Human Nature, Primate Instincts, Classical Liberalism and Socialism

[jordan179]

(originally posted to john_j_enright on his blogHuman nature, both from the viewpoint of preference and for capability, is antithetical to socialism. The reason why from the point of view of preference is that the human concept of "property" is ultimately derived from the animal instinct of "territory"; from the point of view of capability, due to informational

Comments

[eta_ta]

What about the dream of contemporary Libertarianism? Of the sort that advocate open borders, unlimited immigration, immediate stop to involvement of American Army&Navy in all and every military operation and replacement of all government law enforcement agencies with private mercenary companies?

[jordan179]

Private security agencies can't be the supreme police authorities in a polity because of the inevitability of armed conflict between rival private security agencies and the difficulty of any just resolution to such conflicts given the nonexistence of higher security agencies. As for abolishing armed forces for defending against other States, this has the clear disadvantage that it leaves the libertarian realm defenseless against attack: private security agencies simply can't be as big or as well-coordinated as national armed forces. In the realm of violence, the State rules supreme, by necessity. Force is the ultimate "natural monopoly."

[eta_ta]

Well, yeah; that was the dividing line between me and the local libertarians of a Reason- and Ron Paul- persuasion - or even online, not so local personages. I attempted to raise few similar objections at the bloggers' gatherings, but realized - this is where the Left merges with Left Libertarianism and thought it would be wise to remove myself from the company.

I think these things is what is hurting libertarianism in the long run.

[ford_prefect42]

Just try to argue for the incremental approach. Yes, it may or may not work to implement anarchocapitalism, but we can get a lot closer than we presently are.

[marycatelli]

Actually, a rise of legally-mandated racial oppression was much more a creature of the early 20th-century than earlier. Segregation was regularly slapped down in the Reconstruction South, for instance; it took Woodrow Wilson to withdraw the feds and let them go at it.

[jordan179]

Yes, that's true. I would argue it comes from the timelag between philosophy and policy: the racialist theories of the mid to late 19th century did not get to be publicly implemented until the very late 19th to early 20th century. The racist slavery of the 18th-19th centuries was more of a creature of the religious bigotry of 16th-17th century philosophy, because of the identification of blacks with "Moors" and "heathens."

[madwriter]

I can't speak for the rest of the South, but also, in my home state of Virginia, economic crises --> minorities arguing for more racial equality --> more repressive racial laws. The Panic of 1837, a few years after Nat Turner's rebellion, crushed the last of Virginia's strong native abolitionist movements. The Panic of 1893 led to a rise in blacks demanding equal rights (including boycotting Richmond's streetcars), and Virginia implemented strict segregationist laws. The post-WWI agricultural slump (in much of VA the Depression started a few years early) on the heels of Woodrow Wilson's federal segregation sparked a civil rights movement in the early 1920s that the state responded to by filling in the "missing" segregation laws along with pioneering eugenics.

[ford_prefect42]

While I agree that the utopia of classic liberalism is unattainable, there is one major important difference. In striving toward classical liberal utopia, you get peace, prosperity, and a shrinking list of major injustices. In striving toward communist utopia, you get mass murder, oppression, and genuine horror.

Political philosophies must be judged not solely on what happens when they are fully implemented, but on what happens when they are attempted.

[jordan179]

I completely agree with your statements. Classical Liberalism is a far more practical philosophy than Socialism because Classical Liberalism works well even with partial implementation. Socialism doesn't. This is because the natural selfish impulses of each economic actor work to reinforce Classical Liberalism, for instance by creating gray or black markets in forbidden goods; and in the process to undermine Socialism. As political actors, though, individuals have stronger Socialist tendencies.

[zornhau]

This is the problem; the system has to work with humans as they are, rather than how we would like them to be.

Socialism violates individualism. Capitalism violates collectivism.

Square that circle!

[lostboy_lj]

I'm not so sure that our darkest instincts are "our strongest ones", at the individual level. They are simply the easiest ones to generalize across a polity of strangers. Our best instincts - love, kindness, fellowship, generosity, etc - are almost always particularized to individuals. The kind of empathic bonds that our best instincts rely on for expression require much more direct information about the subjects of those instincts than emotions like fear, envy and anger do. I think that, especially in a democracy, the less particularized instincts will appear to be the most powerful ones, because it's very easy to express hatred for certain groups in a generalized, collective way but extremely difficult (and maybe impossible) to express something like love in a generalized, collective way

[marycatelli]

The problem is that good people are like good ladders -- every rung has to be good for it to be a good ladder. You can't manage with a ladder where slightly more than half of the rungs are bad.

Not being stronger is not enough to prevent their being immensely damaging.

[lostboy_lj]

Sorry, but I don't think that people are anything at all "like ladders", nor that every aspect of a person must be good for them to be deemed a good person in sum. That is a very reductive -- maybe even fascistic -- way of looking at the human condition, in my opinion. There can be good-but-flawed people. In fact, I assume that's the only kind of person possible; anything beyond that would be a God of some sort.

Or maybe I misunderstand your analogy. Who is the "you" in the sentence, "You can't manage with a ladder where slightly more than half of the rungs are bad"? In any case, the notion of a person as something to be climbed kind of repulses me.

[marycatelli]

Your good-but-flawed people are capable of utterly wrecking society.

As for the ladder, it was an analogy. Your natter about "climbing" is repulsive and odious, because you know perfectly well that the analog to the ladder's purpose is that human beings constitute society -- or don't, and it falls about, and that is using a red herring to evade the point.