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The Kel Weaver Political Bit

My brother, whom I would describe as a Christian Fundamentalist Republican, once made a comment that I was “more right” than he was, simply because I wanted even less government than him. This seems odd to me, considering that I’m opposed to laws against gay marriage, drugs, or many other such things that people on the American right would consider very wrong.

Of course, I’m not the first person to make this observation. Undoubtedly, many of you are familiar with the Nolan Chart. Instead of assigning your political thoughts to a one-dimensional line, David Nolan decided to extend it out into two dimensions. Upon my first introduction to the Nolan chart, and because of my math background, I immediately noticed its deficiency. You can no more assign people to a two dimensional plane than you can a one dimensional one. Instead, a more accurate description would be a n-dimensional vector, where n is the number of political issues you are concerned with. But of course, we are talking about vectors of possibly several hundred dimensions, and frankly, the human mind doesn’t quite understand anything above the third one.

But even then, I find myself not so concerned with social or economic issues. At the end of the day, the question boils down to one simple one for me: Do I want government, or not?

Thus, I have devised a method of determining you political stance that is far simpler than the Nolan Chart; in fact, it is far simpler than the left-right line we are most accustomed to.

Allow me to introduce the Kel Weaver Political Bit (or the Kel Weaver Political Boolean, or the Kel Weaver Political Binary Choice – whichever is easier for you to remember).

The question you ask yourself is thus: “Do I support government?”

If you answer yes, then you are a 1.

If you answer no, then you are a 0.

I am a 0. Unfortunately, I imagine I am quite outnumbered in the world by 1s. Fortunately, however, I imagine a number of our readers are fellow 0s.

Posted in Philosophy