Maybe the Truth Doesn't Always Set You Free

[kmo]

Are there people you admire but don't like to talk to because you don't like your side of the conversation whenever the two of you get together? I really notice it as a podcaster. There are some interviewees with whom I fall into an easy conversational vibe and the hour flies by. Other conversational partners are like my counterpart in a duel, but

Comments

[peristaltor]

The libertarian ethic stands on individual responsibility and individual autonomy. If the sovereign individual is a fiction, a trick of the light, or merely a rhetorical device, then the rights of individuals could be equally contingent.

Yup. I started to realize how malleable our personalities were when I began my dive into advertising. I really hate ads, for example, not because I merely find them irritating; I find them irritating because many of them work, and work long before I think they've had any effect. Were I some individual in the Randian tradition, I would be able to select and choose my opinions without worry of contamination by outside pressures and competition to my cognition.

When Steve Keen and Yves Smith outlined the rise of neoclassical economics and how it depended upon furthering the myth of Homo economicus, wow! We, according to papers outlining how the theories work, are perfect producers of goods and perfectly-well-informed consumers, and this symmetry of information destroys any advantage one may have over the other.

In fact, the heavy weight Homo economicus carries in neoclassical econ theory makes me more than suspect that the rise in Libertarian philosophy has at its roots paid amplification by the noise machine.

It might be that the belief that individuals don't exist outside of their social relations reliably leads to oppressive social orders.

The flip side might be true, as well. I could regard a social order as oppressive if it refused to consider the plight of a person before a crime was committed, as certain law-and-order types do when they deny that an earlier history of abuse and torture should not be considered in determining guilt or even sentencing.

Ever read any Horatio Alger books? They are the most trotted out for supporting the by-the-bootstraps fellow. I managed to read one, and couldn't help thinking how frickin' impossible it would be to roll out of a heap of alley excelsior cheerful and ready to black the boots of strangers just to get enough coin for breakfast. More bullshit fiction was never written.