Us liberty-minded folks are endlessly frustrated that our ideas get so little traction, that there isn’t a society we can point to as a much of a libertarian society, or even a perceptible movement toward liberty in our own societies. Sure, people will agree with us on some big-picture principles, but there’s just something about libertarianism that doesn’t “take”. Allow me to propose a fundamental flaw with libertarianism (and/or perhaps with libertarians).
Warning: massive generalizations follow; counterexamples can no doubt be cited. But I think the overall perspective still holds. Caveat: I’m not entirely happy with this post, but Swiss needs content, so here you go.
That flaw is this: Libertarianism as currently proposed is contrary to human nature, and in a kind of mirror-image way as communism. As the Soviets realized that communism can only work with the creation of New Soviet Man, libertarianism can only work with the creation of New Libertarian Man. The communists had a blind spot – that the pursuit of self-interest was an essential, inherent part of human nature. Libertarians also have a blind spot, and that blind spot is community, how (most) people crave it, and how community works.
Allow me to set up a couple of binary continua: economics – communities, and transactions – relationships. I posit that the sweet spot for society, and thus for people generally, is somewhere in the middle of these continua. Of course, individuals will find their particular sweet spots at various points on these continua. But a society, or a political philosophy, that overweights one end or the other is not going to succeed. One imagines that a hunter-gatherer society is going to overweight relationships and communities – after all, there’s not much of an economy, and thus not much to transact. While such a society can persist for quite some time, it is stagnant and will be overtaken and subsumed by one which moves the needle more toward economics and transactions.
Libertarians tend to have something in common with Marxists, and that is the belief (acknowledged or not) that economics is the bedrock of human society, from which all else flows. Our society, I believe, has gotten increasingly transactional, and as a result the civil society that requires a great deal of relationship-driven behavior has weakened. Libertarians, with their focus on markets and thus economics, tend to embrace the transactional view of human relations. We are prone to talking about the market as the cure-all for every societal ill. We default to economic relationships when talking about society. You know who else defaults to economics when talking about society? No, not him. Commies, that’s who.
The attraction of an economic/transactional society is that the marketplace is a very voluntary place. In a free(ish) market, no one can coerce you do a deal. It is this freedom that attracts and holds the attention of the liberty-minded. And, indeed, I don’t think anyone would deny that our current society is very economic/transactional (often called “materialist”), and I think has gotten more so over time. Libertarian moment, yay? Of course not. Because civil society has been squeezed brutally by transactionalism on the one side and, of course, the growth of the state on the other.
Communities come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from, perhaps, the family through various civil institutions of various structures and formality (the church, clubs, even neighborhoods) to the nation-state. Communities are defined and created by similarity in belief, behavior, and expectation – we all believe in this god, and worship him this way; we all enjoy cigars and darts; we all want to live in a neighborhood of well-maintained homes and courteous, respectful neighbors, that kind of thing. Now, one of the difficulties in discussing “community” is that it is a very slippery concept, hard to define with rigor, but I’m sailing right past that at least for now.
What this means is that communities are about setting and enforcing (one way or another, ranging from the raised eyebrow to the jackboot) expectations about certain behaviors. Libertarians tend to reflexively object to? flinch from? the whole enforcing, and sometimes setting, expectations thing. But you can’t have a completely open community, one with no expectations or requirements, open to all regardless of how they act (which in turn will reflect what they believe). In intellectual terms, a completely open/public community is a category error because it erases the ability to choose who you associate with – what results is not a community at all. Simply put, there is no such thing as a completely open, completely public, community. At a more human level, its always “my community”. Communities are defined as much by who is out as by who is in. There is always an “us” and a “them”, and your ability to make money from “them” in economic/transaction mode doesn’t make them a member of your community.
Communities are (almost?) by definition composed of like-minded people, people who broadly share a worldview, values, ways of behaving with each other. Libertarianism has very little to say about the value of the kind of community built on relationships with like-minded people (other than pro forma griping about restrictions on private clubs). While libertarians may oppose forcing all-male private clubs to accept women, many have no problem with forcing communities (ranging from the nation-state to a small town or even neighborhood) to accept (and here’s the third rail of this post) immigrants. People want to walk down the street, go into a store, whatever, comfortable knowing that the people they encounter are like them.
Sure, we scoff at the wokist motto “diversity is our strength”, but is our disregard for communities of like-minded people, people who grew up in a certain culture, really all that different? Mock the cosmotarians all you want (really, please do), but its hard to see how their radical multi-culturalism, and resulting disdain for “small-minded” bitter clingers, wasn’t intellectually consistent with a libertarianism too focused on openness without concern for cohesion.
So, lets look at immigration. The libertarian view is that immigration is good because it consists of a willing seller (of services) finds a willing buyer (of those services), and that the mere crossing of a national border (which is easily dismissed as a mere social construct) should not impede this market function. Economics, much? Naturally, we oppose giving welfare to immigrants, but this purely economic view of immigration obtains even in the absence of welfare. After all, that cheap labor means lower prices (and/or higher profits, and nothing wrong with that), so its all good, right? For those Americans who find themselves undercut on the labor market, well, “learn to code” is pretty much the only answer libertarianism offers. Economics uber alles, no?
Closely related to this is the idea that the people hiring immigrants are just exercising their freedom of association. And this is where the discontinuity with community really starts to become visible. Libertarianism is ordinarily quite comfortable with the idea that freedom of association necessarily means freedom to not associate. Don’t bake that cake if you don’t want to, right? (Note how even that refers to an economic transaction.) But when immigrants, from another culture, speaking another language, with a bundle of different values and behaviors, move in because somebody gave them jobs, the members of that community are now associating with them, whether they like it or not. What happened to the freedom not to associate? Sure, you may not mind having neighbors with . . . interesting . . . ideas about private property, the age of consent, quiet enjoyment of your home, and so forth, but what about people who have other desires about who they associate with day and day out?
Yes, freedom not to associate gets messy in a hurry. People are like that. And, yes, I know that allowing communities to exclude people opens the door to racism or tribalism, but, at a deep human level, there’s no such thing as a completely “public” community. To put it in, perhaps, ugly terms, tribalism is hardwired into people. And you disregard that, like disregarding any other part of human nature, at your peril.
Remember what I said about healthy societies finding a balance between economics/transactionalism and communities/relationships? It’s a balance, inherently somewhat unstable, that is needed. Can a society that overweights communities/relationships be stifling and stagnant? You bet. Can a society that overweights economics/transactions be fulfilling? Look around at the epidemic of dysfunction in our society, and see if you can honestly say “yes”. Repressing or even suppressing the desire for a community of like-minded people, and the kind of expectations and exclusion that is absolutely necessary for that, will not end well. Either that desire will express itself in brutal tribalism, or it will wither into anomie and depression.
I believe there is a deep human craving to live in a community of like-minded people, that the heavily economic/transactional worldview is corrosive to these kinds of communities, and that people sense this in libertarianism. Which is why libertarianism, in its current form, isn’t viable in the absence of New Libertarian Man. In many ways, the growth of the Total State is an expression, as well as a cause, of the lack of community in our society.
I’ve gone on long enough. I don’t have an answer to how to find a healthy balance, but I know it needs to be found and, sadly, at this point libertarianism isn’t going to provide it without a comprehensive, dare I say fundamental, transformation.
Well said.
And this is the community I found myself in? *sigh*
Seriously, this is a good article.
I had a shortage of options.
Agreed on both counts.
This.
True. People are envious, people are lazy, people want free shit at the expense of others.
I really think this is a fundamental character trait, how you handle envy. Some people want to take what someone else has. Others want to figure out how to get through their own effort what they covet. Some people don’t envy others at all.
I ask myself, if I had “fuck-you money,” what would I spend it on? A house, maybe a pool, a housekeeper, and a cook. Travel. A couple of new cars. Then what? Don’t know. Charity. Which charities? Randos who fall through the cracks of having too much for help, but not enough to get ahead.
And some people don’t want what you have, but they don’t want YOU to have it, either.
Great article!
A microcosm example of this is online communities. I’ve tried to build a few of these and INVARIABLY I end up kicking people out for egregious behavior. I have one community left of the many I’ve tried to found, and I have 5 people left of about 50. We 5 have been with each other for 20+ years.
Another example is my church (or the Catholic church), which is one worldwide conglomeration of communities of about 200-300 souls, only about 100-150 people each are actively involved. Wasn’t there some study that showed that a functioning community hit its limit at 150?
I think your point about libertarian philosophy being based on economy v relationships is (to me, new) spot on.
The 150 limit would be Dunbar’s number.
Hell, I’m proud that this community of freaks and geeks has managed to stick around as long as it did, even if there is attrition.
♥️
The concept of community is one of the things that I find valuable about professional sports. Sports helps to provide that with minimal risk and low cost (in most cases).
Costs me even less to Kvetch around here.
Who does Kvetch play for?
/Joke
I think he played for the Lakers. Power forward. 6′ 5″, 6′ 9″ with the afro.
A stadium filled with 50,000 people wearing the team colors and screaming for the home team to beat the away team is not a community. It’s is merely a collective that has a common interest for a brief moment in time. You cannot have a personal relationship with 50,000 other people.
The sense of belonging that you experience in the stadium is fake and it is transitory. But it is powerful, and demagogues have been using that fake sense of community to manipulate crowds for millennia.
I believe he’s talking about watching in the bar with people who have grown a small community out of drinking together first and bonding over sports.
One of the fundamental mistakes that humans mistake is to extend the community they have with 10 friends hanging in a bar to 10 random people with the same sport jerseys hanging in a bar to the tens of thousands of fan sitting in the stands. For that moment in time, they all have the same collective goal. But that ain’t a community.
Note that I am not trying to denigrate the process where 10 random guys in sports jerseys turn into a community by showing up week after week after week and expanding to hang out at other times.
Exactly. It provides something that’s low cost/low risk and allows something to bond over.
That makes no sense. Any definition of community is going to include a bunch of people you don’t have a personal relationship with.
I don’t think the part of human nature that dooms Libertarianism is a desire for community.
I think it’s envy and spite.
Yes. This. Also fashion. You People (TM) discount fashion too much. Many people have views that are foremost fashionable. And they bully lest they be bullied.
This . . . .
Communities come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from, perhaps, the family through various civil institutions of various structures and formality (the church, clubs, even neighborhoods) to the nation-state.
conflicts with this . . .
Communities are (almost?) by definition composed of like-minded people, people who broadly share a worldview, values, ways of behaving with each other.
A community can never exceed the monkey-sphere.
people will agree with us on some big-picture principles
It is more that they agree that libertarianism sometimes gets them what they want. They won’t apply the same principles when it opposes what they want.
We’re seeing that now with free speech. Some of the people on the right who were recently censored suddenly have no problem shutting down people who say things against Israel.
Do onto others before they do onto you.
Mock the cosmotarians all you want (really, please do), but its hard to see how their radical multi-culturalism, and resulting disdain for “small-minded” bitter clingers, wasn’t intellectually consistent with a libertarianism too focused on openness without concern for cohesion.
I don’t grasp what you’re saying here.
Maybe I’m too hung up on the incongruous claim of “diversity is strength” made by the cosmotarians when what they really want is diversity in utterly superficial traits, while enforcing rigid homogeneity of thought.
And some people don’t want what you have, but they don’t want YOU to have it, either.
The dog in the manger strikes again.
Some of the things spoken of in this article seem to be reasons that the folks in this forum broke away from TOS.
We were Too Local?
Yes. Spices not native to New York do not go on food.
That flaw is this: Libertarianism as currently proposed is contrary to human nature, and in a kind of mirror-image way as communism.
I’ve been saying that for years. That’s why I don’t consider it to be a goal, or end-game ideology. It’s just something that needs to constantly be pushed towards, wherever it can, because it will lead to better things than not doing it. That’s what makes it the mirror-image to communism, because similarly the more you push towards communism/socialism, the worse things will get.
I’d say you are using a very broad definition of ‘associate’, I don’t associate with my neighbors or 90% of the people I am around everyday. I don’t consider it associating just because people shop in the same stores or eat at the same restaurants.
You could associate with me by sending me a bottle of fine American bourbon or rye. Just sayin’
Bourbon is in my future this evening…
nonsense you have work tomorrow
That’s true. I too hardly ever talk to any of my neighbors. There are “loners” in every town. It may be on that level of “community” they know the guy well enough to leave him alone rather than “OMG, Did you see that creepy guy?”
“Libertarianism as currently proposed is contrary to human nature,”- the idealistic version obviously, this is why I am conflicted about calling myself a libertarian, but there is no better term.
“that blind spot is community, how (most) people crave it, and how community works” – plenty of community without government though. the problem is more tribalism than community
Libertarians tend to have something in common with Marxists, and that is the belief (acknowledged or not) that economics is the bedrock of human society, from which all else flows – economics is pretty damn important. But economist libertarians have no idea how to phrase their arguments. When I said this on this very site a while ago most disagreed.
“We are prone to talking about the market as the cure-all for every societal ill” – I am not. Not even close.
“Libertarians tend to reflexively object to? flinch from? the whole enforcing, and sometimes setting, expectations thing” – not really. Just don’t have it done by the cops. And be very careful about what you want to enforce
“many have no problem with forcing communities (ranging from the nation-state to a small town or even neighborhood) to accept (and here’s the third rail of this post) immigrants.” – this open borders libertarianism is something I myself always opposed.
Maybe I am just not a libertarian in the US sense. But I do not really find my views here.
Who is proposing libertarianism as currently proposed is my question?
Years back someone asked me something along the lines of what publication should I read to know your views… I told him there is no answer to that because I do not take standard views on everything.
Winston’s Mom’s kid. Duh.
If you compile a variety of sources then you form your own opinion. If you rely on a single source your opinion is decided for you.
I’m an Urthonatarian and more people need to get on board.
Get on board? Is this one of those spaceship cults? Are we flying to Urthonia?
Communion pickles?
Aside from marriage with someone living on the other side, why else would one cross the line?
“Because their dick was stuck in the chicken.”
That’s fair.
Lots to think about with this one. That is the sign of a good article.
I can see why a purely transactional relationship with society would be unpopular with the majority of people. There is a need for people with similar interests, priorities, and desires to seek each other out and choose to associate with these people (socially and as part of a transaction). This type of relationship is still important in many aspects of transactions. They don’t have to be the kind of close relationships (come to my house for dinner), but as simple as I know a guy who did work for me and it was good at a fair price. Most would rather work with someone that they knew a little about then someone they find in an internet search or the phone book. This is why Amazon and its ratings were so powerful. These types of relationships rely on some level of trust. Do I trust the person who recommended this vendor, plumber, etc. or do I trust this and all of the other reviewers for this product?
There is also a need in most to feel like they belong and are a part of something bigger than themselves. There are many ways these types of relationships used to work and many ways that they have changed and continue to evolve today vs 10, 20, 40, 80, 100 years ago. Communities based in a small town share similar backgrounds, churches, and organizations, because they have/had no option. Online communities are different as one has many options and they choose to associate with this group without the container of location to restrict your options.
libertarianism isn’t against any of the above in fact it should support it. You can be a believer in liberty an still belong to a group that doesn’t. It becomes difficult at times and the urge to push the group towards your views are strong on both sides.
Where it becomes problematic is when there is not a exposure to groups with other opinions or thoughts. So the belief transitions from; “this is how we do it” into “this is how everyone should do it”. Government is very good at exploiting and promoting this type of tribalism.
“libertarianism isn’t against any of the above in fact it should support it.:
Yes, I wonder if R.C. Dean’s proposition is “libertarianism” or “libertarianism poorly explained” (insert Bastiat quote here. It seems to me in part that libertarians challenge state power because it seems to be so pervasive and increasing. Perhaps we need to do a better job of explaining we are against coerced community – whether that comes from the state or corporate power or whatever.
While I don’t think the internet is going to solve all our problems, we can use it as an example: “when you’re looking for a good, well-run, restaurant, are you more interested in the Health Department certificate on the wall, or the overall opinions at Yelp?”
Good point Raven, any kind of forced choice is a problem for me. It can come from industry, however it will not last long without government support and regulations.
One thing that I heard while failing to pass voir dire was the judge commenting on “the only person” who had ever passed through his court who wouldn’t take the oath to tell the truth and uphold the law. Per the judge, they were “some kind of anarchist, and they don’t like to follow rules”.
I kept my mouth shut.
Only one? I couldn’t take that oath under penalty of perjury because I recognize my perception of some event may not be what the actual facts are.
Alright, my eye is killing me, but let me eke out a comment.
First, this is the kind of discussion I was hoping to promote.
Second, I don’t think any movement can succeed just by being against something. People need something to be for. And I don’t think “free to do more deals” is enough. It also gets into culture, when you start talking about what kind of society/community do you want to live in? Multi-culti pablum about diversity doesn’t cut it – no healthy society can accommodate everyone, from the Amish to Pakistani child grooming gangs. Community also foregrounds questions of culture in a way that economics does not.
I do think culture is more than background, skin color, food and ethnic makeup. That may be what is superficially called “culture”. I believe that the US culture “ideally” was at one time being accepting of and allowing success to everyone; regardless of class, religion, and country of origin. This is not what happened or happens in a lot of very well known locations, time periods, and individual cases. But Just like climate is not weather, culture is not a snapshot in place and time. it is a long term trend averaged across a large sample of results.
This is fantastic. Thank you, RC Dean! I am in Mexico at the moment, bartering with people selling handmade junk. And, as per the rules of the game, getting fleeced. So be it. Capitalism is very important, no matter what path forward the New Libertarian Man takes.
Rockwell left out the feds about to pounce on this insurrectionist who had the audacity to speak out against our rulers.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote about a clear distinction between “free trade” and “free immigration” in The God That Failed: “while someone can migrate from one place to another without anyone else wanting him to do so, goods and services cannot be shipped from place to place unless both sender and receiver agree.” Also, “free in conjunction with immigration does not mean immigration by invitation of individual households and firms, but unwanted invasion or forced integration.”