I’m not so sure this applies to a lot of people in here. I know very very few who were raised around anarcho-capitalist ideas. Virtually everyone I’ve ever met who shared an interest in Austrian economics and/or voluntarist principles got there through a journey from somewhere else. In other words, this was their “alternative location.” They found this place after doing more or less what you’re saying, in one way or another, and ended up here.
In fact there’s a couple of threads about it…
How were you first introduced to Austrian Economics?
Those are just the ones I know of off the top of my head. And that seems to be a conversation virtually everyone has when they meet someone of our same persuasion, “how did you first learn about these ideas? What’s your story?” It’s almost a given that everyone has been around other points of view…their whole life in fact…and in getting in touch with other viewpoints they found this one.
And it seems to me every week there is at least one or two threads created by people who are not familiar with these ideas and are asking questions about them (meaning more people are making the same journey…as I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number end up becoming regular site visitors and possibly end up identifying with the Austro-libertarian philosophy).
I think there’s a valid reason most of our persuasion are not very enthusiastic about doing this. It’s because we have heard these other points of view…our whole lives. Most of us grew up being raised to agree with them, and in fact, many of us were proponants of them. There is only so much you can take hearing the same nonsense over and over. This sounds biased but I think if you want to do the most to help people become less dogmatic, you might encourage leftists who have never even heard a libertarian idea in their life to look into other points of view. Everyone accuses everyone they disagree with of being dogmatic, but I don’t think it can be denied that people of our persuasion are much more aware of (let alone understanding of) the opposing view point…again, if for no other reason than there’s almost no way to get away from it (nevermind the afore mentioned fact that most of us were raised into it, or at least around it, in one way or another).
But I know of PhD students…hell, even university professors…who have never even heard of Hayek. (No exaggeration. They didn’t even recognize the name.) If you want to find dogmatists, you have a much easier time finding them in another camp.
I’m reminded of a passage from Ayn Rand...
If you keep an active mind, you will discover (assuming that you started with common-sense rationality) that every challenge you examine will strengthen your convictions, that the conscious, reasoned rejection of false theories will help you to clarify and amplify the true ones, that your ideological enemies will make you invulnerable by providing countless demonstrations of their own impotence.
You will not have to keep your mind eternally open to the task of examining every new variant of the same old falsehoods. You will discover that they are variants of attacks on certain philosophical essentials – and that the entire, gigantic battle of philosophy (and of human history) revolves around the upholding or the destruction of these essentials. You will learn to recognize at a glance a given theory’s stand on these essentials, and to reject the attacks without lengthy consideration – because you will know (and will be able to prove) in what way any given attack, old or new, is made of contradictions and ‘stolen concepts’.
I think this goes to another part of that same passage:
[“Open mind”] is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices—and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.
What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.