railway siding: "Goodbye Mr. Cameron, goodbye Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Piers Morgan, Jeremy Kyle. Ta ta Germaine enjoy the view, you should find a bucket in the corner if nature calls." As a general rule though I can't take those labels seriously and if I'm participating in a discussion where they're used outside their historical context I usually leave the room. I say usually because those terms although hackneyed are not totally redundant, for instance it can be useful to draw comparisons between the post 97 Super-Consumer era and the cronyistic policies of Italian fascism but such comparisons pass somewhat stratospherically over the heads of most who use those terms. So think of me of a kind of secular nihilist, if you've got a political doctrine -- I don't believe it. Doctrine is the product of collective reasoning, the political entities resulting from such are organs of aggregated self interest which inspire that very reasoning, a nauseating merry-go-round of convenient self justification. Is this where I mention Feminism and Political Correctness?
Comming soon in: Politics part 2 Submission to collective will and how it relates to personal responsibility
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