In my exploration of the Internet today, I was led to a great epiphany about anarchy, society, and politics in general. It all began with some research into Noam Chomsky, who is now well known for his political dissidence, but who I first came across when we had studied his review of B.F. Skinner in my intro Psych class in high school.
While delving into Chomsky's background, I was incredibly struck by his political views and the theories behind them. What really caught me, was that he described himself as a libertarian socialist, a view that Chomsky states as being extended from classical liberalism. I was instantly intrigued, since I was not familiar with either of the political ideologies. Exploring further, I found that the two schools of thought are at once similar and different. They are both seemingly rooted in anarchy, or at least some form of limited government. However, libertarian socialism seems to disagree fundamentally with classical liberalism in regards to the issue of private property. Socialism, of course, seeks to abolish it whereas liberalism seeks to protect it.
I found this dichotomy to be a perfect indication of the gray area of life in that the same mechanism (that of limited government) could be used to accomplish either of two diametrically opposed causes. It further outlines the two sides of the same coin of anarchy: the anarcho-capitalists and the anarcho-socialists. It made me think back to a class I took my freshman year of college about the 1960s and the anarchic hippie era. We were learning about New Journalism at the time and studying Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that told the story of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, and their journey across the country. The material was highly engaging and an interesting perspective on the times, but what really stuck out to me was a comment my Teaching Assistant made during our discussion of the topic. He told us that, in fact, Ken Kesey and his followers had voted for Barry Goldwater--an out and out radical conservative--in the 1964 Presidential election. Goldwater's views were a fore-shadowing of the views claimed by today's republican party. His platform was a call for the abolishment of state led programs and a fiscal conservatism that used the least amount of government intervention possible. AND he was a conservative supported by the southern white constituency (formerly the southern democrats that had been in favor of slavery and segregation), which was most certainly afraid of the hippie revolution.
So then I thought to myself: what were a bunch of hippies doing voting for a man who would have liked to drive them out of the country? And that was when I realized that what brought them together was what both of them desired most: some form of anarchy, or at least a move in that direction. It's funny, really, how divided two ideologies can be while still being parts of the same mixed bag. Anyone in the GOP would be mortified to think that their call for limited government would be echoed with the same fervor by a hippie like Ken Kesey. What people fail to realize, especially in the realm of politics, is that what we all want is not always as different as we think.