Libertarians for Collectivism

Wally Conger takes on “pragmatic libertarians” and likens “pragmatism” to a sickness. Pragmatism is taken to mean being “practical” about bringing about a free society, i.e. taking baby steps and shooting for incremental change. The critique does not so much pertain to pragmatism as a philosophy, and I reckon that a radical libertarian might be a pragmatist in the sense of emphasizing practice over ideology.

Mr Conger’s foil is one Pete McAlpine, who wrote:

“Some years ago, I came to the conclusion that collectivism is the natural order of human existence. Collectives are real, not imaginary as many individualists would like to think. Collectives, from tribes to nations to civilizations, are real, held together by force, threat of force, memes and/or maybe even morphic resonance. Collectives are macro biological organisms. Individualism plays little or no role in the primal bloody processes which give rise to them.”

Collectives are imaginary in the sense that they have no existence outside the minds of individuals who comprise them or must cope with them. I don’t think anyone thinks they aren’t real. A collective is an organizing principle or meme complex which informs individual behavior and which is used strategically by individuals.

For example, I may appeal to my kinsman based on considerations of “family” to assist me in some manner, and he may be persuaded by this argument to do so. We are still individuals acting as individuals although there has passed between us the legitimizing discourse of the “family” and the kinds of claims kin may make on one another. On the other hand, my kinsman may have come to regard such claims as negotiable, in which case he might not be so readily persuaded or might require assurances of reciprocity.

The state which claims me as a subject may argue that I owe a duty to serve in its armed forces and to put myself in danger as a “patriot”. If I have been sufficiently indoctrinated, I may be persuaded that this is the case and be willing to risk life and limb in furtherance of the agenda of the ruling elite. I am no less an individual in doing this. It’s just that I am a deluded individual infected with a viral meme complex that makes me believe that I am obligated to the state, that this abstraction is pursuing its interests, and the ruling elites also promote the interests of the collective rather their own.

If I am less well indoctrinated, the state will have to compel me to serve, employing indoctrinated or self interested thugs to threaten me with violence if I do not comply. It is much less expensive and inconvenient to rule me if I can be programmed to regard the state and its claims on me as legitimate. Having to use force is a manifestation of problems with maintaining legitimacy. If I resist or acquiesce, I do so as an individual. The thugs who menace me are also individuals acting for their own reasons.

It is the calling of the radical to problematize collectives predicated on force, not to embrace them. Perhaps it is the fate of humanity to evolve into a hive mind, but I do not aim to promote such a development. There is nothing unnatural about or wrong with collectives per se. Of course, humans will band together for mutual aid and society. What libertarians rightly object to are collectives based on violence and the creation and maintainence of a delusional populace.

Collectivism is pathological, a debilitating cognitive disorder, and libertarians, once cured of it, ought not to risk reinfection in the name of being practical.

Morphic resonance? Please. Whether you examine humans on the cellular level, as individuals, as parts of societies, as parts of the biosphere, as parts of any larger system depends on what you are trying to determine. Humans are collections of cells, individuals, members of societies and parts of larger systems. We are not, as a factual proposition, more of one of these than another. We choose to think about humanity in one or more of these ways for our own purposes. For me, my life as an individual is the most significant, and I'd wager that most folks have a similar personal outlook. When I was an anthropologists, sometimes I would look at a collective rather than individuals. If I were an evolutionary psychologist, I might take an interest in the whole species and its relationship to its environment. If I were a planetologist, I might look at how humans fit into the whole system. From a political standpoint, whether you emphasize the individual or the collective says a lot more about you than about humanity.