Labels are a means for control. It's why "abracadabra" and various magical incantations are used. But we don't think of the real origins of the power of labels such as left and right, democrat and republican...
In the book of Genesis 1:25-26 Adam gives names to all the animals so that he can have dominion over them. You know who didn't have a name? God. When asked, the closest we came was YHVH. The lack of vowels renders the name impotent for man to have control over God.
This is why I reject all political labels because governments do the same thing. Once they can label you, you have lost your own power. So if you want to claim your own power for yourself, never give your political position. You can't accurately do so anyway without compromising it.
I hear some of you call me libertarian, but you're all wrong. Just because a couple of attributes of one group happen to fit, doesn't mean I will fit all of them. The same is the case for everyone else. Nobody will be in complete agreement with everything on a platform unless you surrender to the label.
So don't do that. I've spent the last several years deliberately going against the standard political divisions. That's the only way to really clarify your thinking and maintain your own power.
Great advice! It's easier to live that way anyway! :)
Labels are just words, and they're useful for communicating your thoughts and beliefs to other people. Refusing to share your ideas may be an effective way to defend yourself from having your ideas challenged, but challenging each other is how we grow and improve. Labels and language are imperfect, so we should be aware that we're unlikely to perfectly understand other's positions, but that's no reason not to make the effort with all available tools.
I think you partially misunderstood what I was saying. When I say don't give your political position, I mean primarily on paper with authority (nobody else really cares except in petty ways). I started thinking like this around 2004 when republicans started redrawing the district lines to try to rig the vote outcome by delegate so I lied and said I was republican (I wasn't really any party). The interesting result of this is somehow that registration tailed me after I left NY in 2006 and lived in Nevada, then I came back to NY in 2013 but an entirely different place a county removed that should have had no clue what I was registered as. Seems that some were desperate to beef up the voter roles.
The habit that I've formed over the past few years is to redefine what I am in a way that other people don't understand politically. Voluntarism works for now, but as soon as that word gets misused by authority, that label will be gone and I'll "be" something else. It's not hard to do, just reemphasize something else which always works because labels are inherently misleading anyway and can never be completely inclusive of what you are.
Thanks for the explanation, that makes much more sense. It's certainly dangerous to be objectified by those who see themselves as authorities, and labeling is a tool they can use to ease that objectification. I wouldn't say that labels are inherently misleading, but I agree that it's important to recognize their limitations and not view them as an exhaustive explanation of everything another human is.
Lets put it in another way that Robert Schmidt might say (He's the translator of Greek and high ranking scholar I worked with as a programmer)... It's hard to get a 100% semantic field match between words. Many languages have words that just don't translate into English, while some words might have some of the meaning and would be synonyms. While their semantic fields will overlap, they are not a perfect match because their auxiliary meanings don't match. This is what I'm trying to get across.
Agreed and well put. The objective is what is important, not the term used to define the path to it.
This is one reason I stick to my objectives. I state them. My objective is to further individual liberty. As long as someone is doing the same, they are automatically a friend. The labels used to define such a person change. The objective never does.