In my writing I often employ a character study as a tool to help me out when I am stuck or confused about a character in one of my pieces. I try to dissect the motivations ad the perception of my character and from that I can usually see the event of the plot in a fresh way.

The thing is I will also turn this critical eye upon myself from time to time. All humans are composed of conflicting ideas, perception, beliefs, and morals. We like to believe that our values spring from a consistent worldview, held in a just and reasonable manner. In reality our views are a collection of odd bits picked up here and there like an indecisive shopper at the worlds largest swap-meet.

Know this I like to try to root out my inconsistencies and/or find the deeper values that are driving my surface reactions. In short do a character study on myself.

I have long maintained that I have libertarian political leanings. I do support the general principle that the government that governs best is the one that governs least. I do not like, nor do I approved of that state directing or attempting to direct the actions of individuals. I am passionate in the my support for the concept of equality, and try to live up to that lofty concept and not just pay it lip service.

Consequently for many years I registered and identified with the Republican Party in this country, the Party that pays the most verbal service to libertarian thought. But years ago I broke with them and more and more I have had a gut reaction that their view of libertinism and mine were somehow at odds. I could not simply walk off though, I need to know for my own sake what is at the root of the divergence. Why do I feel this way?

Easy answers would be the Republican positions of issue such as marriage and torture, but those are issue not principles. What is the principle at work that I hadn’t really uncovered in myself that drove me away?

I think I have at least a plank in that stage where my idea play out that have been a thorn to accepting the current conservative thoughts as libertarian. (Boy that’s a convoluted image, isn’t it?)

Years ago I wrote an essay on why I hold the position, vastly unpopular I might add, that animals have no rights. The upshot of this is that I believe human rights belong exclusively to human beings. (As a science-fiction writer part of me wants to construct an argument that would include intelligent aliens, but let’s stay away from hypotheticals.) Dogs, cats, birds, fish, no animal has rights in my view. That is not to say we should treat them badly. I would never willing associate with a person who abused an animal, but that is a personal moral choice, not one based upon the slippery and dangerous idea that animals have rights.

So what does that have to do with my break with modern conservatives? Certainly they are not great defenders of animal rights. (Though I know a number of right wing people who are very vocal about the evil of animal abuse.) It’s that there are more than just animals being given human rights. The conservatives are by and large very big on treating corporations and other fictitious entities as having human rights.

No. I disagree, and I can see now that this is at the base, or at least near it, to where I have a falling out with many people on the right. I am very libertarian about individual humans, far less so about our constructs.

I’m not sure where this will lead, other than a dystopian novel I thinking about, but it is there. It is a solid piece of what I think, of what I believe.