I loathe the man, but Reason makes the case for him as an anti-authoritarian, neither left nor right:
In July of 1957, an unknown writer named William Burroughs visited a friend in Copenhagen. After three weeks in the area, including a brief excursion to Sweden, he wrote to the poet Allen Ginsberg that “Scandinavia exceeds my most ghastly imaginations.” In Naked Lunch, the novel Burroughs was writing at the time, Scandinavia became a model for a place called Freeland. “Freeland was a welfare state,” the book explained. “If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.” (…)
A Johnson “just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people’s business,” Burroughs wrote in his 1985 book The Adding Machine. “Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: ‘Some people are shits, darling.'”
