Universe Integrity: of Star Wars and Ron Paul
This xkcd comic is funny, and fairly accurate. I’ve noticed that the people at Ron Paul sign waving events are disproportionately techies.
But there’s more to it than that.
Put aside any disagreements about Ron Paul’s positions and instead deal with his consistency and his integrity. Ron Paul leaves precious few dangling threads. He presents a view of government and society that is self-contained. Everything he supports can be boiled down to one principle: non-intervention. That explains personal liberties. It explains a limited government and a free market. It explains a humble foreign policy and war only in cases of national defense. All the other candidates have positions that are harder to boil down to a single guiding principle, and as such, exhibit inconsistencies. Ron Paul has crafted a self-contained universe of maximal individual liberty and minimal government. It has an Ayn Randesque optimistic and heroic view of the individual, as a being pursuing goals in its own rational self-interest, and a Reaganesque pessimistic view of collectivist institutions, as being necessarily opposed to the individual. That explains the initial draw: optimistic individualism. But it’s the internal integrity of Ron Paul’s universe that explains the energetic and obsessive devotion of its fans. It’s like how Star Wars video games and books etc have to be approved by Lucasfilm to make sure they don’t contradict the existing Star Wars universe. Half the Star Wars films suck, and the good three suffer from their share of bad acting and Ewoks you’d like to strangle. They’re a phenomenon because of the vast unified and non-contradictory universe they spawned. You won’t ever see something like “Minority Report” spawn a massive fan following, because the plot holes and internal inconsistencies destroy it before it can take its first breath.
As a comparison, Barack Obama has optimistic views that draw supporters, but he presents an inconsistent universe with the individual and the collective paired up like awkward sixth grade dance partners as the first slow song of the evening begins to play. So while he’ll continue to enjoy popular support, he’ll never have people as completely devoted to his cause as Ron Paul supporters are to his.
The tragedy of it all is that when they are presented with a unified theory of liberty and governmental non-intervention, most people say “sounds great — now who is going to pay for my health care and who is going to impose my religiously motivated moral beliefs on others?” Le sigh. It was a pipe dream when this country was founded, and it has just gone downhill from there. But you know what? Damn the torpedos, my car sports six Ron Paul stickers.
Update:
