this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Covid proved to me any libertarian hope/dream I had wouldn't actually work because people would never get together to do the right thing as a group.
People getting together for the common good is just a government, the exact thing libertarians hate.
No not necessarily since government = force. The hope of libertarians is that they would do it out of a mutual interest in protecting others. The whole do what you want as long as it doesn't impact me. That argument was proven fucked by the actions of the pandemic. That's what I'm talking about.
Worse, there have been two "libertarian cities" over the past few years that suffered an awful fate. First thousands of people moved to a town in NH and then voted themselves into all city positions. They shut off the government, had everything collapse, and returned to where they came from a few years later when it turned out that fire fighters are nice and bears roaming the town (cuz one person's hobby was to feed them donuts and they are libertarian so they can do that dontchano). In AZ, they built a community without any infrastructure specifically to avoid taxes and government control--they were buying water from another community until that community said they needed the water for themselves, leaving them with nothing.
What cities were those? Would love to read more about it
AZ was Rio Verde Foothills.
Most likely it was South Park, Gotham or Duckburg.
Part of the problem is that from a social history standpoint, libertarianism typically has attracted people looking for an ideology to justify their selfishness.
The ideology that tends to attract people who value social organization while minimizing a forceful overarching government has been anarchism.
Well it makes sense. Most people think they are lucky, and to one extent they are, the unlucky ones are all dead so survivor bias. Once they are aware of a problem they reason out they will be the lucky one. Additionally, the interests of an individual has little to do with the interests of the crowd. We really should start learning this concept and stop with the invisible hand nonsense. It could make perfect sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil. It can make sense for a company to not bother with environmental cleanup. It can make sense for a restaurant owner to not want a lockdown.
The whole appeal to rational self-interest depends on a false premise. Biology has furnished an example. For the point of view of cancer it makes perfect sense to keep on multipling. The time horizon of each cancer cell is pretty short maybe a few months. If it doesn't spends those months multipling as fast as it can other will.
I mean, potentially. We also hate cancer cells because cancer cells kill people, you know, like, we are capable of higher reasoning. The reasoning that co-operating with somebody else is oftentimes of more benefit to us than not doing so. The reasoning that, you know, we fucking die, grappling with our own mortality, and making plans for after we're dead, based on reasoned principles that we can come to as an idea for what might be "good" for people, generally. We're capable of long term planning and decision making, all in our own self-interest. It doesn't make sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil precisely because of the effects climate change in the long term, likewise with environmental cleanup, or keeping your restaurant open. It is not effective for society to do these things in the small or in the broad.
The people in the energy sector aren't burning oil because they're just assholes. There's a little bit of that, of like "fuck these guys because I just kind of hate them now", but it's mostly just because they're not convinced that climate change is real. They're convinced that some short term concern or other concern about "national security" trumps the threat of climate change. They're convinced that they're the best locus for power, in the field of energy (or maybe even generally for the egomaniacal), even if they're actively destroying the environment by holding onto their power. It's not because they're incapable of long-term reasoning, it's because their long-term reasoning is flawed and neglected.
I dunno, it works out to basically be the same as though they only had access to short term dogshit reasoning, in the actual environmental effects they have on the people around them, but I find it pertinent to know that they had access to long-term reasoning skills, and those skills were just co-opted, warped, and ignored. The long term reasoning was applied to rationalize their short term goal, their ideal shaped their reasoning, rather than the other way around. Not really to say that you can't just start out from a different position and come to a different end point, you know, just to say that. The memes are more complicated, even in their malignancies.
No, it's partially because some know climate change is real but they think they will be rich enough to weather the troubles and even thrive and profit from when the SHTF.
Here's how that works.
Oil exec says fsck climate change, meanwhile they're amassing billions in profits. The rubes below him echo "bah climate change is hogwash". Then climate change hits, the coastal cities go underwater, super storms hit, and doughts. The Oil exec meanwhile bought him some prime higher altitude land inland - he only needs to be 500 feet high to escape the rising seas - and he makes a castle out of it, then bring in useful servants, and wall up. The world falls into chaos and when it's over you call it Panem.
May the odds ever be in your favor.
You are just repeating the argument, which doesn't work. It is perfectly rational for a person not to care about the long term damage they are causing. If your life expectancy is 80 and you are 60 then nothing past 20 years matters. If you are wealthy enough to be shielded from your actions then nothing matters at all.
Even putting aside the differences in people you still have the tragedy of the commons. It is in your best interest to exploit any shared resource before someone else does.
This is why the free market at best, and works best, when it is given a limited domain to act within.
Yeah but like. Why would you care about what happens in your own life, you know? You only have 20 years left, what's the point in life? The self exists beyond just the id, beyond the animal instinct, is what I'm saying.
My point is that broadly, you can kind of assume hedonism as the default, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's really true. Even so, after a certain point of economic security and ability to spend money, you've fulfilled and then completely burnt out all pure hedonistic desires. You're going to start inventing things that you want, or, more realistically, you're going to start consuming other stuff, that tells you what it is that you "really" want, and you're going to start living by just sort of being this shitty consumer of other people's virulent memes that are marketed at you. You see this all the time with "upper middle class" techbros, accountants, managers. The same is true of the people at the very top, they just tend to have values that are shaped more by the political climate of 20 or 30 years ago because that's generally how long it's taken them to worm into their positions.
So once you move past hedonism (if we ever even had that in the first place, for people, which I generally find not to be the case), you kind of find yourself in a vacuum as to what your meaning is, what the point of everything is, and that's when it starts getting filled by actual frameworks of how reality is. This is why rich people unironically believe that poor people just spend their money irresponsibly. It's because power is magnetic to the corruptible, you know, there's a selection bias for that strain of thought as you move up the ladder, but it's also that power corrupts, people in those positions of power get that strain of thought marketed to them much more stringently.
It is very rare that you find the total encompassing sociopath that's only capable of seeing everything from a materialistic egocentric perspective, where they only live 20 years, so they might as well do everything they can get away with and die on a big pile of money that has ceased to mean anything for them. That's a caricature of the ruling class, it's a caricature of humanity. People are capable of longer term thinking than that, and of much more complicated thoughts, and so there are much more complicated systems of propaganda and incentive structures that are set up in order to manage people's ability to rationalize the world.
I think you're all putting too much faith in the way human mind works. Of course people are capable of higher reasoning and planning ahead, but in most individuals in many situations long-term reasoning just doesn't get triggered.
I don't think it's possible to reconcile no force, only mutual interest action, individual free actions with no or minimal negative mutual impact, and a single acceptable outcome...for basically any issue.
The larger the population you apply that ideal to, the less possible it is, due to tribalism. To get rid of tribalism you have to get rid of humans. Fail to get rid of tribalism and libertarianism isn't just dead on arrival, it's spontaneously aborted.
The whole point of a liberal democracy is that you replace "force" with individual political agency and consensus seeking mechanics. The state still maintains a monopoly on violence to some degree, but violence isn't a necessary part of administering that monopoly. This is like the original enlightenment libertarian ideal. The whole Ayn Rand revisionist school and now whatever the fuck it is that Jordan Peterson is on is what fucked up the terminology