https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jlbc1g/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/
Libertarianism is appealing as a political philosophy for two reasons.
It sounds principally just and high-minded. People are FREE, afforded dignity and respect independent of the existence of large political institutions, and it purports to support rules that would prevent many great historical injustices.
It invokes simplistic intro-level microeconomics models and concepts to argue that the practical consequences of the philosophical and political conceptions in point A are positive, that voluntary association leads to good outcomes.
What then, to do with the facts of market failures - what to do about transactions wherein someone is being exploited despite the voluntary nature of agreements? What to do about acts nominally between two parties, but that affect those not party to the contracts - externalities?
When confronted with the facts of market failures that cannot be hand waved away (or with as in the link, market failures that personally affect the libertarian nerd community in a negative fashion), there are two possible responses.
OR
The cognitive dissonance in the Libertarian -> Fascist pipeline is resolved in manner 2.
This misses the elephant in the dog-cage (never mind living room): racism.
Libertarianism – an ideology native to the USA – appeals to those inclined towards white supremacism because it provides a perfect excuse for running society in a manner that doesn’t provide any kind of support for “those” people.
(That’s before we get into the whole “I am autonomous” -> “I own myself” -> “why can’t I (or someone else) sell myself?” -> “it’s okay to own people who sold themselves” -> “people are property” logical train-wreck that gives us the typical libertarian rationalization for why chattel slavery is reasonable, logical, rational, and (ultimately) good.)
And fascists have a natural affinity for racism because fascism is predicated on dividing people into an in-group (worthy/the master race) and an out-group (everyone else).
Libertarianism is ultimately a philosophy of freedom for property rather than people. And guess what it takes to maintain property as an institution?
Libertarianism for me, fascism for thee. Those who would use their liberty to despoil the free utopia must be exempted from society and subject to state violence.
To be fair, this critique can be leveled at any would-be government of ideals: the state reserves the right to do violence in defense of the ideals. If there’s a pipeline, it’s in presenting a conception of society so radically divorced from reality that state violence is the only imaginable way to sustain it.
The hetronormativety, the objectification of women, the stench of inceldom.
Fascists do indeed deliberately recruit libertarians, who are the easiest to “redpill”. They are very explicit about this strategy because they know how naive libertarians are. While libertarianism draws some good conclusions about certain things, it’s completely brain dead under the surface. It’s constructed to defend itself against arguments from the left but is totally internally inconsistent.
I argue with my older brother a lot, he’s kind of an edgelord, and he’s class jumped via a string of tech promotions, and he maintains that he’s just a centrist/libertarian who “just wants to grill.” But he’s on this alt-y sort of media diet, he apparently watches Tucker Carlson and Tim Pool and a lot of JRE. and I can’t figure out if he’s being coy about his actual beliefs or if he’s in this weird superposition of thinking that his lukewarm support of modern conservatism (including a lot of “both sides”ing) is at all consistent with libertarian beliefs; I challenge him on this a lot. Then the other day he says, “well maybe I kind of like the nationalism.” Son of a bitch, my own brother has been brainwashed.
There’s something poetic about how half the guys LARPing as Jack Thompson in that thread were singing a very different tune six years ago.
The main issue with libertarianism, is that in reality we had it all - child labor, legal drugs, assassinations, all of it. And then people would look at this sorry state of affairs, and freely associate and group together and get rid of it and build the world we live in today. Hundreds of times around the globe, people decided they didn’t like it that way. Hundreds of times, the market wouldn’t allocate enough resources to preserve the libertopia.
This “free market” of theirs would require a malevolent god to maintain. Nothing short of a malevolent god would do - any person or group of people with enough power to maintain something like that, would just turn it into a dictatorship.
Libertarianism exists in 2 forms. People who just want to handicap majority of people’s power via propaganda (e.g. keep techies from unionizing). That is an attainable goal, there’s nothing inherently self contradictory about persuading suckers. And those who bought into this propaganda. There’s some overlap.
peter thiel lives in a society
or 3 if only we had the “right people” live in our society, then we wouldn’t have all these problems. Therefore we should round-up/exclude/gas “the wrong people.”
Don’t forget these other bad faith arguments:
Garbage ideas from garbage people.
Being a libertarian in a country that enslaved and legally subjugated a group of people for centuries is pants on head retarded. “Hey, we’ve stopped kicking you in the balls now, so we’ll make this the ‘no kicking in the balls’ country and call it even?”
Yudkowsky targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
Yudkowsky honestly thinks this is a battle he can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
Libertarianism is always encapsulated for me by the story of Grafton, NH. Bears don’t care about your freedoms XD
Culturally though, libertarianism also seems to draw a lot of…bunker types? People who prepare for the apocalypse by hoarding weapons and MREs instead of, you know, useful stuff like looms and beehives and farming equipment. There’s a persistent persecution fantasy there of the “Live free or die” persuasion that is constantly preparing for an armed standoff against The Government in the name of Freedom, and when you constantly put yourself in a wartime mentality, you open the door for a lot of fascistic thoughts and behaviors (see also America anytime we’re in a war, including the last 19-odd years of the ‘War on Terror’). Drops in patience and empathy, glorification of violence, suppression/rejection of dissenting speech, lashing out against visible representatives of the perceived enemy, ostentatious displays of loyalty and power…stop me when this starts to sound familiar.
Libertarianism as a door opener for fascism: When “bugs” are features
If you look around, there’s a lot of Libertarians who actually believe in market failures and externalities. Their solutions are different from others. Solutions range from pigouvian taxes, LVT, zoning reforms, NIT/UBI and a lot more. Not to mention a lot of Conservatives who don’t want to belong to Republican identity have started calling themselves Libertarians.