Finding your way in Life with someone else's compass

Hmmm... slaphead... glasses... it must be me

I was browsing though someone else’s blog the other day when I came across a link to one of those on-line psychometric tests that compartmentalises you on the basis of your answers to a few dozen questions.

This particular test offered to locate my personality on a 'political compass' that seeks to do away with the crude concept of ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ by adding an additional dimension.

Out of curiosity I gave it a try...

Political Compass Test

It turns out that the additional dimension is how authoritarian the subject’s beliefs are.

My results, plotted on a graph, indicate that I am a Left Wing Anarcho-Libertarian. In fact, it turns out that I could well be the new Gandhi...




All extremely informative stuff - aside from the fact that I am not Left wing and I am most definitely not Gandhi.

In fact, I suspect that the test and the entire basis on which it is founded may well be bollocks.

But it amuses me to consider why.

The reason why it is bollocks and why I can score the same as Gandhi is because the test is founded on the same flawed political ideas that many of our so-called democracies are based on. Ideas that ultimately serve no other useful purpose than to divide people up into largish, roughly equally powerful groups that can be set at each other’s throats - for ever. It doesn’t matter if the differences between the groups are real or not, as long as the daft sods on both sides believe that they are real.

• Which is how you get people with fuck-all in the bank voting for capitalist political parties.

• Or people who claim that they hate fascism with every fibre of their being sticking up for planned economies and totalitarianism.

• Or when I fill in a poxy on-line psychometric questionnaire, just because my answers reveal a distaste for large, corporate monopoly (as opposed ordinary people making a bob or two) I am therefore categorised as 'Left Wing'

Lots of square little pegs happily shoving themselves into round little holes that somebody else thoughtfully made for them.

I suspect that the penny is dropping for a growing number of those square little pegs, as fewer and fewer of them are willing to endorse the farce that passes for democracy by voting for any of it. It doesn't mean that they don't care. It just means that they know voting won't make any difference.

Of course, the argument goes that they could start their own political movement.

Yeah, just like I could go into competition against Exxon.

My own version of the political compass test would include questions with a slightly different flavour than the one above. I’d include stuff like…

• Should the Many exist to serve the needs of the more intelligent, more capable Few?

• Do you believe that anyone really deserves to be worth more than, say, £1bn?

• Do you find telling people what to do more of a pleasure than a necessity?

• True or false - Coffee is for closers only?

• Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.

Et Cetera Et Cetera Et Cetera...

My test wouldn’t be so much fun to do though, as 98% of people would give the same answers and the results would cluster something like this...



...which is hardly the basis for a two, or even three, party political system

Hmmm, I wonder how many people would vote for the ORSF (Obscenely Rich Sociopathic Fucker) Party? I think that it's just as well for them that they go about protecting their interests in other ways.

Over to you Jarvis