I’ve been on a bender lately trying to find as much “libertopia” fiction as I can and, inspired by some of it, I’m trying to consider what I would like to see in that genre and perhaps to even scribble something out on my own. I’m interested in opinions of what you feel has been missing from the libertopia fiction that you have read, what you would have liked to have seen discussed or handled more.
A couple of definitions/caveats to (attempt to) keep responses focused in the direction I’d like them:
Include anything in the broad umbrella of “libertarianism”: AnCap, agorism, etc.
I’m not personally interested in *dystopian" fiction that attempts to show the superiority of libertarianism by showing how bad statism is. I get that. I’m interested in books that try to give a vision of what “libertarianism” would actually be like.
Comments like “It should be well-written” are funny and probably too accurate, but not particularly helpful.
Feel free to mention particular works you have read since I’m looking for more.
Just to give a flavor for some of what I have read: the classics, obviously, e.g. Atlas Shrugged (the Galt’s Gulch part), Heinlein, etc.
Neil Smith.
Snow Crash (kind of… it’s rotten depiction is part of my wish that there was better).
Neil Schulman (Alongside Night).
Withur We (introduced here by the author Matt Alexander).
“A Lodging of Wayfaring Men” - Paul Rosenberg, still working my way through this.
I’m probably forgetting some stuff I read earlier.
I’ll summarize what I miss in these books:
I miss the ability to envision how libertarianism would actually play out after the revolution, when the world has settled down and chugging along.
I don’t want talking porpoises; science fiction changes all the calculations.
I don’t want Lord of the Flies: what might work in a primitive setting isn’t trivial to envision how it plays out in modern society.
I want to see a depiction of “libertopia” populated with the same people that populate the real world. No fair populating it only with supermen (Galt’s Gulch) or libertarians (Smith, Schulman) or gun-nuts (Smith again): that’s never going to happen, and if your society is populated with such people, it really doesn’t matter how you structure government and society, everyone will just “do the right thing”. I want to see what happens in a libertopia populated by people who aren’t experts in political science, who don’t do the right thing, etc.
Not all of L. Neil Smith’s work has 'talking porpoises", and a lot deal with libertarianism after the revolution.
Have you read his “Roswell, Texas”? Or some of his non-North American Confederacy work?
Nope, but it sounds like you are recommending it, so I’ll give it a try. I wasn’t aware that his fiction wasn’t all set in the same setting.
My personal vision of “libertopia” (and I really should have made this clear, but I certainly don’t mean “utopia”, I’m just using “libertopia” as a shorthand term for “a libertarian an/cap” world) differs from Smith’s vision along the axis that he stresses most: guns. Of course I’m not advocating gun control or anything silly like that, and I understand the importance of potentially armed populace and potentiall armed victims; I just doubt that in libertopia that everyone would love guns the way all of Smith’s characters do. I wouldn’t. It’s a matter of prediction: he predicts that everyone will carry guns and thus the regular populace will be the deterrent against the initiation of force; I predict that specialization will apply in this as in all other things, and that most people will contract their protection out and will not choose to walk around at all times armed. Sure they can, but I just don’t predict that most would, and I don’t predict it would take on the strong cultural value that it does in Smith’s writing. Again, this is part of what plagues most libertopia writing for me: all of the participants have all the sudden become philosophers who understand the philosophy and workings of the system that they are living under. In Smith’s work, all the characters walk around talking about the importance of gun ownership, and I just don’t believe that that meme will ever spread and take hold in that large a percentage of the population.
Since part of what frustrates me about most extant libertopian literature is that it doesn’t match my prediction of what such a world would look like, that’s fair game for my question: I would like to see a book that looks more the way I’d predict libertopia to be, and that eliminates the Smith books that I have read because they are too gun-oriented. You say that the other Smith books are not as science-fictiony, e.g. no talking porpoises, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they are still heavy with guns…?
1. Demonstrating the possibility of non-violent transformation of the state.
Yeah, me too. Violent revolution makes for more actiony books, but I personally just don’t see how a movement whose major selling point is an agreement to not commit violence can get its start via violence.
2. Demonstrating the benefits of liberty as “sidekick”.
? I’m not sure what you mean by “as sidekick”. Could you explain?
3. Focusing on the main differences between an ancap and an etatist society, e.g. decentralized courts.
So you’d actually like to see a book in which some of the details of this play out? I would too, but I’ve been concerned that it might be too tedious/technical… Matt does some of this in Withur We but as I told him, I would have actually liked to see more. I think it’s also important if one covers this type of thing to do so realistically: there will be conflicts and problems, it’s not going to roll immediately into a noncontroversial institution.
Along these lines: do you think you’d be interested in a story in which the decentralized courts (and defense agencies) have various rogue elements? I think one of the things that most people worry about AnCap (including minarchists) is the scenario of a rogue DA, one that tries to initiate force on behalf of its clients and that perhaps has plans on becoming the dominant DA by force and thus essentially becoming a government. That is an important issue. OTOH, if the purpose of such a book is to illustrate how things could ‘work’ in such a world, focusing on this worst-case scenario may not be appropriate. I at least would be interested however in seeing how the interplay of different “courts”/DAs could work on more mundane things, e.g. abortion, capital punishment, children’s “rights”, etc. What happens when there are conflicts between people represented by DAs with differing norms for these things? What happens when someone from a very conservative DA/court system that thinks abortion should be illegal challenges someone from a more liberal DA/Court system? These kinds of things are very difficult for people to work through themselves, familiar as they are with the current single-law system. I think that illustrating how this works and how it really doesn’t change one’s day to day life is both interesting and valuable, but perhaps I’m alone in that.
Are there other aspects of life in libertopia that you think would be significantly different in one’s day to day life? Actually, is that something that is interesting to people: how people’s day to day lives would be in libertopia? Or is it really only interesting to cover the things that are new and exotic and different?
That would be a misused word. English is not my native language so my vocabulary is a bit restricted … Anyway, with the help of a dictionary the expression would be “along the way”. I wanted to say that like one poster above me said that liberty’s benefits should not be “smacked in your face” as in preaching.
Yes I would be interested in such story. Would a book be worth reading if it just presented the happy wide libertarian utopia? Sure, reading something like that could be nice, but the better stories are about how people deal with the struggles of life, so a book about a libertarian utopia should not be any different. A book about the day-to-day struggles of a person or society could be appealing since it would demonstrate how usual life would look like in an ancap society, as opposed to an etatist society.
But since the main difference between state an ancap is the presence or absence of a monopoly on agression, the main theme in such a book could likely be the decentralized court system - or better how courts are not needed since most things are not settled there. Or one could demonstrate how a non-subsidized, non-distorted economy would look like, how people deal with employers who pay horribly or how an ancap society deals with points that concern people nowadays, like the wellbeing of poor people.
In conclusion: If you want to appeal to the masses, show the really exotic aspects of libertarian society, for a genre of “libertarian literature” show anything that is different, explore how liberty works out combined with sci-fi, traditionalism or whatever you can think of. Show how a libertarian society deals with struggles as opposed to nowadays.