Being the resident anti-state crackpot makes me a conundrum to my conspecifics. They ought to be able to predict my views fairly easily since they almost all boil down to nonaggression and love for my fellow man, but they haven’t figured this out at all. They can’t seem to wrap their minds around the concept that I can disapprove of something, eg chewing gum, without supporting a law about it. Or that I can think that something is a good idea, hybrid cars, without calling for the government to promote it.
Because of my unwillingness to use force to advance my own preferences, folks assume that I have no strong opinions about other people’s behavior. I am pretty much devoted to a philosophy of live and let live, but I have my own tastes and preferences, some of them fairly strongly held, and I will refrain form associating with people who offend my sensibilities in some areas. I will avoid trading with businesses that engage in practices of which I disapprove. I won’t call down the force of the law on folks, and I will defend their right to live as they please even when it offends me, but I nonetheless have lots of scruples about lots of things.
And my conspecifics assume that, because I oppose a particular state activity, eg public schooling, I also oppose the underlying ostensible purpose of that activity, eg education. They can’t imagine being all for education while opposing government schools or being in favor of health while simultaneously opposing health fascism.
I realize that I seem crazy to my conspecifics, but they don’t seem to appreciate how insane their positions seem to me. For example, when talking about rent control in New York City, one woman pointed out that without it her landlord could have raised her rent when her lease ended and that this would have been inconvenient for her. That was all the justification she seemed to need for coercing her landlord with the implicit threat of violence to accept below market rent! To me, she comes off as violent and barbaric, but she certainly doesn’t see herself that way.
I am convinced that for most folks the state is just part of the existential substrate. It is a kind of madness, a mass delusion, but I hold out the faint hope that it is treatable. I was cured, after all. I don’t know if this would have happened for me if I had not been repeatedly exposed to the memes of libertarianism. I will keep transmitting them into the meme pool in my surroundings as long as I have breath.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Your rent control lady is only behaving exactly as evolutionary psychology shows us the human animal reacts—that is to take care of self first and to be altruistic when convenient. The landlord is no more noble than his renter. Each is acting from self-interest, each has a right to use any tool in his/her arsenal to protect self interest. Neither is to be despised for their actions. I don't know that there is any answer to these dilemmas in the near future. Until most people are as informed as I am about their own motives and can see how cooperation and altrusim are the best solutions, we'll probably remain cruel to one another. In fact, I think we'll kill ourselves off before we learn the lesson. My Martian friend in the 125th Century earthling time is trying to puzzle this out even now. Read it.
Post a Comment