Are you familiar with any of Jasay’s writings on justice and the presumption of liberty? I know I keep bringing Jasay up but I think he’s one of the most important to read, especially since he comes at the problems - both political and economic - from a different angle than that, for example, of Mises and Rothbard. When I turned to his works I found in them many ideas that I had in a basic form, just articulated better by Jasay and with a more solid logical reasoning.
I kind of have a problem like this. I realize that liberty rightly understood is a means to an end of a happier life. I try to argue for it because it’s opponents seem to me to be incorrect. I still have misgivings about the general end though, which is the free-market paradise.
What happens to you when you live in Libertopia? If it were to be achieved I don’t really know what I would do with myself as it would seem like the historical struggle would be over, the struggle against the state that is. This probably stems from an unwarranted sense of self-importance or maybe self-destruction but what would life be without a good struggle? What would be the frontier? Wouldn’t we just sink into materialistic complacent lifestyles?
The literature coming from Russia in the 19th Century is reflective of a fucked up society. Their thinking was born of a certain suffering. Hemingway’s writing too was born of a certain suffering. Perhaps this doesn’t have to do with the progressive eradication of struggle but something else. I don’t know what I’m talking about.
EDIT:
OUCH!
I’ve only read parts of The State and I was thoroughly impressed. Any links are appreciated.
Clayton -
Justice and its Surroundings - http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1306&Itemid=27
If you have JSTOR, his articles ‘Freedom from a Mainly Logical Perspective’ and ‘Property and its Enemies’ are available on it.
Some articles of his here (they are mainly about the European economy, but see ‘Property and its Enemies’ parts 1-3 and ‘Your Dog Owns Your House’): http://www.econlib.org/library/Browse/articlearchivebyauthor_J.html
Political Philosophy, Clearly (2010) is a collection of essays dealing with justice, liberty, and their self-enforcement through custom. $14.50 on Amazon.
Seconded. There no better way to spread you memes (and genes!) that good old parenting. It should be an easy enough strategy in the decrepit, below-replacement-rates societies of the west.
I think that effect is undeniable but I also think the whole subject deserves more study. The State has an erosive effect on family solidarity and I’m not convinced that there isn’t a link between this fact and the fact that the State exists at all. To put it bluntly, the State is the beneficiary of memes which induce people to forsake their families and sacrifice their well-being on behalf of genetic strangers instead (almost a kind of willing self-cuckoldry). Perhaps it is the greater efficiency of the State in propagating these memes than families are in propagating pro-family, pro-self/kin-interest memes that is responsible for this fact.
Clayton -
It’s occurring. The austro-libertarianism is being commercialized and serving as the foundation for communities/societies; you’ve got LibertyManiacs, Schiff Radio, Society of Libertairan Entrepreneurs, and Hoppe’s thing in Turkey. It’ll continue to grow.
Home schooling would be a great avenue to introducing kids to the message. However, you can’t give Human Action scholar’s edition to 5 year-old; we need to produce pop-up books and short books with great art work. iPad apps would be great too; might as well gamify the learning experience.
I’m having trouble finding a good scholarly discussion of memes online. Here’s a pretty good article. He makes a crucially important observation that I don’t hear from Dennett and other experts on memes:
He mentions that there are other animals that have memes - birds with bird songs, for example (Dennett mentions beavers with their dams; not all of the knowledge of dam-building is innate). I can imagine a scenario where memes became common in our ancestors along-side the evolution of our ability to manipulate the world (there is a book to this effect, essentially claiming that the entirety of human culture is down to the particular evolved shape and capabilities of the hand).
Anyway, my point is that the fitness of memes is only locally determined by their “rehearsal fitness”, that is, their amenability to being rehearsed in our own mind and repeated by word-of-mouth to others. From a global view, physical resources still matter. A dead person cannot propagate a meme. From the global view, the suitability of a meme to enabling its “infected” population is related to its effect on their material wealth. A poor person is closer to starvation than a rich person. Memes that make people poor make them closer to starvation. In order to survive and flourish, such a meme must be increasing its propagation through some means that is more effective than the word-of-mouth that has been lost as a result of the privation it has brought on its hosts.
For example, imagine a meme that says that self-sacrifice to build the Great Temple of the gods is rewarded by eternal life. In fact, it is rewarded by privation as the energy of the infected hosts that could have gone to sustaining themselves and their genetic offspring is instead devoted to the building of the Great Temple which does not give any perceptible material benefit to those making such sacrifice. As a result, people who host this meme are less wealthy and healthy, die younger, have fewer children and are thus less fit to propagate any meme by word-of-mouth, including this one.
But the temple and the priesthood themselves are a meme-representation. They propagate the very meme which is creating them and they do so very efficiently. One man may spread his faith in the Great Temple to a few of his friends and associates. But his ability to transmit a meme is very localized. A massive temple and impressive priesthood, on the other hand, can propagate the very same meme to thousands, even millions of people. It is so much more effective at transmitting the meme that the reduced meme-transmitting potential of its hosts - brought on by the privation that it inflicts on them - is more than made up, thus ensuring the meme’s survival.
And I think this is the key issue - memes have transcended the genetic propagation mechanism that limits other viruses to messing with DNA. Memes can be vectored from art, songs, books, architecture, armies (just the assembly of a large group of people is itself a meme-representation), and so on. The difference between the efficiency of these meme-mega-representations versus the efficiency of simple word-of-mouth transmission by individual hosts is, I believe, partly responsible for the widespread existence of parasitic social structures.
But just like we can clearly identify parasites as a pathology of their hosts that natural immunity seeks to protect against, we can identify these parasitic memes as pathologies of the human condition. It’s not “just how it is”, it is really not good for us, both individually and as a species. The development of new ideas that grant immunity to these meme mega-vectors (Hollywood, architecture, social status, space programs, etc. etc.) have the potential to restore homeostasis both to individuals and to human society as a whole. Perhaps it would be a good investment of resources aimed at increasing human liberty for us to pitch in to building a giant, novel, attention-getting monument to the ideas of Ludwig von Mises. This could act as a memetic vector, attracting people to come see it and be infected with the ideas it represents. We need to build “meme-generating machines” that can produce memes as effectively as those of our opposition without enslaving people.
Along these lines, I once had a cool idea of building a gigantic monument in the desert - something to rival the Great Pyramid of Giza - but built entirely from sponsored bricks. Such a monument could be a testament to man and Nature, dedicated to preserving in stone the greatest ideas which human beings have ever devised, particularly the ideas of social science and economics which made the building of such a magnificent structure through completely voluntary means possible. If the GreatPyramid is a testament to the glories of Keynesian economics and central-planning (note that Egypt virtually collapsed after they were built), this would be like the “anti-Pyramid”. Anyway, just another one of my crazy ideas.
Clayton -
I think Hayek, having been the first (to my knowledge) to bring the idea of memes to the field of libertarian analysis, deserves to be considered. Though I now see that, by Dawkins’ standard Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution would be classed as a ‘group section’ theory, hence incomplete at best. A revision of the Hayekian paradigm along the lines of the Evolutionary Stable Strategies would be of great help, I think.
To return to the main theme of the thread (by the way, great threat Clayton!), I’m must add two points:
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We should be careful in classifying certain social structures as parasitic. Perhaps the state is parasitic by our standards, but I believe that it still is a far less parasitic structure in comparison with those that it supplanted.
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I do not believe in the conversion power of church-like organizations, not for libertarian ends, at least. I think that churches step in when families fail to provide the child with any kind of cultural education. Having a kid who’d otherwise end up as thief or beggar in the streets receive some sort of culture by a large organization is a clear improvement. But this just will not compete against a normal education in the nuclear family.
So, if some church or school-like libertarian organization ever succeeds in attaining a church-like influence by church-like means, this by definition will mean that its adherents will be people of a scant cultural education, and bearing large emotional scars. Not the kind of people you’d like in a free society. Molineux’s followers where mentioned here as an example. I may add the Objectivist circles. I, for one, would be scared to live in a society made up of these two groups.
So, I myself insist on the virtues of a nuclear family transmitting liberation memes, and of libertarian originations as ‘mere’ intellectual clubs where grown libertarians can communicate with each-other. That is a far cry for ma modern church or mass school.
+1
Hmm, I think that’s a bit Luddite. I agree with you that one function of churches is to act as social scavengers or “cultural charities” that fill the cultural void where family has broken down. However, I think that there is a circular relationship between the spiritual* health of society and the spiritual health of the family (and the spiritual health of the individual). They have to be healed together because the health of each is dependent to one degree or another on the health of the others.
There are hundreds of millions (billions?) of families on the planet. Obviously, you cannot visit each one, explain to them why they would benefit from strong family cohesion and then expect the world to change. Some kind of force-multiplication or leverage must be used. This is properly the role of cultural leaders and I think we need to go back to a social structure where families are bound together by (ideally non-binding) social leadership which, in turn, is bound together by its own meta-leadership, and so on. This is how many clan/tribal cultures are organized - the Somalis, the Afghans, etc. Say what you want about their abject poverty, their social structures have proven to be all but nuclear-bomb-proof.
I think we are victims of the power of modern meme-representations (books, electronic transmission, recording, even architecture, etc.) to uniformitize. In the process, what is lost is that the leaders are simply leading too many people - they don’t know their names and individual circumstances in enough detail to possibly be able to provide leadership that is in any way useful to those being lead. There is a knowledge vacuum at the top combined with a pretense of knowledge (h/t Hayek) being projected by the memetic regularization of society. It appears that our leaders know what they are doing. After all, we all listen to the same music, watch the same TV shows and ride the same yellow school buses yet the sky has not come crashing down. In fact, they haven’t got a clue what they are doing because they can’t possibly know the relevant information regarding the consequences of their leadership decisions and because those they lead are given little choice regarding who they are led by and (thus) how they are led. The slaveowner is not a social leader.
I do believe that religions/clan leaders/chiefs/medicine-men/etc. played this social leadership role in a healthy way, at least prior to the advent of the State and imperialistic religion. I’m speaking of “wild” religions, to borrow Dennett’s terminology… religions that haven’t yet been turned to use by the priestly class and the State. This is why I believe the way forward must lie through secession and political/cultural localization combined with the emergence of a credible global marketplace in law, language, commerce, and so on. Order (central-planning) in the small and chaos (marketplace, “invisible hand”) in the large. This, I believe, is the only healthy future for human society and human flourishing. Social leaders who actually know a lot of the people they are leading by name would be a big improvement.
The critics of such a path will call it “feudalism” but I think that is mistaken. If a world of small, politically and culturally diverse communities is “feudalism” then the modern nation-state is simply mega-feudalism. What I want to see is a reversal in the trend of political aggregation into ever-larger political units and a revival of political disintegration until we reach social structures whose size lends some reason to believe that they may actually be good for the individual people who comprise them. I don’t want to sharply disagree with you but there is nothing non-parasitic about Washington, DC.
Clayton -
*I use this term advisedly to refer to that part of human well-being that cannot be measured with a medical test
Several-folded
It probably is somewhat luddite. But my idea is that you discover libertarians, you do not make them. You can make libertarians of you kinds and of them alone, everyone else has had his ‘political’ paradigm firmly drilled into his head by the time you get to debate with them (Molineux got this right).
This is why I see no use for a libertarian institution as a conversion base. Just a place when people can go to discover they are libertarians, and help each-other in intellectual and/or practical stuff. I always saw the LvMI as just such an institution, which gave me back in the day the intellectual munitions to accept I was a libertarian. Truth be told, Molineux might be doing much of the same, although he’s also doing some other things which are of no interest to us.
In time, we can only out-grow statist, you cannot convert them.
Speaking of which, I’ve laid out design ideas for a few types of games. I don’t have the coding knowledge at this time to finish something on my own. I need a CGI artist and hardware API coder. I’m also working on a TV series. We’re aiming to starting shooting this summer.
You seriously crack me up.
You may have cause and effect mixed up a bit there. For progress to be made someone must stick his neck out against prevalent group think. We can’t all be choir boys.
If by “family” you mean the Christian system, no can do señor, that is anti-ataraxic for me.
Regarding the Dennett talk, he makes a mistake. There is a good reason that there are no churchy things in other types of organizations. Those things are cognitively associated with the negative emotions toward the bad aspects of traditional churches. If you used a symbol similar to the Swastika and a brown-black-red color scheme for your organization you would have problems. I’ve always used pipe organs heavily in my music because I think it’s the best sounding natural instrument. I sent one of my early compositions to a girl. She said, “I hate it. It sounds like church music.” Anyway, I already write churchy sounding philosophical songs. I wrote a libertarian rap years ago and I recently started doing lyrics for my new conventional music.
+1.
Beyond Democracy, an excellent little book (I know, plug #6 or so here) also comes to the similar conclusion. I think the path to freedom and against parasitism could be distilled to a juxtaposition of political localization against political globalizaiton. After all is said and done, the size of the structure may be all that matters.
I agree on cultural localization and secession. Long-term plan would be regional clusterization, natalism within this group and producing/consuming libertarian influenced culture. This isn’t against “meme-generator”, both strategies can live in harmony and support each other. Free State Project combined with natalism would be one of the best things that could happen to liberty in our century. This is the main reason why I hate F4M, he makes very bad press for FSP…
I have a mild allergy to the word “plan”… I think it’s more of an issue of what social order is “realizable” and understanding what are the conditions under which such a social order can develop. What we are really trying to do is set off a chain-reaction or seed fertile ground. Society itself will take care of the rest.
I do not believe that our goal is to create a society of libertarians or even a majority of libertarians. Rather, we need to stop the ideological/memetic pre-conditions of the material plunder of the masses by the Elites. This plunder is made possible only by the complicity of the masses in their own despoilation (de Boetie). In order to reverse this, we must spread the - very natural and healthy and, most importantly, true - idea that one’s own satisfaction is his highest end or purpose.
Most people have really unhealthy ideas about the moral status of frankly pursuing their self-interest, confusing this with selfishness, miserliness, anti-community and a host of other vicious attitudes. The memes responsible for this confusion use it as a shield or defense mechanism against dispassionate arguments that explain the fact that self-interest is the necessary precondition to any action. Self-ownership is self-interest. The only way to rid yourself of self-interest is to become the property of someone else, which is arguably not even possible.
As healthy ideas about the actual role of self-interest in decision-making spread, the power of the self-sacrifice/slavery memes automatically begins to be sapped. As people become less complicit in their own exploitation, there are fewer resources available to the central transmitters of the self-sacrifice/slavery memes. These memes become less efficient at self-replication, further reducing the resistance to the healthy ideas regarding the natural role of satisfaction in decision-making.
I’m not going to make any predictions because predictions are dangerous but I do believe we’ve actually witnessed a small taste of the potential for a collapse of the Establishment’s memes with the 2012 Ron Paul campaign. The energy level has just increased and increased. It is conceivable that we could witness a kind of raging, ideological prairie fire sweep across the globe. It’s happened before - what do you think the Protest Reformation was? It happened so fast - ideas that had been long-standing for centuries in Catholicized Europe began to collapse virtually overnight. The printing press clearly played a role in this collapse but how much more awesome is the power of the Internet in transmitting unauthorized ideas than the printing press.
The moment I post this to the Mises website, it becomes viewable from almost anywhere in the globe and can be accessed in a few hundred milliseconds. The ideas and information of the Ron Paul/End The Fed/Tenth Amendment/Etc. movements are already spreading like wildfire. But for all the successes that liberty has had in the last few years, my hope is that we are just seeing the first few embers of an ideological conflagration that exceeds our ability to imagine.
If historians allow us any say in the matter, I would like to call it Mises’s Revenge.
Clayton -
I’m highly sceptical about an overnight change. Yes, Internet has changed rules like it did with printing press - libertarianism has exploded since 90’s, especially Austrians who rose virtually from nothing. I agree that the amount of libertarians will rise more, but still I’m sceptical and see this as a more uncertain “plan”. Natalist/segregationist “plan” is more secure and certain, but slower. I see it as a sort of backup. Maybe it’s too slow for the technological development, who knows. But I’m not trying to put these “plans” against each other, they work best if they’re combined. Think about if most of libertarians in US would move to the New Hampshire, to the specific towns - it would be indeed be Mises’s Revenge.
I am skeptical of any movement that claims to be about liberty yet entails making any kind of “sacrifice”. Moving to NH for anything other than economic and/or lifestyle reasons is a bad choice, in my opinion. For those who feel so strongly about the FSP that they choose to move, that’s fine, it’s their choice. But I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do it.
As far as natalism goes, I think that FSP is small potatoes - it’s a failure to really think at the correct scale. One of the social roles performed by churches (in my opinion, there’s really no scholarly research to back this up AFAIK) is to act as “reproductive clubs” - it’s much safer to marry your daughter off within the confines of a church congregation than to let her try to make her own way through the “singles scene.” But the certification of suitors through the auspices of religion has never been a completely face-to-face system. People send out letters saying, basically, “I am a young man looking to marry and would like to visit your church to see if it is God’s will that I marry one of the young women in your church.” They still do this, by the way, a fact little known outside fundamentalist Christian churches. Often, they will ask their Pastor to either sign the letter or to write a generic referral letter to go along with it, certifying that they are upstanding members of the church and perhaps some special recommendation if they are especially well known to be virtuous and so on. I’ve seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions.
This goes right back to my OP. Rather than asking people to move to a specific geographical location for the purposes of constructing libertarian families, perhaps a better solution is to set up an institute that helps people begin building a socio-cultural network whose primary purposes mirror those of traditional reigions (without pretending to be a continuation of any particular traditional religion): moral instruction, community events, officiation of festivals and holidays and general reputation networks, especially with respect to business and marriage.
Clayton -
Here are some proposed tenets:
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Religious belief is a personal matter. Equivocation of different religious beliefs, however, is insulting and condescending. Hence, this organization is not secular but neither does it espouse any particular set of religious beliefs.
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I know a lot more about what is good for my neighborhood and my community than what is good for people who live thousands of miles away and may speak a different language. Hence, I should not impose my ideas about what makes a good neighborhood or community on those who live far away from me or who live in a significantly different culture from my own.
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Those who hold political power are human beings like anyone else and they, too, know a lot more about is good for their immediate neighborhood and community than about what is good for people who live thousands of miles away or are very different from them. I should not ask those who hold political power to impose their ideas or my ideas about what makes a good neighborhood or community onto those who are very different from us.
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Real leadership is based on recognition of excellence, not imposed authority. Hence, this organization does not seek to influence society through the political apparatus. Rather, as an organization that seeks to identify, develop and facilitate social leaders, the focus is on understanding what the essential attributes of leadership are and helping people to recognize those among them with the gift of leadership.
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Changes to the law often have unpredictable consequences or, even worse, predictably negative consequences. For this reason, I should be hesitant to advocate for drastic alterations of the law. There are many problems in every legal system in the world and these need to be identified in a careful, reasoned manner so that they can be changed in a responsible and measured way rather than through violence and revolution.
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Social leadership touches every aspect of the human condition. Fostering the social ties of local membership through community activities helps to reinforce social bonds, create reputation and referral networks, social safety nets and provide a context for the enjoyment of life with friends and family.
That’s the sketch outline of what I’m thinking. I don’t think you need to meet once every weekend in a brick building and play the organ. In fact, that would probably conflict with many people’s existing religious commitments. Yes, there are lots of unsolved problems but I still think the core idea is sound.
Clayton -
Very good, Clayton. At its core though the community has to have some recognition of justice (which is essentially the NAP) as its central value. Essentially the purpose is to rebuild on a more solid basis the important community aspects that have atrophied due to the growth of the state.
Also, what actual activities do you see this group engaging in apart from general gatherings? Charity (including fund-raising), running classes? Which existing organisations can we pilfer ideas from? The Freemasons, the boy scouts?