I have read anarchist, democratist, fascist, syndicalist, “conservative”, classical liberal, right-libertarian, left-libertarian, plumb-line libertarian and might-is-right philosophies of life, society and politics. I have found valuable ideas in the most disparate sources, from Hume and Nietzsche to Landua-Udanov and Oswald Moseley.
What I have also found is that the central tenets of these various philosophies and world-views are typically myopic, if not outright fallacious. I do not accept ‘natural rights’, sovereignty, social darwinism, egalitarianism or ethical egoism. In part perhaps this stems from the fact that, as a value-individualist, I am almost nihilistically liberal. But I am not at all ‘liberal’ in the sense of “multiculturalist” tolerance. Rather I find their views are quite arbitrarily distorted by their own, often nonsensical, evaluations of certain facts or pseudo-facts in life. Like Wittgenstein, I think many questions to which these ideologies propose answers are in fact pseudo-questions which resolve in a way that makes their views quite impossible.
I also do not share their inherent biases towards certain classifications of people, for example I think that historically both the ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ exhibit, at the more abstract intellectual levels, a totally asinine view of what human life is. I find little meaning in existentialism, be it Kierkegaard’s or Sartre’s, and often the best part of any philosopher’s work is his criticism of other philosophers.
Those who most closely mirror my views on politics, the various anarchist sects, seem even stranger for the conclusions they draw from like theories. Paleolibertarians and avowedly ‘left’ libertarians are prime examples, often elevating questions of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ which (from my perspective) aren’t even meaningful to ask. What the Hell sense does it make to talk about what people ‘deserve’ anyway?
If the spectrum is typically divided between Left and Right, and Nolan gives us an Up and a Down, it seems to me that on socio-political questions my positions (and anti-positions) are so scattered across the spectrum as to defy classification by ordinary means. I propose, in the tradition of Quarks, to classify my views as belonging to the ‘Strange’ spectrum which moves in an additional dimension apart from these, IE taking positions that certain supposedly ‘fundamental’ questions are trivial, arbitrary or do not even make sense to ask. Likewise, certain views ignored in the common classifications are in fact central to meaningful philosophy in any area, including socio-politics. I agree with Ayn Rand that if metaphysics, ontology and epistemology are left out of the picture one has a very empty picture indeed. Yet how much social philosophy even acknowledges how metaphysics will affect the viability and content of any theory? Can one honestly contend that ‘seperation of church and state’ can have any coherent content if one literally believes an omnipotent, omniscient being legislates moral behavior?
It may be observed that I haven’t dedicated any specific content to the Strange ‘spectrum’, but perhaps this is the largest point of this: virtually no political or social philosophy takes the ‘strange’ dimension into account. Objectivism and Rousseau are not merely different in their conceptions of humans and government. Can we even say they are speaking about the same sort of reality at all? What is often put under the heading of political or social philosophy often refer to concepts that are only comparable if we distort the actual content of the philosophy. Of course, classification is for convenience and need not be ‘perfect’. But a failure to take into account the widely varying notions of how reality and life are constituted are the cause of many political disagreements, people are quite simply not talking about the same thing. And the more I examine these philosophies, the more I think that hardly any of these people are talking about reality.