I’m considering changing the name of this blog to no-opinions.com. Why should I have any political opinions? It has occurred to me lately that having political opinions is a hobby less useful and potentially more dangerous than any number of other harmless pursuits, like stamp collecting or model airplane building. The vast real world out there neither knows nor cares about my political opinions. Whether or not I vote one way or another, or not at all, matters not a whit, whatever a whit is (via my cousin, Andy, a “whit” is an Old English word, believed to date from the Danish invasion, meaning the “crumb” or “speck” that falls from one’s lips as one enjoys a piece of pastry). My influence on political policy is nil. That’s the plus side. The minus side is that having political opinions pisses off more or less half of the people to whom they are expressed, no matter what the opinions or who the recipients are. The effort and time spent to develop and maintain any opinions whatsoever on the war or the economy or farm subsidies or Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, etc., is a futile waste by any rational analysis. There is nothing to be gained for anyone, and there are friends, associates, customers, and clients to be lost.
My politial science Professor brother, Jeff, has this to say about that:
“The point of developing, articulating and sharing political opinions can never be that you are going to change the world. That’s a sort of influence exercised by a tiny minority of any community. Instead, it is a way of participating in a public community of shared institutions and participating responsibly in its public affairs through your small contribution to keeping political leaders accountable to the public at large. If you cease to do that, you are declaring yourself an exile from your own community, even a traitor to your own community. You are modeling a behavior that, if generalized to the whole public, abdicates all power over public officials to small, organized, highly self-interested groups. It amounts to a declaration that democracy is worthless and should be abandoned in favor of authoritarian regimes controlled by narrow, self-interested elites.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, that’s all true of course, but from a personal point of view, a game-theory point of view, it begs, it fails to answer, the age-old question, “What’s in it for me?” And from a conservative, libertarian point of view, there is the credo, “If there isn’t anything in it for me, then what the Hell is there in it for anyone?” It’s the antidote to Kant’s categorial imperative, “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”. This is the universal law of the Left, whose ambition is to enforce their laws universally. We must all drive Prius’s or die, for the sake of Gaia. Heck, I even believe in Gaia. I mean, how much acid do you have to drop before you realize that the Earth is a living organism of which we are the sensory organs? I mean, dude!? It’s obvious!
So, I tried out my new no-opinions life strategy in the San Francisco Bay Area this August, as we journeyed to the land of the cutting edge, the mother lode, the source of all future lifestyle choices, and the home of my grandchildren. I have to say, it, our journey, was quite successful, at least in a negative sense. I didn’t piss anyone off, to my knowledge, durng the entire week, a new record for me. And, by the time we returned home to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the world was not any less, or more, saved than it had been before we left, near as I could tell.