the failure of libertarianism for free speech, heterodoxy, and truthseeking

7:29AM Oct 23, 2021

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This is a collection of thoughts about libertarianism. It's not necessarily a criticism, most specific positions, rather, a collection of attitudes, characteristics, behaviors and mentalities that are common to people who describe themselves as libertarian or highly sympathize with the label. So, I think I'll start with the most important one, and just kind of worked out from there. I originally, I think, I think I the most important aspect of libertarianism, for me that made me very highly sympathetic toward was the ability or other the sympathies that many libertarians have toward freedom of speech. However, it has since occurred to me that libertarianism is not good for heterodoxy, it's not good for breaking up echo chambers. In fact, if you carry libertarianism to its logical conclusion, is going to result in many micro chambers of opinion, specifically, the household horse, collections of households or whatever, to really, when people are given control over what they're exposed to, and when, when they're given absolute control, or what information they are required to engage with. The only really disruptive information that they're going to interact with is information that they have to interact with the private property, which is going to be things like, work bullshit. So a lot of people, I mean, the archetypal example of a model libertarian is like a programmer, or engineer or something. And that's real attractive, because engineers learn universal principles of science, but it's, it's just as likely the case in fact, probably more, given their numbers, that if you are required to, if you're required to, to work to get property, and have all these, and have all these settings where you can challenge opinions and so forth, that you're going to work a job that's not that sexy, so like, the manager of Red Lobster, is not going to be exposed to a lot of disruptive, universal principles. It's gonna be like, how to upsell people on our appetizers or whatever. And I think it is sort of a big coincidence that rather, it's not a coincidence, all that people who are most in favor of libertarianism tend to work in tech, because that's the area where free market principles work really well. For hardware, not for not for people oriented things like social networks. So to get real heterodoxy going on to get people discussing issues that they won't otherwise, you need to get them to. You need to force them to engage with shit they don't want to engage with because people have very short term interests, and if left to their own devices, on discipline, people will choose undisciplined shit, people to advance themselves under freedom. People need discipline first. And you very few people, I would say 10% or less, will cultivate discipline and self advancement when left to their own devices. Most people won't I've, I've worked jobs, where I was given a lot of downtime where we were, we were able to do whatever we wanted. And I had a mental tally going of who used that time to better better themselves and who didn't, and it was about nine out of 10 just fucked off. So I mean, there's sampling issues there. But I think that if you extrapolated this to the population around that number would hold. So, when left to their own devices, people just watch very banal TV. They read very banal social media, it's possible to watch enriching TV, to have your social media filled with informative or otherwise enriching or in bettering shit, but people won't do that. They're there without any sort of outside reason to a lot of people won't.

And then a smaller segment of people will do that, but you have to really get on there as well. And then another large contention, people will do that only under the most dire circumstances. And you'd have to basically put them in like a boot camp situation for them to do it. And then another segment of people just will never do it at all. They'll they'll drag to the nail and even be set to jail before they would do that. So it's very much the case that people people, when given choice, a lot of people will use that choice to make habits that are detrimental to their own development. And those habits reinforce themselves and cause more complacency, laziness and so forth. So when we're talking about heterodoxy, you're you're you're talking about what? What sort of habits Do you want to crush basically, and that's intellectual complacency. And that's, that's the very thing that will happen. When people are allowed to have complete choice over what information networks are exposed to. In other words, public shit, like public classes and whatnot, are environments where people are forced to interact with the judgments of others that they would rather not. And indeed, on social media, the creators of these networks, even YouTube, and so forth, are minimizing the influence of comments. People are realizing that comments are extremely heterodox in the sense that you're likely to read something that you disagree with in the comments, whether it's dumb or smart, doesn't matter. And so people, this is upsetting to a lot of people. And then therefore, people don't want to read comments and social media, people are working to minimize that as much as possible, while not leaving outrage on the part of people who decide to comment on articles. So they make the comments really annoying to see. And then therefore only the kind of people who who need to comment on things actually do it, and then no one else reads them. So I mean, at the time, for a while, the attorneys have struck me as an attractive alternative to some of the corrupt problems with public universities. However, I think that in any sort of scenario where people are forced to do something that betters them, and they are allowed the option to choose, they tend to choose the illusion of improvement, with an actual easy option versus versus the thing that actually makes them better. So on YouTube, for example, a really popular thing are TED Talks, because most TED talks are very easy. And they give you the idea that you're learning a lot more than you are. Whereas the 45 minute, two hour long lectures by college professors are not watched nearly as much because those are difficult. They're boring, and they don't make you feel like you're having this immediately large insight bomb. Physically, in terms of fitness, what are the what's the most effective way to get a ton of losery guys into shape, it's boot camp, for sure. You take away a lot of the rights in a short period of time, put them in an environment where they're forced to do something under extreme penalty, and they and they and they do it, they do. And the discipline that stays with a lot of those people is with them for the rest of their life. This debate has also the debate over licenses is another thing because a lot of people are against licensure because licensure increases the barrier to entry for a job and increases it creates artificial scarcity and so forth. However, a lot of people don't. A lot of people forget that. licenses aren't just a way to select for quality, there are ways to select for quality that you don't actually know better to evaluate. So fitnesses the example I'm most familiar with. There are a lot of people who are very good trainers who don't have a certification however, without a certification, you tend to get the most snake oil, you tend to get people who promote some of the most mints information. And a lot of people would be so also this creates a problem where in lieu of certifications people go by popularity, and the most popular shit is going to be the shit that gives you the most immediate sense of results, which might not be your real results. It will be dishonest.

encouragement that that gives you the impression that you're that you're advancing faster than you are again the TED talks of exercise progress Something like hardware doesn't suffer from this problem, because hardware is fairly straightforward. No one needs to supersede what they think that they would need or want to purchase more powerful hardware. But when when, when evaluating a trainer or a teacher or something like that, you do have to evaluate the short term sense of improvement or gain or whatever versus the long term actuality of improvement. And a lot of people are not good at doing that. And a lot of people will take the short lie almost every time. And I think there's no better example this than for profit colleges, which are very expensive, and have some of the easiest courses that are possible. The easiest courses you can you can be allowed to have in a college system at a credit to college. And yet, that's the draw, because they make people believe that they're getting a better education than they are. Because an education we get a lot of C's is not appealing. People don't want to pay for that as much. A lot of people's choices are tied up in ideas of self image, or ego or self perception. People people don't want to be hypocrites, they don't want to be, they don't want to seem like they're being inconsistent with who they are. They want to believe that they are who they are. They don't want to feel like liars or cheats, or they don't want to feel like they're not as good as they think that they are, they don't want to feel so all of these ideas about themselves. And there are more I just these are just a couple play into people's short term choices. And people are very motivated by the short term things like their sense of self. Dan Ariely has a study where he he found that people's sense of self perception is a ceiling on how much they are willing to cheat at a game. So they'll cheat a little bit. But cheating a lot causes them to believe that they are dishonest people, and that the the category of dishonest person matters more to them than the amount that they would gain, which contradicts the idea that if people were perfectly rational, they would be these egregious cheaters or whatever. So libertarianism will select for the things that are easy and convenient, and so forth, while giving you the illusion that they're not because, again, free market doesn't mean honest market. Only the most clear cut of lies are prohibited by law. And there's a lot a lot of gray area that is allowed. In terms of dishonesty, I mean, holy shit, you can you can print fat free on something that that was never supposed to have fat to begin with. And, like the counter to this is that, well, people's purchases, like values and so forth. I'm kind of, but if people's purchases purchase, reflect your values, then you need to, on some level, change the values to longer term ones if you want to change culture. So the idea goes that in a society where people were disciplined, their purchases would be more aligned with what's in their long term interest. And this is, so the laziness and easiness of these industries is a problem of, of culture. Now we just need to change culture. Well, first of all, cultural change takes very long time. But But setting that aside, inertia is a very powerful thing. One of the reasons that people can't make a social network anymore, that's a good competitor, Facebook is because of inertia. You need inertia to make social networks happen. Once a social network becomes sufficiently established, it's very difficult to unseat it. And this is why there hasn't really been a next Facebook. So a lot of social networks get their niche functionally. In other words, they do some sort of thing a bit differently, like snapchats thing was a racing media. Instagrams thing was just maximizing photo quality and so forth. Facebook is not likely to have a second Facebook competitor, in the sense that it does the things Facebook does. Twitter was supposed to be the Facebook competitor, but Twitter is different in that it prioritizes links and kind of short

half assed commentary where Facebook kind of just has whatever but you can do something better. In fact, many social social networks have think spot is an example or mines Whatever. But that did that, again, that doesn't matter if there's no people on the platform. And that happens by inertia. People will join the social network where they feel like they're the most in contact with the friends, or the people they want to talk to. And that takes time to build up. And it takes time to defeat years, even. So, you can't just immediately swap out inertia. And for as long as it takes to get rid of the, the inertia factor takes even longer to instantiate cultural change. Black Lives Matter. Like people have been complaining about the issues of the Black Lives Matter have been complaining about for a very, very long time since the Rodney King riots, but only very recently did this reach critical mass to where virtually everybody is on the same page. And that's one particular issue that a lot of people are sympathetic to in the first place. Something like the quality of information that one consumes is a lot more nebulous, it's a lot harder to follow. It's like following a diet and getting people to follow a diet is a lot taller of an order than getting people to admit the police brutality is a problem. But But there's another problem with authoritarian ism and heterodoxy, which is that if you try to shame people into having different values, their subjective value theory asserts that, that no value is better than another anyway, which. And that it's not, it doesn't really make sense to say that something is more valuable than something else. Because what's valuable is just what's expressed in people's revealed preferences. So there's, there's this almost relativistic element to it. And which is somewhat ironic, given the pushback of libertarians against what they believe to be a postmodern relativist, but But again, I want to stress that the, the property maximizing element of libertarianism is really one of its, I think, biggest Achilles heels in that, if followed would create the worst system of echo chambers and micro safe spaces or whatever that we've ever seen. And we would have the least heterodoxy that we would ever have. So imagine where there are no, there's very little like, there are very few required squares or settings, people have to puncture they imagine sort of like a very spread out rural ish area where everybody homeschools everybody, very few, there were few community functions. People never really required to be around people that they don't like, or that bothered them or pissed them off, or whatever. Were in that setting, or people are going to, if they are people required to encounter opposing views. So you might say, Well, you know, go ahead just throughout their lives, they might get bored and seek them out. Okay, but But what if they don't, because a lot of people don't, a lot of people, a lot of people are perfectly content, sharing the same shit all the time. And then that's kind of where you get to the crux of it, which is that there is no ultimate impetus to engage in opposing views at all. So the conclusion is that people are that libertarian conclusion to the free speech heterodoxy issue is that well, that's that's an accepted consequence. The freedom for private property is more important than heterodoxy, which is something that I ultimately have to draw a really hard line against, because heterodoxy is central to the functioning of democracy. Everybody's dumb opinion is their business because everybody's gonna vote with their own opinion. So if people are if people are fermenting all of these incredibly stupid opinions, in sort of like a silent majority way against your knowledge, like, what, what, what the counter is there to that? Because remember, the incredibly stupid opinions of people. And the false beliefs about science and so forth, are what led to the support for the drug war in the first place. problems that many, many libertarians pose and I'm with them on that I think that you should have the right to harm your body

as much as you want, after signing the appropriate consent forms, and understanding what you're getting into also, on the free speech issue the it very much compartmentalizes freedom of speech to just government censored speech. But in a society where the dominant interactions are in private areas, governments meet government censorship is going to be increasingly irrelevant. So you want to maximize the discord in Express speech or revealed speech, which, if in private settings is going to require some sort of disincentive for allowing people to have echo chambers. And a lot of the solutions tend to be these very, like wonky, borderline dweeby solutions like well, they would have you know, you could you could sue somebody if they bla bla bla, or you could write an offer and tax returns or something. But that doesn't really like. The problem is that it's not like people who do their taxes, having Dumb Dumb opinions, it's the masses having dumb opinions. And if you want to foster heterodoxy in the masses,

most people aren't going to be able to afford lawyers, and most people aren't gonna be able to afford these very specific tax write offs or whatever. So encouraging it, it's kind of a band aid and kind of a weak move, because you it's, it's a solution where

it's not really been done. And so you don't really have any measure of its effectiveness anyway. But you kind of just have to be like, Yeah, well, you know, trust me, because according to this principle, it would work and that human human behavior is never that simple. Lots of things, people think that lots of things is going to work certain way. And they, they often don't. And if it were that simple, startup founders would not be so frequently wrong about how they think that things are going to go down when they do. And to draw an analogy, I want to bring out the problem of where to have hard arguments, the problem of actually having hard arguments, because a lot of people, a lot of people will say that they prefer arguments to be not online. But that is that's that's because online arguments reveal to people how dumb they are. Or that reveals how little substance how little, they actually have to say about a topic. If a person, because it doesn't really cost a whole lot to say that you prefer discussing things as a person, when you don't actually do that anyway. Or you do but your your discussions are so insubstantial, and brief and fleeting, that you believe that those are substantial, hard discussions. And you've imported this idea to your online discussions. So when confronted with this, you think that your very frivolous idea of discussions is this substantial thing. One of the projects that we're working on for upwards of five years longer than that, is this idea of parachutes and postures, I made like a glossary of this behavior. A posture is some sort of attitude toward information. So sort of attitude or positioning about information that enables one to make a pivot or a parachute about the information and allows a person to dodge the act of substantiation, or to say face when they do try to substantiate it and are not able to or whatever. So a posture is a avoidant or manipulative attitude toward information. And then the parachute is the actual action toward information. And here's an example. The construction I can't even believe I'm engaging this but so when a person says that at the beginning of their post, they're establishing to you that they already don't want to be there and that they're doing you a favor by even being there. So then when they do exit, which is probably going to be very soon, within one or two replies. They can act like you were being an asshole to them, because they force you to do the thing that they didn't want to do and they're doing it out of some goodwill or whatever. There were many of these starting a post with laughter You know, like allomi Oh, do you really okay, okay, okay. Okay, okay. lol, like just like, but really though, like you really, really, like you're really just, and then and then eventually going in. And then once a person replies and invites them to substantiate they say something like, Oh, yeah, like I can't even believe like I can't do this, bro. Like, well, you A similar thing actually does exist in real life which is the the bro hold me that the bro hold me back phenomenon where a guy talks some shit gets into a fight and then the idea is that had his guys not been holding him back that he would have demolished the other guy or whatever. We all know that this is bullshit, but it's a way to save face and online posturing does that a parachute is something like it's whatever excuse the person has for not engaging the act of substantiation by substantiation I mean actually proving their point, providing evidence for their conclusion. So

something like something as simple as you're a troll, I'm done with this conversation. I mean, maybe the person is a troll, but probably not.

Another really common one is you obviously don't know what you're talking about I can't, I've done or whatever you know. And you can, you can usually tell when a person is. So a person who really isn't going to converse with you anymore, we'll just leave. That's what I do. They're not going to announce it, they announced it usually for a safe face saving function. And you can always discern when a person is doing this for free saving reasons. If you just pretend that they never said that at all. And you keep replying. And they will reply to your replies. Almost I would say overnight, like 19 times out of 20, they will. Because their goal is not actually the goal is not dialogue. Nor is that the truth, the goal is to have closure and relieve themselves of the awkward feeling that being asked to substantiate their views has, because frequently when a person gets into argument, they only go one or two replies deep, because that's about as much as they thought about it. So when you get to the two or three or reply point, that's when most people exit the conversation. Because they don't have much more to say after that. And so they have to start inventing excuses for their lack of things to say. And it's, it's uncomfortable, it's a process. A lot of people won't do it. Because it reveals to you how much you don't know. And people really, people are made very uncomfortable by realizing how much they don't know about things. Okay, so now I want you to think about where would you have discussions, if not online, if not in these kinds of public fora that have that we're lucky to have in the first place. So if you weren't going to have so you can cite your sources on Facebook, in person, when you when you talk with somebody, immediately what that person just said is over. So if you've ever had an argument with one person, and it's just you and them, and you're in a room, and that's it, there's no third party to say, who said what they can say something like I didn't say that. And you have no way to prove that online. There's a record online, you can cite your sources. You have the time to compose a reply. So a lot of people have this fake sense of urgency. They believe that the amount of time that they've taken to reply influences how true what they're saying is that's false. That's an idea called recent ism. The idea that the recency of your information is related to how true it is. That's wrong, unless the claim itself is related to something involving recency. But it's usually you it's usually not unless it's like our prediction or bet or something. So online discussion has these advantages. And if you've ever had to have so I've, I've probably sought out difficult discussions with people, in person and elsewhere than almost anybody else I know. And if you think that you've done this more than me, I really want to talk to you. And I invite you to share your experiences with me because I want to know you. But I don't think that I would say that the vast majority of people reading this have not. I'm a very assertive person, I'm willing to go out of my way to seek out uncomfortable discussions wherever I can find them. And my experience is that in person, people have more excuses to parachute, not less. Because in person, you're doing things that are directly related to a function usually. So on the street, you're going somewhere You can immediately leave based on the idea that you're you're headed to a destination. At work, well, that's obvious. Unless your work is directly related to politics, or the or you're an academic or whatever chances are, whatever contentious issue you're talking about, is going to be irrelevant to work. And he won't really have the attention or the time to really have a true back and forth on the subject. On top of that, there's HR. Like, yeah, you might have a lot of freedom to speak your mind and say, a kitchen. But that's because no one's gonna have a really, really substantial discussion in the kitchen. Like you're not going to cite your sources in the kitchen. Can't like, you don't have the time to whip out your phone, spend 10 or 20 minutes reading

nature or j store or whatever, and like having the other person then read it. And that like no, there's not, that's not the setting for that. Likewise, with retail, likewise with many office jobs. So the relative freedom of speech is not related to the quality of speech or the the heterodoxy of that speech we want, what we want is we want high quality, challenging informative heterodoxy. And that's not gonna happen in most workplaces. So let's just take some other common scenarios, a bar, have you have you. So, if you've been to a bar, you know how unprepared people are to talk about anything of substance for longer than a couple of sentences. Maybe, first of all, a lot of people are drunk off their ass, and even if they're not, bars, where people go to be agreeable. And people will say things, people are very prone to saying things just to transition topics, even if they don't believe them. Just things that people want to hear, basically. So you're discussing police brutality, someone says something banal, like, you know, you know, there's good cops and bad cops sips on drink, and then you get drunk, or, and they say something like, Man, I'm not feeling this, like this is really my vibe. Because again, the The setting is not one where I mean, it could be, but it's usually not. I feel like clubs are self explanatory. In most it's too loud, even speak, the grocery stores, likewise, you're there to get groceries, not to talk. Hell, even University classes, a lot of classes are discussing bass, but still you're discussing a very specific proposition. And it's very easy to come across a contentious issue that's still irrelevant to the, the topic being discussed. And so then therefore, a person who pushes the issue is going to be disruptive or whatever. And that's justifiable under most classroom policies. So I invite you to think about a study where you think that people can really discuss hard hitting serious shit, cite their sources have the time to reflect on it, not Dodge, not be like, yeah, I'm busy or whatever. I think that you'll find that the best setting for that is some sort of forum setting. Like, non time constrained forum stuff, so like, not Facebook chat, necessarily. But like, Facebook comments, you're not time limited. There's not a length requirement. You can you can link things, you can cite things. You can come You can come prepared. And so you might say, well, but Facebook isn't for that. Well, Facebook is really for anything. So it's, you might think it's for your particular form of entertainment. But again, no, it's not. Unless explicitly dictated by the site's creators. And even then, it could be for something and you could use it for your own purposes. There are lots of things where the creators dictated for a certain purpose. And it turns out that it's better for another purpose. And so people just start using it for that purpose. Hypothetically, you could have a bar, where the entire purpose was a very substantial discussion. What would happen, though, is that this wouldn't be very profitable. And under, you know, the free market system, whatever, you probably be priced out. I mean, of course, this could be like a local bar funded out of your own pocket, but that would still require that you make your money some other way some more bullshit away, which doesn't really solve the problem. And also, social media is a lot more effective in reaching tons of people in bars because bars have maybe a couple people in a discussion at a time. There's a limited amount of people who can speak social media, everybody can speak, it can reach 1000s people. So think about the original problem of libertarian echo chambers. So What's the biggest echo chamber you could possibly have? Well, it's your it's a house, a nuclear family kind of situation, where you're homeschooling the kids, and they're very little, very, very little interaction with other people that you don't want to have. And that that level of freedom is akin to giving somebody complete control over their diet. What are okay, so you might say, Well, okay, but a person I know does have complete roll their diet and they they're fine. Yes, but what are most people going to do? And the problem with democracy, unlike diets is that we don't vote based on our sugar intake well, mostly. But we do vote based on our ideas of of discourse and dialogue and what information we have. So

having eliminating safe spaces, basically, is important to the developed the maintenance and development of democracy. And you're not going to do that. In a society where everybody has their own little universe that they have control over, where they have complete control over their own little world because they have because of like, the Supreme laws regarding property or whatever. And this is something that I felt Inklings for a while. And this is so the entire last 36 minutes was about how libertarianism interferes with ideas of heterodoxy freedom speech. And you'd need you need forced settings you need some sort of public setting to get people to engage with ideas they find despicable. And that's really important. So completely pursuing the right to do whatever you want with property, and your your your company or whatever, is going to create more echo chambers. And liberals have noticed this and weaponized it and take advantage of it. And that's how you get the Safe Space idea. But I think that the reason that a lot of this I think the reason that the and this is the less substantial part of my observations is that I think that a lot of the criticism, a lot of the characteristics of libertarians, are people who are who are essentially avoidance. Not of not of not of most life issues, but of things like of things like strongest approval of things. The necessary and often messy conflict that is required to have political progress are the risks the risks of really taking a serious stance on something so libertarian is sort of like the third wave position that a lot of people don't really know the specifics of and so it's easy to say something like well are these criticisms don't fit me because I'm a libertarian and of course you know, or you're talking about some issue like a classic one is abortion and you say something like well you know, the poor I think the problem is the government because and you know that a lot of people who are normies are gonna kind of be on board because the government man that's like that's, that's like speeding tickets in the DMV and taxes and so on a very, extremely superficial level, like with like, they can't possibly really comprehend what this is going to involve or like what it would entail to implement these ideas, but because you kind of have this like, extremely cartoonish appeal of what the government is they're convinced kinda so you say something like I think the issue is the government should be issued down to the states and I mean okay, but all that's really going to do is mean that a shit ton of people can't get abortions in states where they should and some states are going to be super tyrannical and maybe even prevent those people from getting abortions in other states. So then you're gonna have a lot of people you're gonna have a lot of birth problems that are gonna eventually bleed over to other states. And you might have Coalition's of states about it, and so forth. So it but nobody ever really gets that part. It just sort of like a, you know, I think they should have the freedom to choose. And again, I'm not always opposed to the freedom to choose, I think that people should be able to buy more or less whatever drugs they want with enough consent forms. But I think that the it comes down to states rely, that line is an example of the conflict avoidance that I'm talking about, because it doesn't really get to the heart of the matter, which is that would you want your kid would you would you abort a kid or not? That's the most Thinking most people are thinking or like if your girlfriend or if you or some are dating, or someone you're close to got pregnant, and they, you think that it was a mistake, would you want them to abort it? That's the most. So by saying they think it should come down to safe, that's kind of a Dodge. And saying that, you know, you're a libertarian on a lot of these, these issues is a way of kind of compartmentalizing your stances in a way that a lot of people aren't familiar with. And so they can't really, they don't know you. And so they don't really know what a lot of it would involve. And so they don't criticize you. Because you had the you had the idea that people are more okay with you than they are.

I mean, something like, I want the government out of my acts. It I mean, it sounds nice, it's it's a, it's very agreeable, a lot of people think that it makes it makes everybody sound like a bunch of homeowners association, soccer moms, I've just been going to bat bodies, basically bodies, wasting your time and so forth. But I mean, depending on the area, that can be a huge distortion, I mean, something like, get the government out of my healthcare. Well, that's not a situation where private solutions have worked very well in the minds of quite a few people. And many, many researchers on the topic. So I mean, a lot of ways it's glib, it's sort of like a cocktail policy position, like cocktail socialism. It's, it's, it's something that you can do to parties. Sounds good. And it's, it's unapproachable enough, it's on criticized enough. Like, something like I don't know, the idea of political correctness, or like, it takes a lot of balls, to defend the idea of political correctness at a party setting. Because someone like me, it's probably going to tell you that you're a moron for doing that. But or, or or like, I don't know, being a men's rights activist or but anything that has a commonly attacked position, being a Christian evangelicals, I'm like that. But saying that you're a libertarian, is, there's not like a existing repertoire of responses to most of what that is. And so most people won't have any sort of immediately negative opinion of you. Also, because most of its theoretical, you can kind of make it like this little dweeby debate game, like, Well, you know, I think, on this theoretical basis that this is that this happened, what do you think, well, this does happen and it kind of removes yourself from the accountability of these positions, because if you, if you implement a position and it goes wrong, then a lot of people are gonna think that you're at fault for that, or fault for voting for that or whatever. Like, if you go to for, like, if you vote for Hillary, Hillary's a ship president, a lot of people are gonna blame me for that. Likewise, the Trump Well, if you say something like why voted for Gary Johnson, then you kind of feel like you don't really have

much to be blamed for I mean, you still do, right? Because you could be a spoil or vote or something or, or, or, or your your, your non physician could indicate a lack of willingness to think about the real, crucial ship.

There are a lot of angles of attack there. But that's not the point. The point is that when people don't immediately attach a tangible real results to what you believe, then it just sort of becomes like a

it becomes more of just an exercise. Sort of like epistemic fanfiction so like, a lot of people will say that they're in favor of ending the war on drugs.

They haven't really thought about what that would mean. It would mean that a lot of people I mean, yeah, people are gonna die. That wouldn't have otherwise. This is also true with the existing system. The people talking about well, you know, if they legalize the tax to regulate it, the good all these new businesses, the economy, so forth, yeah, that's fine. But we don't talk about the very unsexy part where a lot of people overdose and die. And that's a trade off that I'm willing to take completely, because that's worth it. Because the ability to harm yourself even if you die is more important and more essential to the advancement of pharmacology of, of human health and so forth. Then, the current system where research is strictly strongly prohibited. And where access is incredibly limited, based on these restrictions where people are unjustly sent to jail for many, many years due to possession of substances that shouldn't even be prohibited in the first place. But again, to make that sacrifice, you have to be willing to accept that like 1000s of people who wouldn't have died otherwise are going to die. And yeah, yeah, I will, I will, dead ass look you in the eye and say that, you might say something like, Well, my kid is an addict. And if you made this stuff, purchasable, he might take it and he might die. And I'm gonna have to look that person in the eye and say, yeah, that's the trade off is worth it. But when you get into the realm of this, like, cocktail party, theoretical, like, Oh, well, you know, I think that if they did this, that we can't have this result. You know, like, if you loosen the restrictions on and blah, blah, blah, it's very, um, it's very difficult to imagine how you would be at fault for something because it's so disconnected from how people think it would actually be implemented. For the purposes of some attempt to comprehensive this, though, it's entirely possible that a position could be theoretical, and also the correct one. Many of our political positions now are theoretical, at one point, however, the tendency of the kind of cocktail policy people, not necessarily just libertarians, any sort of political position where it's theoretical aspect, gives you a certain kind of lack of accountability. A tendency of the cocktail politician, cocktail policy people, is that they, they tend to seek this out as a matter, of course. So I have some positions that I think are fairly theoretical. And that I think, would work but I don't have a whole lot of evidence for this. their positions, I think, would definitely work, have a lot of evidence for them, they've been implemented elsewhere. And then, and you know, there's a range, but a cocktail policy analyst is going to have a lot of their positions be theoretical, and that's going to be what they refer to in times of conflict, where a person could plausibly think that they're a piece of shit. And so I think that one of the dominant tendencies that have always had a distaste for and libertarianism is what seems like the avoidance of standards that can be held that a person can be held to. So Democrat, Republican or widely recognized political constructs and having libertarian be a foreign one, makes it harder to hold you to some sense of accountability, licensing. If you are against licensing, then you are then your if there are less standards with which to evaluate you. And this also means that you have you have fewer ways to be wrong. Schools. So yes, a lot of standards organizations are either private companies or nonprofits. However, a lot of these standards are also set by governments across the world. And so a lot of the standards originated from those governments having set those standards and so on. And certainly, although they might be private, they're certainly not for profit. In fact, for profit, a lot of for profit industry seem to actively resist standards not because those standard

not because resisting them is good, but because resisting standards allows you to come up with your own shit.

And then advancing your own standard for profit until someone else events is their own standard and so forth. Format wars are good example this example this phenomenon. homeschooling is very popular with libertarians and for every, for every very smart child of two professors. There's going to be 10 kids whose parents are frankly just they just want to religiously indoctrinate their kids and give them a watered down curriculum. That is mostly just what they the opinions they want their kids to have. And in a very libertarian society. Kids become carbon copies of their parents and It becomes harder to harder to overcome what doctrines and dogma your parents gave you. A lot of people don't think about the kind of authoritarian oppression of belief and free thought that would occur in a household where complete private property control is exercise. A lot of cults develop in that sort of setting. And again, it's not because that setting inherently encourages that it's because that is a setting where that mentality can best Foster. So if you wanted to create a cult, the best ideology for you would be libertarianism. Similar to how if you want it to be a match, the best thing about ideology is the welfare state.

If you wanted to you get the idea. There are various ulterior repurpose things of public political ideologies. And libertarianism is is not exempt from this.

But I think it's telling that a lot of the strongest arguments for libertarian, a lot of the more viscerally normie friendly arguments for libertarianism tend to be things that are kind of superficial, almost commercial, like, like, look at all the shit I can have, or look at all the cool shit that I can have this band or whatever, you know, like flame throwers, and guns, and like, can't we have like, like, blackjack and hookers? Or gambling or whatever? It's like, Yeah, sure. I support the legalization of gambling, I think you should be able to own guns, I and the war on drugs, let everybody buy whatever they want, and so forth. But all of that is at the level of possession of stuff. And it doesn't really get to the more advanced solutions. It's very it's it's libertarianism at the level of Amazon purchases. You know, it's very, it's almost consumer, it's consumers politics. Look at all the goodies I can have. Therefore, my political ideology must be appealing in some way. Well,

if that were all it took, then cronyism would be the correct way to go. If all that's needed is to convince if all this necessary to convince you and I have a political stance, is to just say, well look at all the goods you can have under this particular system, then then a system of cronyism is perfect. Because then why supporting your corruption I get the most shit. So that's not I mean, being the you know, second command to someone like not second exam being being high on the list of people who are in Kim Jong goons favor would be would be a good way to go under the argument or for that matter any other kleptocracy. And I think that libertarianism is so appealing at the level of stuff, because again, that's the level where you offend at least people and and it's the most superficially agreeable cocktail party friendly stance, the part where part where someone says, Well, yeah, I think you're, I think that your workplace should be able to fire you for whatever you say, digital social media, and that I don't have a problem with healthcare being tied to an employer, and, and so on and so forth. All of these things, these are real, these are real positions that people have and they're there they're real positions that people object to the whole like, I think abortion should be lifted with this Ace thing I mean, it's easy to talk about libertarianism at the level of like, haha, recreational nukes. But when you start getting down to how this would actually affect people's lives, which you almost never do, because again, you're not in a setting where you where you can, which goes back to the where we need public fora idea. We need places where people people can disagree about shit that matters in ferocious ways.

All of that creates a retreat from hard, messy moral problems and it I think the way to adequately summarize it is that it is the negligence of civics. All of the negative effects on democracy that occur are at the level of the individual avoided under libertarianism. This doesn't mean that libertarianism is not individualistic it is. But that's just one flavor of individualism. That's one flavor of the idea of freedom. So a society where people are free on paper to choose whatever they want, but were due to inertia. first mover advantage, due to lack of disincentives for choosing, short term gratification, and so forth, good all these things. People have ingrained habits and purchasing decisions and so forth that have made them very low agency people. They may be free on paper, but they have very little freedom to do what they want in terms of their goals, or their ambitions, or in striving for anything, I'd be able to buy things. But that's it. And I think that libertarianism has emerged, rather researched recently, because the left has become so restrictive and authoritarian in some ways, that it's lost sight of essential principles, like freedom of speech, like individual choice, like diversity of thought, especially diversity of thought. Because of the left failures on all of these issues, libertarianism has emerged as as as the only sane voice of the major political ideologies to counter that. Because the left has been so lockstep people have failed to recognize the elements of the left that strongly oppose the more authoritarian elements of the left. But I think, you know, if you think about what the correct policy solution to a given issue is fancy, not fancy, I'm fashionable, ideological terms that can be showed off at a cocktail party, or at some meet up for rationalists, or intellectuals or whatever, the end and just those. Those are often not often what get to policy results. The solutions to policies tend to come from researchers who make a certain issue their thing, get a lot of data on it, and get a sense of what the solution is. Sometimes it's deregulation, sometimes it's regulation. But coming up with a top down solution that's going to lead you to the decisions you should make ahead of time is ignoring the complexity, the complexity of these problems? And if you look at what a lot of experts on various political issues are, some are libertarians. Yes. Brian Kaplan is one and Brian Kaplan has made a lot of really good solutions, or rather proposed a lot of really good solutions. But so has Jonathan Hite. So as Steven Pinker so a lot of a lot of people who hold very informed positions on political issues tend to pretend to be a generic center or generic left or liberal, libertarian with not that strict of a adherence or liberal terian or whatever. Because binding yourself to an ideology first prevents you from having a very developed opinion on specific issues and a fringe you from integrating that information into your political framework. I started off I started off leading a libertarian because of my concerns with free speech and heterodoxy. And I thought that that was the solution for that. And now I no longer think that it is I think that some sort of center left position or some sort of question mark left position is going to be

how to best achieve heterodoxy and more freedom of speech in America. As your political positions positions become more More sophisticated, informed, nuanced. You will find it harder to categorize what you are. And that's fine. But if you do identify as libertarianism, rather, if you identify as a libertarianism if you subscribe to libertarianism is what I meant to say. I invite you to think about why you really do. What is the more motivating factor for that. So I think that free speech and heterodoxy are both really important, because I think that the truth is very important. Is libertarianism attractive to you? Because you get more stuff? Are you kind of like a hoarder on the inside? Is it because you want to be lazy? Do you think that you're advancing people's responsibility and accountability by doing this? What's your aim? There's not a correct answer here. In fact, please don't tell me your answer to this. This is for you, not me.

But I've often observed that libertarianism is the halfway point it's it's a. It's a transition for a lot of people in understanding what your political priorities are. And in this particular case, I don't think I think that it's a very useful political ideology at all, for free speech heterodoxy or true seeking. I don't have the podcast. I'm not gonna make one anytime soon, at least not a year or two from now. So I just post my thoughts. Sort of like a diary for me. This is by far the longest thing I posted in a very long time. So if you've made it this far, I really appreciate it. Feel free to tell me what you think. I hope that has been insightful for you or that you've gained something from this. I really do. I mean that. And if you disagree, I'm interested if you are sincere. If you think if you think that you're expressing something real and important, otherwise, I don't care. In other words, don't tell me. If not. If you have any recommendations for further reading or listening, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, thanks for your time. And that's all