05 November 2006

My political leanings

I will be honest, I have been worried about some of the political thoughts that I have been having recently. They were quite novel for me, what with environmentalism and what-not filling it. I therefore decided to checkout the Political Compass to see where I stood.

This site poses a series of statements to which you then have to say how strongly you agree or disagree. To prevent fence-sitters, there is no neutral box so you are forced to have an opinion either way. The results are then plotted on an x-y graph, where the x-axis is how left- or right-leaning your economic views are. The vertical axis represents how authoritarian you are, the higher up the scale, the more of a bossy boots you are.

Two examples cited on the website are Maggie Thatcher who was quite far to the economic right and quite authoritative (based on her assumed scores) and Adolf Hitler, who was naturally nearly through the roof when it comes to authority, but was way to the economic left. Anyone with an understanding of pre-WW2 Germany, will agree that is a true assessment.

So without further waffling, my results:

As I expected, I am slightly to the economic right - after all a free market means free people*. What was suprising though, was that I was totally neutral. I had expected me to be tending towards the authoritative side. A bit of a revelation.

* Except in China, where the free market has not meant the people are freed, however in reality the markets there are not truly free, so the mantra sticks.

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