I’ve noticed something interesting. The words you use have a huge impact on how people will react to your ideas. On internet forums, whenever I openly call myself an anarchist and talk about private defense agencies etc, I’m often called crazy, and the posts against me are very hostile. When I use terms like “polycentric law” or “multiple competing governments”, many socialists even say they think my ideas are interesting. They don’t even realize what I’m talking about IS anarchy. I do the same with my friends aswell. I really don’t like ideology to have anything to do with my social life, but occasionaly we do have discussions on politics. So I’m real subtle, we started talking about banks one time, and instead of using terms like “fractional reserve banking” “gold standard” etc which all sounds really complex to your average more-or-less apolitical person, I just said that I thought it was unfair how banks loan the money I deposit out, isn’t that fraud? And they all agreed with me and said they never thought about it like that. I think we libertarians should change our vocabulary when introducing our ideas to others, plant the seed of liberty, eventually they might just become libertarian. We must never lose our consistency, never compromise with evil and “water down” our views to sell to the public, but that doesn’t mean we have to make what we believe in look very radical and on the fringe.
^Agreed. But I don’t think we should throw away words like pda or anarcho-capitalism, it’s just if there are negative connotations torwards an ideology, then don’t start with it. You have start elsewhere.