Culture Matters: revolution and liberty

Economics Political Theory
1

I had a quick thought on revolution. I usually do tend to fantazise that a top down imposition of liberty would work wonders… but the truth is that culture matters the most, doesn’t it?

I mean, it wasn’t the American Revolution that spawned a massive enterprise of freedom, it was centuries of neglect by the british towards the colonists. The revolution was merely a reaffirmation of the colonists indivitualist principles. When the Latin American revolutions tried to copy their northern neighbor’s model, all they got was decades of civil war and ungovernable countries that kept breaking apart into smaller entities. You can’t force freedom on an unfree people.

Same goes for Europe, they did not adopt a more liberty-leaning stance than the rest of the world out of a violent political upheaval: the decline of the Roman Empire meant small government by bankrupcy and then centuries of feudalism. Throw in the bubonic plague killing off one third of the population and bringing the importance of the individual to the forefront, and you get the rennaisance and the mentality that made Europe the dominant player in the modern world. (OK, I admit I may have a jumbled view of Euro-history, correct me if I’m wrong)

Or what of the other civilized corners of the world? Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong-Kong? The first three are just british living elsewhere and the second two brought economic freedom at the expense of personal freedom via top-down imposition.

A revolution nowadays would usher in a worse government than the one we have right now. A top down imposition would bring forth a violent backlash like in Latin America in the 1800s. Whats’ liberty got left? Hoping a government will somehow neglect some very extensive and fertile plot of land? Hoping a total collapse will usher in a period of barbarism from which the culture of freedom will reemerge? I just keep thinking most people are just too far gone in their worship of statism. They hate their current government and would like to usher in a new one… with no real deep changes.

A sheep-like mentality will bring about a sheep-like culture I suppose.

2

…the second two brought economic freedom at the expense of personal freedom…

What personal freedom is missing in Hong Kong?

Whats’ liberty got left?

What about the Russian paradigm? After 70 years of mass starvation and no beatle music, everyone wanted the free market back.

3

“Science progresses when the old professors die out” Joseph Schumpeter. Incidentally, I think Menger (and maybe Bohm-Bawerk?) had similar views

4

Well, I suppose Franklin was right:

The imposition of liberty through politics is probably impossible currently (of course this doesn’t mean there can’t be small gains here and there). The greatest hope, I think, is for an environment to occur in which people can vote with their feet towards liberty.

This is the overarching goal of seasteading, since not only will it compete with governments for capital both physical and human, allowing people to live freely on the actual seasteads, but it will demonstrate to people the advantages of the market and give them something to copy, since theory is evidently not enough for them. Yes, Singapore and Hong Kong already do this to an extent, but the more pressure for competition - combined with the continuing decline of the statist order - could shake things up.

If you are attempting anything through politics, decentralization is the best goal in the long term, even on a-political lines.

And apparently I’m British.

5

Both Dennett and Harris have made the case that the strength of the atheist movement lies in its lack of organization. There is no target to hit against and variation is maximized, ensuring the right answer is in there somewhere in terms of strategy. I think precisely the same thing can be said, and more, of the anti-state movement. Our strength is our lack of organization. Progress may appear to be slow at any point in time but that’s a small price to pay for guaranteed long-term success.

Clayton -

6

What matters most is the nature of the revolution in the first place, not the culture, however this is mitigated by the fact that culture creates the nature of the revolution in the first place. This is to say that what matters the most is the inspiration for the revolution in the first place.

How many revolutions have been purely ideological? To my mind, practically none. Practically all revolutions, be it the American, French, or Russian have all been to some extent or other driven by elites, many of whom shared a basic ideology, some of whom did not, but they were only able to enact their whims because of the abuses of the civil power. Most revolutions are merely responses to the current state of affair becoming unbearable, it does not pose a solution. Most colonists wouldn’t have foreseen, or wanted, the constitution in 1776, no one wanted what happened during the French Revolution, and the communist lost in the initial elections after the revolution and the peasants who populated the country sure as hell didn’t want collectivized agriculture.

So classically the problem is exactly that revolutions aren’t ideological as much as either political or reactionary. A handful of pro-democratic ones have taken place, but it’s rarely been a very radical step at that point.

In the end revolutions suffer from the same problems that democracy does, the education and the failures of the masses to really pursue anything, especially anything that’s radical, which revolutions always experience.

What is to be done?

7

True. The Constitution, even statist as it is now, would not pass a majority vote in today’s world.

I advocate seasteading, and it’s later corollary–spacesteading.

The oceans are the last territory unclaimed by a nation state. And it should take a couple hundred years at least to fill them out. And if we can establish a culture of liberty on the oceans–ocean living has a few massive advantages. For one thing, infinite reconstructibility: you want to move your building, it’s cheap and easy. Reconfigure an entire city? No problem. Shipping by water is by far the cheapest method, meaning a very many commercial advantages as well.

Beyond extremely unlikely–impossible. A freedom culture has only emerged that I know of out of benign neglect of ruling authorities, such as in the American colonies before revolution.

Yes, exactly that, which is precisely what the leftist authoritarians want, docile animals that will allow the planners to shape them.

What we need to do is build a political order of individualiam and then move there. It would attract libertarians first, which takes care of your culture problem.

Sail 14 miles off-shore and you’re in international waters. Found a permanent floating structure, extensible, no taxes, no regs, only voluntaryism as an organizing principle.

I have been working on such a political structure, what it would look like, how it could operate, what it would mean to translate individualism into a political establishment. It seems counterintuitive that it could even be done, but I think it can be. And the first thing is to dispense with democracy, that mechanism designed only to give legitimacy to the rulers and which is predicated on socialism and responsible for so many social ills in our western worlds.

This solution is what Robert LeFevre called ‘autarchy,’ rule of the self by the self. Thus my signature.

It changes the meaning of jurisdiction, makes them have fluid rather than set boundaries. Allows any person to craft law, infinite private law, and elevates the individual over the collective such that no one can force law on anyone else. Rather, in keeping with individualism and the social nature of people, those laws which you accept, you will likely group together with others whom accept similar laws.

And thus we have society ordered now by ideology rather than static geography. And law composed of unchallenged ideological force in any jurisdictions, because you don’t need oppositional politics when no one is being forced to accept a law.

And the other major factor is to make foot-voting the primary form of political protest, or what I call micro-secession. Don’t like the laws in a particular place? Just move next door or start your own thing.

This is a small taste of some of the developments I’ve got going. If we can get something like this off the ground and it’s successful, it seems to me it should be both innately stable, due to the alleviation of political in-fighting it makes possible (in fact, it could end political argumentation entirely and replace it with political comparison), and particularly prosperous due to the immediate access to large amounts of cheap space to build and live in, the complete elimination of taxation, and universal access to shipping lanes.

In fact, I want to start a pilot program within a decade and move permanently onto the water myself as a prelude to large-scale development. I think it wouldn’t be too hard to convince some businessmen to make permanent floating factories or the like since they would have no rent to pay, no taxes to pay, etc.

We should look to seasteading for the future. It’s something the power elites are not expecting, because it was previously virtually unimaginable. And it has the potential to change everything.