29 May 2023
Many have seen them. They’re usually printed on business sized cards. Some pass them out at state and county fairs, at political events or around campus. Its few questions boil down respondents’ political and economic opinions and plot them across the sociometric spectrum. I think it’s actually a pretty fair representation of people’s attitudes.
Some people hate it; correspondent Jypent Moupvil asks, “Where’s American? What happened to anarchy? Is that in the middle? I guess the idiot who made this would put Nazi on the right when Nazi means National Socialist German Workers Party.”
Nazis are clearly in the “Authoritarian” quadrant nearest the bottom whereas we anarchists are clustered at the very tippy top.
Moup objects: “Anarchy is on the right. I’m a constitutionalist. I’m in the middle. I believe you must have balance and equilibrium. I don’t like the law of the jungle.”
Well I AM an anarchist, and that puts me at the very tippy top of that graph advocating for 100% economic AND 100% personal freedom. We are more libertarian than Libertarians, more conservative than Right-wingers, and more liberal than Leftists. Anything less is statism.
And of course I’ve said it for decades; libertarian anarchists look down equally on both the Left and the Right. And yes, I have been advised, by the eagerly aggrieved, just how dismissive and contemptuous it is to “look down” on others. Well, that’s just Mazel Tough! Down is the perfectly appropriate metaphorical direction to look upon the base and the corrupt.