Every champion of the free market, from Ludwig von Mises to Ron Paul, held the position that the battle for freedom is an intellectual endeavor - a contest of ideas. They all advocated educational activism to change people’s minds on how society should be governed. All of them rejected violence, which was not only necessary to lend credibility to their positions, but also to avoid prosecution for “anti-government conspiracy” and similar charges.
However, it seems to me that every major political change in human history came about as a result of forceful imposition. In fact, I challenge you to name one political paradigm shift that succeeded by convincing the population of its merits as opposed to a group of true believers taking control and abusing the inertia of the common populace to push their agenda.
You can split hairs and say that popular consent through education was necessary to legitimize revolutionary changes, but I don’t buy it. Did Russian peasants really root for communism? Did the French understand the workings of democracy when some of them stormed the Bastille? They may have been fed up with their former systems, but very few were gung-ho revolutionaries.
So libertarian purists look down upon those that get involved in unsatisfactory compromises and the dirty business of politics, but where is the empirical evidence that supports their method? How can we change the world for the better when action, not lecturing has been the driving force of human development?
It is not what people want, it is how people act. For instance, a prisoner may want to escape, but he won’t act on it unless he finds some means that he finds preferential to being passive. Instructing the masses in the only option open to us. Though it is possible, and Mises spoke openly of this, that a liberal minority could take power by force, a reign not supported by the majority would be short lived. Thus you must win the hearts and minds of the people. It has been our main problem. I have personally felt that all of the money being funneled into Campaign for Liberty right now would be better, subjectively speaking of course, to be spent on the production of a film that could explain our most essential principles and lessons in economics within 2 hours. Preferably a comedy. You could get Drew Carey, Penn and Teller, etc. for sure.
A large number of the Soviet Population were not supportive of the Bolsheviks during the first few years of their regime. In the end, Lenin’s new economic policy ended up allowing a great deal of private property and trade in order to save their regime from collapse.
The storming of the Bastille was a local concern. The rural population was generally in favor of merely clamping down on the monarchy. The nobility was in favor. Jacobin elements took power during the period of the Terror and the Counter revolution, but were later shoo’d out by mass protest.
I would say that forceful imposition usually is a result of a shifting intellectual climate. In the end it’s not just about having more guns, but about people actually supporting your rule. It’s about ideas. When people finally get together and overthrow the old order, it merely signifies the change of ideas that has been taking place.
You’re right though that libertarianism tries a different approach in that it actually reasons with people with logic, it does not manipulate people with emotion, which is what the other successful movements did. Maybe it’s for the better that libertarianism is honest, and maybe a more dumbed down populist wing would be a good idea. I think though that what we call libertarianism is an outgrowth of rational thought, so with improved education humanity is bound to become more libertarian. In a way libertarianism is just a manifestation of humanity finally wising up. It isn’t like the other political movements, so it shouldn’t use the same tactics.
Also I don’t really think libertarians decide not to resort to violence as a tactic, they just have a nonviolent mentality. There has just never really been any violence from the libertarian camp, ever. So the violent path isn’t really an option, because that’s just not what we do.
Societal change has as much to do with ideas as does the working of a market economy with philanthropy. Its ideas that chase systems, not the other way around. Why is it that we see clearly that a market economy works regardless of one’s preferences and yet a free society is suddenly hanging on ideas? I was never convinced by this story.
Why is it that we see clearly that a market economy works regardless of one’s preferences and yet a free society is suddenly hanging on ideas?
Because if you displace the existing state by force, the guys with the most appealing ideas will lead the mob (and the most popular ideas so far are to establish a new state).
Another problem with direct action is visible if you take a look at the Seasteading Institute discussion forums. The idea of Seasteading is to have a large number of “competing governments” that, over time, become more and more libertarian just by virtue of market forces. But most of the people on the SSI forums are not in it because they believe in liberty. Rather, they believe in that old quote, “It’s good to be the King.” What they really want is their own kingdom where they can lord it over people just as they’re being lorded over today. They have no real commitment to seeing a more just or moral social order brought about.
And it is precisely this moral fiber that is the precondition for a revolutionary change in the social order which has been a long time in coming and may yet be some time off. But if all we’re interested in is creating our own little Rothbardistan where we can lord over people according to nominally “Rothbardian” ideas, we’re not really offering anything different than the thousands of other would-be petty tyrants lined up to carve out their own little feifdom the minute the existing political order begins cracking at the seams.
If I had to choose one thing in Misesean thought that is the most important, I would say it is the idea that truth will win in the long run. I used to believe this when I was a fundamentalist conservative, as well, but the problem was that I wasn’t being true to myself, I was lying to myself on many levels. When I started to sweep away the lies I told myself to harmonize my religious beliefs with the real world, I realized that the truth is more powerful than any lie told for political gain. It doesn’t matter how many more decades the Keynesians succeed in their job as the intellectual bodyguards of central banking. Sooner or later, truth will out and the whole Ponzi scheme will be a discredited pile of shit, plain for everyone to see. By being honest with myself and practicing the discipline of cleansing the corrupting influence of political propaganda from my mind while seeking the truth, I am able to be an example to others who want to shake off the shackles of postmodernism and motivated reasoning. If you sit down to think with an endpoint already in mind, you are not really thinking, you’re just rationalizing someone else’s political structure (however indirectly).
Leading the mob is not the same as establishing a society. i.e. Kerensky led the mob yet failed to establish himself. Or the Bavarian commies, or the Hungarian commies, or the Austrian commies. Saying that ideas make societies it to completely disregard the very laws that we seek to expound.
Perhaps this is related: Although there are major food, water, and fuel shortages in Japan right now, I can hardly find any instances of people jacking up prices, even though this seems to be the economically advisable thing to do. Instead stores try limiting the number of bottles of water you can purchase. Why not raise prices? I think because of reputation, and it wouldn’t be neighborly or something. There are a few random scalpers, but in general prices are only rising slowly. As a result, companies are relatively unmotivated to get supplies to disaster areas, and people are suffering (and in some cases dying) because of it.
In a society where a large number of people have an irrational bias against certain natural market mechanisms (such as “price gouging”), perhaps the market will not work so well, in those aspects at least. If most of the people irrationally love the state and hate competition, love central planning and hate emergent order, then there might be chaos in absence of the state. If this admittedly cursory line of thinking is correct, it suggests strongly that it is a matter of ideas, or at least that the prevailing attitudes in a society must be at least somewhat non-hostile to capitalism and all its trappings. This in turn suggests that having an “opinion-molding class” that understands economics is pivotal.
Very good example! Now, how does what you’re saying here differ from: “the entrepreneur is only interested in his own wellbeing, not in helping. Thus, any betterment of the welfare of all under capitalism is ephemeral and accidental, for the guys working for capitalism are selfish”.
If there is no difference, why don’t we speak just the same in terms of societal change, i.e. try to work out laws instead of just going back to “whatever the people intend to happen will happen”. Whatever happened to the ever-present law of unintended consequences?
Yes, as long as communication and thinking get clearer and clearer, whatever ideas are most useful will win out eventually. It seems to me, then, that a major goal is clarity in thinking and communication. That is why I would like to see a better method for communicating than just these darn flimsy words.
Tangentially, this suggests an interesting hypothesis: hierarchical companies and corporations (and for that matter, sports teams and other things leftists rail against) are an outgrowth of the natural desire for some people to be leaders, even though most of them can’t be politicians. The leftist urge to ban all hierarchical structures (and greed, etc.) seems to go against human nature, whereas capitalism seems to channel it into productive uses.
Saying that ideas make societies it to completely disregard the very laws that we seek to expound.
Austrian notion of rationality is different from being omniscient or having infinite reasoning capacity. In non-austrian terms (game theory/mechanism design/agent-based modelling), people have bounded rationality, thus to really make some choices in their life they resort to heuristics, instead of trying to infer their decision from basic principles every time. The set of heuristics is different for different persons, and also changes with time. Some people call these heuristics memes, some call them ideas. These ideas influence the vast majority of human choices, and only rarely a person stops and rethinks whether an idea he believes in actually makes sense (is useful for optimizing his choices). I just cannot see how you can think ideas are irrelevant to human behavior.
Agreed. When it comes to determining the choices of the individual his preferences are all we need to know. But what I’m trying to say is that societal order is more than the sum of individual choices. There are unintended consequences that drive societal structures. Thus, merely changing minds (even if possible) would not work, I’m afraid. There is a deeper set of laws that mock what our efforts to mold our society.
If you mean that we should give specific recommendations on what steps can be realistically taken to improve society, I whole-heartedly agree. I posted a while back on some steps that I think are within the realm of political feasibility in terms of Social Security reform. It is possible to disavow the entire system of coercion while at the same time saying, “Well, as long as we’re stuck with it, then we should at least do things in this way rather than that way.” For now, I think that’s as much as we can hope for. The rest is just a waiting game - waiting for Nature to take its course. But I’m an optimist and I believe we are heading toward greater freedom in the long-run.
Don’t mean to burst your bubble but natural language is as good as it gets. Cf Godel, Turing, Chaitin (incompleteness). I’ll provide more details if you’re interested.
This is clearly the case and I think it is the relatively young field of evolutionary psychology that is the first science to really investigate these “deeper laws.”
I’m sure you already agree with me that striving to use more precise English phrasing helps clarify communication. I suspect you also also agree that coining new words, defining your terms up front, and using diagrams can help even more.
If you are just saying that it is theoretically possible to explain everything in natural English words, I might agree, but as a practical matter this is simply infeasible without inventing a new specialized language or set of jargon for each specific communication task and without having near-infinite memory and concentration ability. Like trying to explain to someone on the telephone how to reproduce a painting they have never seen. I could say more, but I suspect I would be talking past you, because I cannot imagine someone entertaining the point I am trying to argue against right now.
Yes, precision is essential but I think the subtlety of natural language is vastly underestimated by modernists. Just watch any lecture by Steven Pinker and you will have a new respect for the incredible subtlety and sophistication of natural language. There is no doubt that language itself can be a barrier to thought but it’s usually wrong for very good reasons (good reasons from the point of view of Nature) when you think about it more deeply.
The tendency of modernists to think that language will be improved by being sterilized is, I believe, a symptom of their failure to really understand just how subtle natural language really is. I am highly skeptical of claims that natural language can be improved upon by alien devices (such as restricted vocabulary, simplified syntax or, especially, wooden formalism and elimination of grammatical ambiguity). This is not to say that there is no room for innovation in communication technologies. Math symbolism or musical notation are excellent examples of just such innovation that makes genuinely new activities possible that would otherwise have been impossible for the unaided human brain. Yes, both math and music can, in principle, be communciated using only ordinary vocabulary but such communication is so unwieldy and bulky as to be essentially unintelligible… try reading an ancient math manuscript… “the half of the triple of a quantity is the quantity by six and quartered.”
OK I think we agree then. I am similarly skeptical of “sterilizing” natural language via a planned design that hasn’t passed any kind of “market test” (even if that just means personal use).
What I was thinking of was to make a visual form of 2D communication, sort of a full-on development of things resembling the visual tropes used in TV, ads, cartoons, movies (cinematography devices), NLP, introspected visual thought processes, etc., and a whole lot more. Preferably it would be “farmed” so that it would develop through some kind of natural process (that is, through proven utility via trial and error).
I have no idea how to do that, though, other than creating some kind of a random net chat site where you are only allowed to use some kind of Paint-like visual input tool, and text is forbidden/moderated away. Or just by incorporating a whole lot more and better diagrams into my posts and encouraging others to do the same. But making diagrams takes a long time right now. Maybe I will get faster at it.