Complex Numbers

The Derivative of Opinion

Write about an opinion you’ve had that has changed over the years.

There's been a few years, so there are quite a few opinions that fit the bill here.

One thing I've always tried to avoid in this blog is political controversy. It's hard to avoid completely, though, since everyone seems to have an opinion about something - and I'm no exception. What I don't want to do is get into arguments about issues like climate change, abortion, the death penalty, or military spending. We here at Writing.com tend to be more civil about these things than elsewhere on the internet; still, some of my friends here are on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me, and I don't want to lose friends over something over which we, individually, have little control.

However, my opinions, like I think most peoples', are either a) trivial or b) political. I mean, I could talk about how anchovies on pizza are an abomination against everything that is right and true in this land, and you could argue otherwise, but in the end it comes down to a matter of personal preference - and if we ordered a pizza together, we could settle the dispute amicably by getting anchovies on one half. So if I made this post about how I used to actually like anchovies on pizza, that would make it trivial.

I didn't, of course. Anchovies are, always have been, and always will be, an abomination.

Aversion to political discussion aside, I'm sure regular readers have figured out where I stand on most things. Some of you, like I said, feel differently. That's okay; if people didn't feel differently about things, there wouldn't be a reason to avoid the topics, would there?

My father always used to tell me that people shift to the conservative end of the spectrum as they age. I suppose, in a way, he's right, but it's not necessarily a political conservativism. You get to some age, and I think you just start liking things to be the way they are, or remember the "old days" with some fondness and want to go back there.

I'm not at that age, yet.

I used to fancy myself a libertarian. Mostly, this was the influence of Robert A. Heinlein, an author whose works I devoured when I was younger. The ideas of ownership and self-determination - well, those were appealing to my younger self. The individual, according to this philosophy, is at his or her best when left as unfettered by regulation as possible. One should always, the philosophy goes, do and think for oneself.

Then I read Ayn Rand and, thinking for myself, decided that libertarianism was bullshit.

Still, echoes remain. I maintain a belief in individual freedom of thought and conscience. When I hear about suppression of, say, religious belief, I get angry or outraged. There are, of course, trade-offs, as there are for everything - if your religion requires human sacrifice, for example, that interferes with others' rights. But choosing to worship your conception of God or Spirit or Whatever, harming no one in the process - that right should be sacrosanct. So to speak.

Or, like me, not worshipping.

But one of the core tenets of libertarianism is that of ownership. If you have ownership of a thing, that includes the right to, for example, destroy it. But, I eventually realized, there's a problem with this: if I put a toxic waste dump on my land, the effluent could seep into the water table and deprive others of a resource needed for life. Again, trade-offs are necessary. Exactly where and how we draw the lines on the trade-offs, well, that's what the arguments that I prefer to avoid are all about.

For instance, if you live in certain watersheds in the US (as a civil engineer, I see the world in terms of watersheds), it is illegal to capture rain in a barrel. That rain, left uncaptured, supplies rivers and aquifers to which other individuals have a claim. Now, we can argue all day about whether this is "right" or not, but that's not the point; the point is that we, collectively, have instituted rules about runoff because it's a necessary resource. Without those and similar rules, which are anathema to libertarians, things have a tendency to go very, very wrong. (They go wrong sometimes anyway, but that's not an excuse to throw out the entire concept of "rules.")

I've found that no one wants government interference, unless it suits their own ideas about what the government should interfere in. People who want "small government" often demand bans on alcohol or weed, for example.

And that's about as political as I want to get, and I wouldn't have gone even that far if it weren't for today's prompt.

Tl;dr: I used to be a libertarian, and then I grew up.

(To explain the title of this entry: in calculus, taking the derivative of a function is a way to determine its rate of change at any or all points.)