One of the stranger aspects of my life has been dealing with groups of people, and occasionally individuals, who have presumed that I must be a conservative because of where as I born and the colour of my skin. That I have often been mistaken for a conservative, and that I have generally not realised what was happening until much too late, highlights something about my character and situation.
In retrospect, I see that there is a certain logic in treating whites who must have been born into a colonial country during the colonial era as if they must be conservatives. Although it is an oversimplification, the assumption that a white Zimbabwean must be a conservative is perhaps generally true enough to make it a predictive principle.
Yet, I am not, nor have ever been, a political conservative. I am even less of a cultural conservative than a political one. My cultural training was in line with principles of stoicism and irreverence, in about equal proportions. Although the stoicism might seem to imply a right-wing state of mind, it has no such political homeland. It can just as easily be lobbied against the establishment as for it, or on its behalf. There is no telling, from my character structure, what politics I happen to embrace.
Throughout the years, however, people have assumed that I must be a conservative, and have treated me accordingly. This leads directly to misunderstandings, particularly if I should happen to express any of my intrinsic irreverence for power structures or ways of thinking that do not develop and thus self-transform. I am impatient with everything that stays in the same position. Character-wise, I am no conservative.
To the degree that I have remained lacking in knowledge about politics, and indeed about my own identity as others see it, I have left myself open to being misunderstood in ways that seem to have been quite extreme.
I have not expressly denied that I am a conservative, because I have not understood that this is what was being assumed. For much of my life, I would not have had the terminology, even, to name the error.
My path to understanding conservatism, as well as to understanding many other political movements, has been on the basis of errors that others make about me. My principle of epistemology is as follows: "If you want to know what others are really thinking about you, observe their errors."
There are always going to be those who will blame me for their perspectives. This has happened many times. They will say, "We assumed you to be a conservative and now you have turned out to be something other than that!" They will say that I have tricked them into believing one thing about me, when I was acting according to a different sort of logic altogether.
In reality, when this happens, I have never had any notion of the direction of their thoughts until they proclaim that they have been deceived. I can't be held responsible for what they had been presuming.
In retrospect, I see that there is a certain logic in treating whites who must have been born into a colonial country during the colonial era as if they must be conservatives. Although it is an oversimplification, the assumption that a white Zimbabwean must be a conservative is perhaps generally true enough to make it a predictive principle.
Yet, I am not, nor have ever been, a political conservative. I am even less of a cultural conservative than a political one. My cultural training was in line with principles of stoicism and irreverence, in about equal proportions. Although the stoicism might seem to imply a right-wing state of mind, it has no such political homeland. It can just as easily be lobbied against the establishment as for it, or on its behalf. There is no telling, from my character structure, what politics I happen to embrace.
Throughout the years, however, people have assumed that I must be a conservative, and have treated me accordingly. This leads directly to misunderstandings, particularly if I should happen to express any of my intrinsic irreverence for power structures or ways of thinking that do not develop and thus self-transform. I am impatient with everything that stays in the same position. Character-wise, I am no conservative.
To the degree that I have remained lacking in knowledge about politics, and indeed about my own identity as others see it, I have left myself open to being misunderstood in ways that seem to have been quite extreme.
I have not expressly denied that I am a conservative, because I have not understood that this is what was being assumed. For much of my life, I would not have had the terminology, even, to name the error.
My path to understanding conservatism, as well as to understanding many other political movements, has been on the basis of errors that others make about me. My principle of epistemology is as follows: "If you want to know what others are really thinking about you, observe their errors."
There are always going to be those who will blame me for their perspectives. This has happened many times. They will say, "We assumed you to be a conservative and now you have turned out to be something other than that!" They will say that I have tricked them into believing one thing about me, when I was acting according to a different sort of logic altogether.
In reality, when this happens, I have never had any notion of the direction of their thoughts until they proclaim that they have been deceived. I can't be held responsible for what they had been presuming.
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