Values

Gentle Readers,

Over at Uncommon Sense Greg Swann took a good natured (I assume) swipe at me for self-identifying as one who leans politically towards the left. I suspect Greg has difficulty with the notion that a person can accept some tenets of a particular creed without swallowing the entire doctrine whole and unquestioned.

If anyone cares to take a swipe at me, let it be at my values, and not at what they assume my values are.

Here are some of my values:

(1) My actions should match my values.

(2) Each of us has the right to live our lives as we please, each according to his own values, so long as one's actions are not done at the coerced expense of others.

(3) Each of us owes it to ourselves to root out the illogic and fallaciousness in our own thought patterns.

(4) Altruism is bad. (OK, technically, altruism is non-existent, null syntax.) Kindness is good. The difference is that altruism is the bizzare notion that self-sacrifice and doing nice things for others is somehow inherently good. "Kindness" is the recognition that I value living in a world where when a person who makes a mistake, or ends up in a jam, or just needs a hand... they can occasionally get the hand up that they need. (And see Value #1)

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(5) Leaving the world in some way better than I found it. Producing more than I consume. That production might be something in the way of useful products, it might be something in the way of useful ideas, it may be passing on useful values to a new generation.

If any of those values strikes you as inherently evil... this is your chance. Attack away. :-)

-- DW

Comments

[Nancie]

Sounds more libertarian to me. ;)

I posted a political test and a poll and found out most people either are a republican that leans towards libertarian, or a democrat that leans towards libertarian.

Isn't that odd.

[Rich]

Sounds nearly perfectly libertarian to me. Now you just have to dump the communism (support for the state).