I’ve come to some revelations as of late which have radically
altered my worldview. It has been as upsetting as it has been exciting.
For several years I have
expressed my
frustrations against certain
elements of the libertarian movement which might most recognizably be categorized as
leftist. I am far from the first to see their presence as a
disaster and even
dangerous. This is a very old problem, and it gets worse by the day. I have recently become convinced (and I welcome your efforts to
convince me otherwise) that this is a natural and inescapable biological phenomenon, which dooms our efforts in man’s present evolutionary state.
Why Libertarians Are Hopeless
Before explaining why I believe this to be the case, I should note
that I speak here of libertarians, not of libertarianism. The philosophy
and economics brought to us by great minds like Murray Rothbard and
Hans Hermann Hoppe is as sound as it ever was. If people began behaving
rationally, tomorrow we would live in a world where the word libertarian
was synonymous with the word human. In this philosophical sense, I am
still very much a libertarian. This is how the world ought to work. In a
more strategic sense, I cannot make the same claim. I am coming to
grips with the reality that this is not in fact how the world does work,
and that this is likely to remain the case until long after everyone
alive at the time of this writing is dead.
Libertarians, to our credit, have worked very hard to spread
our ideas by way of reasoned logical arguments. Frantically banging away
on keyboards, in forums, blog posts, and social media, we have rushed
to debunk the fallacies of State propagandists and economic illiterates
the world over. The entire time, we are met with jibberish rebuttals,
silence, and threats of force instead of reasoned responses, and the
entire time we scratch our heads in bewilderment as to why our fellow
human beings, and even our purported fellow libertarians, appear
impervious to reason.
We have worked to better educate ourselves and refine our arguments,
convinced that in accordance with our philosophy of personal
responsibility, this must be a failing on our part. Rather than blame
others for their irrationality, we blame our lack of capacity for
convincing others, and work to better ourselves. Some of us spend many
years attempting to correct our own failings, and as we do, things get
continually worse in perpetuity.
In so doing, we have largely overlooked the crux of the issue. We
have attempted to understand the realities of the universe and make
better libertarian arguments, without trying to understand the flaw in
our fellow man which prevents him from understanding reason. It is that
inquiry which has led me to my startling conclusion, that libertarians
are hopeless.
If libertarians are interested in reason, logic, and evidence, then
they should start processing the evidence that reason and logic have
nearly zero relation to modern social and political discourse. When one
refuses to process a reasoned argument, giving them more reason is a
senseless exercise in futility. Hence the great frustration of so many
libertarians who might study themselves into the grave, never
understanding why they have not saved mankind from his own
irrationality.
But the libertarian too, exercises a great deal of irrationality in
doing so. It is as if he were trying to teach a dog to speak Japanese,
and then condemning himself for a lack of teaching skills, when the
creature simply lacked the biological capacity to learn such a skill.
The startling reality of the human social condition, is that freedom,
reason, and logic have nothing to do with our social and political
affairs. The evidence, is that these affairs are directed by power.
Libertarians are understandably uncomfortable with exercises of power
which involve the initiation of force. They may even rightly claim a
moral high ground by rejecting such power as having any moral
legitimacy. But when power comes to be exercised against the
libertarian, his argumentation ethics will do nothing to stop it. Only
by wielding power of his own, can he hope to stop it.
This involves the use of violence. While libertarianism would embrace
the use of violence in self defense, libertarians have rejected it in
all but the most limited of circumstances. Meanwhile his rivals have
accepted use of initiatory violence on a scale so vast it is scarcely
discernible who is actually wielding force. We would commonly think of
it as quite unjust to use interpersonal violence against our political
enemies, even as those enemies are waving a metaphorical gun around in
their attempts to wield the violent force of the State against us. The
libertarian attempts to reason with people who threaten him with
violence, he loses nearly 100% of the time, and then acts confused as to
why. The answer is obvious, power.
The motivations for the exercise of that power, and the irrational
nature of its use, well, that is a whole other level of frightening.
Old Dogs, New Tricks
If you haven’t heard it, you owe it to yourself to listen to
episode 429 of the Tom Woods show. In that episode, Tom interviews Jonathan Haidt, author of “
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided over Politics and Religion“.
A revelation made in the course of that discussion was a groundbreaking
discovery for me. The analogy made is that of “the elephant and the
rider” in which one’s reasoned logical thought process is a human being,
riding an elephant which consists of more primitive survival instincts
and emotions. To make a long story short, that rider can desire the
elephant to go straight all he wants, but if the elephant decides to
turn right or left, the human rider has little practical say in the
matter. The elephant is stronger than the human rider. The mind is
divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve
the elephant, not vice versa. When human beings evolved the capacity
for language and reasoning at some point in the last million years, the
brain did not rewire itself to hand over the reins to a new and
inexperienced charioteer. Rather, the rider (language-based
reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the elephant.
This is why people behave like animals. Because that’s exactly what
they are. They are animals who happen to have various levels of language
and reasoning skills evolved within them, but the animal comes
first. We are evolved as systems on top of systems. One analogy to this
is that
you have three brains.
There’s your reptile brain. This handles just the basics: hunger,
temperature control, fight-or-flight fear responses, defending
territory, keeping safe — that kind of thing. We’re not getting far
without basic biological functions of breathing, temperature regulation,
food, water, and avoidance of predators and other perils. As much as we
might like to think of ourselves as quite rational, this survival
center will win nearly 100% of the time if made to compete with other
brain processes. This is not something to complain about either, because
absent our survival instincts, we can’t have this conversation because
we’re all dead.
As we evolve further into social animals with group centric or “pack”
instincts, we develop what some would describe as the dog brain. The
limbic system, or emotional center serves a very important part of our
lives, and comes well before our higher reasoning ever comes into play.
We develop emotional attachments to our families, friends, and other
group members. We act in defense of one another. We share with one
another. We compete with other groups, as a group, and we are infinitely
more competitive as a result.
As we evolve even further into thinking creatures, we develop what
some would describe as our human brain, or the cortex. With this we can
do things that horses and cows cannot, like complex social interactions
and advance planning (such as planning an attack on a neighboring
troop). In humans the cortex has grown to a huge size, somehow in
association with our development of language.
With each evolution, the pre-existing systems are not rewired or
redesigned. They are systems on top of systems. The survival center, or
reptilian brain comes first. The emotional center, or dog brain comes
second. And the reasoning center, or human brain comes last. The
emotional center serves the survival instinct, and the reasoning center
serves the first two. This makes perfect sense, because you can’t serve
your group if you don’t survive yourself, and language is almost useless
if you have nobody to talk to.
When one attempts to reason, not taking all these things into
account, he may well come up with flawlessly logical arguments, but
these have all the effect of throwing rocks at a tank when he attempts
to communicate them to others. The emotional and survival centers of the
brain are more powerful than the reasoning center, and attempts to
bypass this are largely futile.
As an example of the “systems on top of systems” concept. Most
animals do not have independent finger movement. Human beings do, but
this is a latter developed system. When you attempt to move your fingers
independently, your brain is actually telling your entire hand to move,
but a more advanced portion of the brain is telling the seemingly
uninstructed fingers to remain still, and there is a great deal of
unconscious muscle coordination at work. The part of your brain that
moves all fingers as one is still there, and is actually still dominant
as can be demonstrated by certain hand exercises, but your ability to
flip someone off is a later development facilitated by a higher system.
Competing Human Survival Strategies
Something that has really rocked my understanding of politics and
social interactions is a concept known as r/K selection theory. While
far from flawless and in some degree of contention, it is at worst a
great analogy, and at best a rock solid explanation of modern political
discourse.
For a brief overview of the concept,
Stefan Molyneux has a playlist discussing the phenomenon on YouTube. For a more in depth look at the subject, check out “
The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics” by Anonymous Conservative.
To briefly summarize for the uninitiated, man is the undisputed
ruling species of this planet because of his ability to adapt to
changing circumstances. Varied conditions involving climate, resource
scarcity, disease, predators, and even intraspecies warfare have done
little to slow our advancement. Today we live in a world where, for all
intents and purposes, we are our only enemy. Man fears no predator, save
for other men.
In nature, there are two primary reproductive strategies, here
represented by the mathematical symbols of r and K. The r strategy
favors rapid reproduction, early sexualization, low investment
parenting, to create as many offspring as possible in response to high
resource availability, and random predation. The K strategy favors less
reproduction, later sexualization, and high investment parenting, to
create offspring more capable of adapting to changing conditions of
resource scarcity, to prey and to fight off other predators.
An example of r-strategists would be rabbits. Rabbits in a field of
grass will almost never run short of resources. Short of some
catastrophic change in conditions, rabbits are not prone to starvation.
Their primary survival concern is owls and other predators which may
swoop down and pick them off one by one in a manner which is to them,
quite random. They cannot fight their predators, and so concerning
themselves with doing so is quite senseless. They cannot control the
availability of resources, and so concerning themselves with resource
limitations is quite senseless. It provides no evolutionary advantage.
The only thing for the rabbit to concern himself with is creating more
offspring as to pass on his DNA, and running from danger whenever he
does recognize it. They are non-monogamous, invest little into the
offspring they produce, have little to no in-group preference, and
perceive no intraspecies threat.
An example of K-strategists would be wolves. Wolves do not feed on
endless fields of grass, they feed on animals which do. To do this, they
must hunt, and starvation is a very real threat as a result. They need
not only be faster and stronger than their prey, but also faster and
stronger than their competitor wolves. As such, they breed more
selectively, produce fewer offspring, and invest a great deal into
making sure those offspring are fit for survival. Since they have to
compete for resources with other wolves, they perceive intraspecies
threats and will fight other wolves for territory and resources. To
improve their competitive advantage, they do so as a group (pack) and
have a high ingroup preference, imposing social norms to maintain group
cohesion.
The analogy made by Anonymous Conservative is that leftists evolved
from an r-strategy, and rightists from the K-strategy. It is in some
ways a spectrum of behaviors, in which many will find themselves
adapting some traits from one and some traits from another, but if one
were to zoom out far enough, two distinct groups emerge.
Liberals, like rabbits, have little concern for the concept of
private property. What libertarians and conservatives view as an out of
control welfare state is in fact quite moderate to them. Even socialism
or communism don’t fully represent the liberal worldview. On the
extreme, we’ll see concepts like the “Venus Project” and other “post
scarcity” movements. This is an attempt to create the rabbit like
existence they are bred for, a field of endless clover upon which to
feed. They are prone to promiscuity, and favor early childhood sexual
education, because to their simple biological drives, sex is the whole
entire point. They are irrationally averse to warfare and other forms of
competition, because there is little point in fighting over a
particular piece of dirt when there is endless grass upon which to feed.
Trying to claim territory or even a mate for oneself is bizarre to the
leftist, and so violence in defense thereof is nothing short of mental
illness.
Rightists, like wolves, will fight, kill, and die to defend property
because scarcity is in the genes. Failure to defend property is a death
sentence, and so from a Darwinian perspective one is no better off
letting his property be taken than he is dying in defense of the
property. That competitive instinct means offspring have to be fit for
competition, and leaving bastard children all over the place with no
male role model is as much to his Darwinian advantage as is
masturbation. He has to compete, and can compete more effectively as a
group, so social norms are imposed on the group for the betterment of
group cohesion, and among those social norms will be sexual ones.
Delaying sexualization of offspring so that they choose mates in a time
of prime fitness, maintaining monogamous relationships to limit ingroup
conflict and raise fitter offspring, honoring the outcomes of ingroup
competitions, and the like are second nature to the K-selected wolf-like
rightist.
It should come as no surprise that wolves and rabbits living in the
same habitat will come into a great deal of conflict. When human beings
take on traits and survival instincts which resembles such creatures, we
should be no more surprised that these groups of human beings also come
into conflict. Were it not for our aversion to cannibalism, the
rightist would quickly make a meal of the leftist, but a market economy
has a similar if seemingly less gruesome effect.
The competitive rightist quickly finds himself atop the food chain in
a competitive market economy. He is the entrepreneur, the leader, the
captain of industry. He calculates his actions, delays gratification,
and impacts his environment in ways the leftist can scarcely begin to
comprehend. The leftist, as evidenced by his perpetual demands for a
higher minimum wage, is reduced to begging for scraps in exchange for
favors. The rightist profits from the leftist’s incapacity to compete
with him, as the leftist is compelled to servitude.
Introduce democracy, and things get interesting. The leftist is
geared toward greater numbers, and is averse to any other type of
competition. A contest of majority vote is about the only contest he can
win against his conservative competitor. So while the rightist may have
established governments for the purpose of facilitating fair
competition and ingroup defense, democracy has subverted that intention
in favor of the leftist. By his superior numbers, the leftist lives at
the expense of the rightist as would a parasite. As a result, we live in
a world where the rabbits rule and feed upon the wolves, and the
insanity of that unnatural order is being displayed by increasingly
catastrophic outcomes.
The wolves can, and may, upend that system at any time through force.
The superior numbers of the rabbits mean little as the wolves’ teeth
shred the flesh and crush the bones of rodents. The wolves quite happily
pay taxes to the State while under the impression they are simply
benefiting their group, but as they become aware they are being preyed
upon by an outgroup force, they will defend themselves against the
threat, much to the detriment of the rodent class.
It is a biological phenomenon of evolutionary psychology, not some
top down scam imposed on us by governments as so many libertarian seem
to think.
The Libertarian Flaw
While this interpretation is flawed from an informed libertarian
perspective, a common theme amongst self described libertarians is that
the right wants to control our social behaviors, and the left wants to
control our economic behaviors. Understandably this seems like utter
nonsense to libertarians, who would seek to be free of either set of
controls. This is flawed for a number of reasons.
Firstly, to draw a separation between social and economic behaviors
is farcical. How we choose to interact with one another, including how
we breed, are economic behaviors. Levels of ingroup preferences, how
many offspring one produces, how those offspring are raised, and other
factors people like to think of as quite separate from stock markets and
interest rates, are in fact quite closely tied together. A preference
to “buy American” as opposed to saving a few bucks by importing
something from China for example, has a profound impact on all manner of
economic indicators. A preference for the instant gratification of drug
use, over the delayed gratification of saving, has obvious economic
impacts. The notion that how many human beings a group produces, or how
those individuals are raised to behave, could possibly be without impact
on the economy, is simply too stupid for the thinking man to take
seriously.
Additionally, while leftists would like to pretend they are the less
judgemental political order, we can see in ever increasing fashion that
this is not the case. Their attempts to thought police the populace,
from insane cries of racism and misogyny and homophobia, to demands that
standards be lowered and subsidies increased for the sake of greater
inclusion, express a profound imposition of social norms on the members
of the society. Clearly, the leftist rhetoric of free speech, academic
freedom, and other civil libertarian views was merely an appeal to the
emotions of the previously right leaning social order, so that they
might gain traction for their own value system in the society.
Both groups are simply trying to advance their particular brand of
social norms as to make their particular breeding strategies dominant.
They do so because this is to their Darwinian advantage, be they
conscious of it or not.
Social behaviors are economic, and economic behaviors are social. So
this commonly misinterpreted libertarian view of the left/right paradigm
is profoundly flawed. Without viewing it through a biological lense,
one cannot understand the nature of modern political discourse. The
libertarian can reason until he is blue in the face, but the wolves and
rabbits care not. The libertarian thinks himself quite above all of
this, and in a sense he might be. Unfortunately for him, the social
nature of man prohibits his accomplishment of his political goals.
Suppose a libertarian finds a particularly open minded rightist, and
convinces him that market competition is best served by the abolition of
State intervention in the economy. Suppose he finds a leftist, and
convinces her that only by the abolition of the State can her sexual
liberation finally come to fruition. What do each of them do come
election time, when the rest of the wolves and rabbits head off to the
polls to elect rulers to impose each of their wills upon the other?
As Lysander Spooner put it;
In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so
situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does
not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than
these two. In self-defense, he attempts the former. His case is
analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he
must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own
life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be
inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests
with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for a bullet – because, as
his only chance of self- preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be
inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered;
that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake
against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers.
On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which
he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of
self-defense offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one
that was left to him.
The wolves and the rabbits will compete for control of the State
apparatus no matter what philosophical enlightenment the libertarian
minority manages to obtain. Whatever rabbits and wolves he recruits to
his side will be few in number since their biological drivers outweigh
their logical thought processes, and even their logical thought
processes see the problem of allowing the other group to gain control of
the State apparatus. Each seek to advance the interests of their
species at the expense of the other, and they will be in eternal
competition until one of two things happen.
1. The other side is exterminated.
2. The State apparatus is no longer an option.
One of these outcomes is more likely than the other, much to the dismay of the libertarian.
Why Libertarians Are Corrupted By The Left
I should again explain, I am discussing libertarians, not
libertarianism. The following critique would rightly be met with
complaints by well read Rothbardians as containing a great many
falsehoods. I have made these complaints repeatedly myself.
In their efforts to grow their numbers, and in the face of perpetual
frustrations in getting wolves and rabbits to shrug off their
evolutionary psychology, libertarian groups have resorted to recruiting
non-libertarians into their ranks. This presumably was perceived as a
competitive advantage in a political system which favors numbers over
reasoned arguments or factual correctness.
In the course of so doing, it is my perception that leftists are
particularly more prone to swing toward libertarian social circles than
rightists, due primarily to a lack of ingroup preference. It is not that
they become libertarians or suddenly shrug off their rodent like
evolutionary psychology. They are simply more prone to novelty seeking
,and lack any group loyalty or attachment to any particular idea. They
are still rodents, but they realize they can have a higher social status
in this smaller group than in their larger openly left wing group. A
left libertarian blogger may become the envy of his left libertarian
peers, but would accomplish absolutely nothing when competing against
the vast expanse of mainstream liberal media.
The rightist on the other hand is less prone to novelty seeking, has a
higher ingroup preference, and is more averse to radical changes in the
existing social and economic order. Additionally, he is aware that his
inferior numbers make his absence in a democratic contest far more
consequential than that of the leftist. So he is far more averse to
radically altering his thinking, his social circles, or his political
activity to favor a more libertarian order.
Thus, while libertarianism as a well thought out philosophy would be
more appealing to the rightist than the leftist, the leftist gains undue
influence in the libertarian social and political scene. That leftist
influence dilutes the body of thought as left tainted media is produced
and distracts from the writings of the Rothbards and Hoppes of the
world. They focus on equality and diversity, which are not libertarian
goals in the slightest. They will favor recruiting women and non-whites
into libertarian scenes, even as these demographics tend to work against
libertarian goals. More leftists are attracted to the left tainted
libertarian media, and so more leftists are introduced into the social
and political circles and thus the cycle perpetuates itself to a point
where economics are barely even part of the discussion, and instead it
descends into senseless race baiting, feminism, and dare I incur the ire
of my regular readers by saying it,
irrational hatred of military and law enforcement.
Why Leftist Influence Makes Libertarian Failure Certain
I mentioned earlier that rabbits and wolves would compete for control
of the State apparatus until either one side was exterminated, or the
State apparatus was made no longer available. Libertarians would clearly
be averse to half the population meeting a violent demise, and far
prefer the State apparatus be made unavailable. Unfortunately left wing
influences on libertarians make the former inevitable, and the latter
impossible.
While leftists are quite fond of State violence and have even been
known to violently attack political opponents during otherwise peaceful
demonstrations, they are, at least rhetorically, pacifists at heart.
Rabbits do not fight wolves, they scurry into holes in the ground
fearing for their survival as their weak little hearts beat rapidly.
Simply put, the only way to bring about the abolition of the State apparatus is a
violent overthrow of said apparatus, followed in short order by a
culture of resistance
preventing the establishment of such an institution in the future. The
passive nature of the rodent class which occupies the libertarian space
at present
forbids such violence,
and certainly lacks both the mental and physical capacity to take on
the wolf in so much as a single non-democratic contest, much less a
violent and protracted one.
A left infiltrated libertarian movement will be incapable of battling
a violent State, because its members will be pacifistic and feminine.
Were its numbers to grow so miraculously as to facilitate this
impossible phenomenon, the rodent class would simply occupy the seats of
power in a French Revolution style egalitarian disaster.
Enter The Neoreactionaries
The wolves who found libertarianism attractive, met with the
nonsensical leftist dogma of the rodents, and abandoned libertarian
strategies in view of this inevitable failure. Other wolves simply
avoided it from the gate. Between them both, they formed another unit
which became increasingly wolflike with time.
Labeled by some as misogynists, racists, homophobes, and right wing
extremists, they are in reality the inevitable outcome of the path
society has taken. The awakening, or as some have called it “dark
enlightenment” that democracy will no longer serve the interests of the
wolf, and that the wolf is more fit to rule, vote counts be damned.
They are the embodiment of a quote commonly misattributed to Alexander Tytler;
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote
itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority
always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the
result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy
ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.
The time for a dictator and monarch is upon us, and however much this
may displease the libertarian matters not. His goals were sabotaged by
his acceptance of the rodent, and the time of the wolf has arrived. I
fear the best we can hope for is that our ruler be benevolent, and that
under his reign a better humanity emerges.
But with history as my guide, I won’t be holding my breath for such an outcome.
------------------------
I'm pretty sure this r-K model is dead wrong in comparing leftards to rabbits and
Conservatives to wolves, simply because the herd or pack and "always
attack first!" instinct is strong in leftists, and mostly absent in
Conservatives; in fact, it's almost the exact opposite: feral liberals
are pack-hunting predators.
They are group-rights-make-right
worshipping gangsters who always extort money from others by demanding
equality of unearned outcome over true equality of opportunity.
"Liberal"
criminals pretty-much automatically create "eternal crises" out of
temporary problems with easy, permanent solutions, in order to deflect
attention away from their own fear of failure. It's always far easier to
refuse to work while blaming someone else, than it is to try and risk
failing.
Obviously, leftists are masochists: always trying to
eliminate their fears by causing the pains they fear! That way, they
pretend to “control the inevitable” disasters! And, since their motto is
"There's No Money In solutions!" they tend to fail upwards all the time
in their criminal negligence, as they endlessly spin simple, temporary
problems with easy, permanent solutions into eternal crises with only
temporary, band-aid "therapies" available - i.e: "Please Give Generously
- AGAIN!"
Contrast that with Conservatives, who are only trying to "conserve" the Enlightenment values of individual freedom of thought.
Here's
another obvious difference between the left and right: remember the old
adage about "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but teach
him how to fish, and you've fed him for a lifetime!"?
Rightists
are all for individual self-reliant responsibility, and so want to teach
people how to fish (fend) for them selves, while leftists want their
victims to become dependent on them, as slaves are to a master; i.e:
"Vote for us again, or you won't get tomorrow's fish - CAPISCE!?"
;-)
