Confessions of a former libertarian
Years ago I took the libertarian slant that national borders were artificial constructs. But now that I own a house, I'd rather visitors come through the front door than sneak through the back window.
I recently read Ayn Rand for the first time since the mid-2000s, that youthful time in which one either becomes a libertarian or a communist (there are really no other options for an inexperienced teenager). Atlas Shrugged is a beast of a tome, a didactic thousand-page monster of a book. It took me almost a month, and I had to break it up with a few easy Grisham novels.
After reading it as an adult I came to the conclusion that Rand, the progenitor of libertarianism, had probably never actually started a company, invested in a company, hired someone, fired someone, or made a whole lot of money. The ideas in her books are attractive, but they are not experiential.
This isn’t a book review, however: this is an ideology review.
Like many of my generation, those who grew up in the era of 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, I was predisposed to be a libertarian. The reason that the clever guys of my generation became libertarian is that we were caught in between two nasty sides of the same coin: the Republican warmongers on one side, and the Democrat warmongers on the other side. Libertarianism was the only anti-war alternative.
When I headed off to college in 2008, we were fresh off a stretch of Iraqi disaster. For a few brief moments, Obama looked like the guy who would stop the war that Bush began, and so libertarians hipsters everywhere, engulfed in banjo music and IPAs and Chuck Taylors and Wayfarers, thought they might become Democrats. Then Obama began droning people left and right, ramping up the war, and his hypocrisy pretty much solidified the libertarians.
My problem with libertarianism didn’t begin by looking at foreign policy: it began at home.
Nobody can deny the cultural decline that seems to have started in the aughts and accelerated in the teens. Things just started being generally crappy. People became polarized. Music got bad. Comedies weren’t funny any more. Things got expensive. Above all, there was just some sort of oppressive vibe and the recognition that it just wasn’t great any more.
What I failed to put together, high on my ivory throne of laissez-faire total freedom, is that political frameworks which only function when people are good aren’t very great frameworks at all. The only reason the law exists, after all, is because nobody is good.
My libertarian friends still have the same rallying cries. I empathize with the root desires of these calls, but I can’t support them, because this ideology is not only pragmatically questionable, but perhaps even actually damaging to culture.
They’ll say things about the non-aggression principle, live and let live, laissez-faire markets, the illegality of stop signs, and “what they do in their private lives shouldn’t concern me.” I’ve held strongly to these principles in the past, so I understand the attraction.
The reality, though, is that people are aggressive, they won’t let you just live, they will cheat you in the markets, they will run stop signs, and what they do in their private lives never stays in their private lives.
And this is why I became an authoritarian.
There was a time, a decade ago or so, that I took the libertarian slant that national borders were artificial constructs. Who are we to say who can move? But that was before I owned a house. Now that I have a house, I’d much rather visitors come in through the front door rather than sneak in the window.
The greatest strength of libertarians (viewing others in good faith, with a rosy-hued view of the world) is their greatest weakness. Often, I wonder if the ideology simply obscures a lack of conviction in our beliefs, or a lack of courage to stand up for our conscience.
Whether it does so or not, it turns out that power is always a one-way street. If one does not assert themselves as the authority, someone else will (and has, for decades now).
We have been run over rough-shod because of this. As it turns out, if our morality isn’t imposed on the world, some bastardized alternative form will be imposed on us.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism contends that there is only objective truth and objective falsehood. I agree with this part. The massively huge flaw in her work is that it is essentially autistic: there is no real understanding of human nature that underlies it. Objectivism sees the world as a rigid spreadsheet formula: the unwritten assumption is that people should behave a certain way because the outcomes are better. It makes sense on paper, but who among us hasn’t known a hundred people who sabotaged their own lives through sheer stupidity, stubbornness, selfishness, or simply rolling the dice?
What Rand doesn’t really address, though, is that if there is truly only one objective truth, why shouldn’t it be enforced?
There is still a latent, idealistic strain laissez-faire living deep inside me. But, hopefully, I can one day extinguish it entirely.