Conservative:
“not usually liking or trusting change, especially sudden change”
“one who favours traditional views and values”
“favouring the preservation of established customs, values, etc, and opposing innovation”
A Run of the Mill Conservative
I was raised a Conservative. My parents brought me up in a framework of traditional, especially socially traditional values. We were observant Catholics who went to mass every Sunday. On a Tuesday afternoon in the school holidays, mum would dust off my play clothes and send me on my merry way to weekly Tuesday children’s mass. Dad worked, mum was home raising my brother and me. During my childhood and early teen years in Germany, I was a captive audience to the many political discussions in our house. I spent many a family gathering lying on the carpet listening to mum, dad, Oma, Opa, my uncle and my aunt discuss politics, religion and world affairs. I drank it up like nectar:
Socialists were the bad guys, Greenpeace was a bunch of commies hiding behind a green front, The Green Party were watermelons, Communism was the great evil of our times etc. My uncle was involved in resurrecting a German Conservative party and I spend many a day folding political pamphlets, handing out how to vote cards and attending anti-abortion protests. You get the picture. I still hold most of those views, albeit with a more nuanced adult understanding. It is safe to say that for about 40ish years of my life, I have been a Conservative. Not anymore!
Janie’s Got A Gun…no, Andy’s got a gun. Ok, rewind, Andy wanted a gun and that’s how it all started.
Long story short, about 15 years ago, my husband and I bought a rural getaway property. After finding out that the area had feral pigs which were potentially dangerous to our little family, I decided I wanted a gun. Now when I put my mind to something that I want, I throw myself at it with gusto and as a result, my first step into achieving that goal was to join a firearm forum on the internet. That almost accidental decision was the first step towards a long string of philosophical, ideological and political awakenings.
I had grown up in a family that probably didn’t have a stance on guns per se, largely because guns didn’t feature in our lives. Having grown up in Germany, my only knowledge of guns came from American Westerns and literature that I enjoyed (eg J. F. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales). Apart from that, guns were for farmers and professionals in forestry etc. The concept of firearms for self-protection was foreign to us. I suspect that if we had been pressed on the subject, we would have waved it off as belonging to the wild west and crazy Americans. But my eyes were opened dramatically by the people I “met” in those Australian firearm forums. (Never say the internet is only for confirmation bias). Some of the people I had discussions with, some of whom I subsequently met in real life and now count among my friends and whom I know to be good people, really challenged my thinking. My position shifted via many tiny adjustments from “it should be ok to own a gun to help control invasive species” to “it is your natural right to defend yourself against aggressors and the possession of a gun for that purpose is moral”.
What does it all mean?
The larger question that arose from the whole “Andy wants a gun” experience, was the much deeper issue of rights. Having come to the conclusion that I (and every other law-abiding person) should be able to own a firearm, I realized that this mindset carried with it certain implications. It was very clear from the negative attitudes in the community and media towards firearms, that many people disagreed with my stance. I was willing to concede that others had the right to disagree with my point of view, but I didn’t feel that they had a right to prevent me from possessing something which I had every intention of utilizing in a moral manner. In short, as a law abiding human being, my owning a firearm was a private matter, much like owning a knife or an axe or a set of matches and as long as I was not using that firearm to aggress against another, that was that as far as I was concerned. The next step along this line of reasoning was coming to the realization that others too might want to do things or possess things that I didn’t agree with but which they should be free to have for the same reason that I felt I should be able to have a firearm. In other words, I had to extend my own standards of liberty to others. Examples to demonstrate what I mean are things like drugs, pornographic material, lifestyles of a particular sexual persuasion, etc. I might not believe that those things are good and moral, but I have no right to impose my worldview on others (I might persuade them via discussion) and especially not via the use of government and legislation. Without realising it at the time, the first seeds of being a libertarian anarchist were sown.
I am not like you!
Yes, I’m talking to you my conservative friends. I’m not one of you anymore. I used to be, and I understand your mind-set, but I no longer subscribe to that type of thinking. You are all the same, you statists of the world. You all believe in the same thing, whether you are left or right, that is you all espouse the concept that government control is good as long as the control revolves around the issues you care about and as long as YOUR mob has the reins of power. You lefties and rightists may differ on the causes you care about and on the types of moral crusades you go on, but fundamentally you believe the same thing – that your ideas of what constitutes right and wrong, good and evil should be imposed on others through legislation.
You lefties want climate legislation, gay marriage, welfare, minimum wage, gender and race quotas, etc.
You conservatives, apart from having little to say on anything and generally caving in to the left on many issues have become obsolete, which leaves us with the more extreme types on the right, who sometimes do harbour racist ideas, who would legislate gay people into oblivion, who hold attitudes to women that belong in the middle ages and who by and large are nationalistic to the point of being war mongers.
I’m done with the lot of you. I was done with the left since forever. I am done with the neocons who are hardly distinguishable from the left except perhaps on a few issues of economics and foreign policy. And after a long yet uneasy relationship with the social conservatives, I’m done with you too. Not because I disagree with your values (I still share many of the social ones) but because you seek to impose them via government. I can no longer hold a position in which I demand the liberty to live my life according to my values but then simultaneously wish for those I disagree with to be legislated out of existence. This position is untenable for me because it is deeply hypocritical.
Too many Conservatives falsely believe that Libertarians want to do away with morality or virtue or values.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Any one Libertarian might well be a libertine, or he/she might also be a staunch conservative Christian but what all Libertarians have in common is the conviction that you cannot legislate people into being moral agents. It must be voluntary.
Liberty Downunder 