Milton Friedman might be a libertarian counterexample. Surely one of the most influential and popular libertarians and he seemed to be a charming and friendly guy.
I am a lifelong libertarian. I own an artist residency where we invite artists worldwide to live and work during the summer for free. I usually host around 16 artists a year. Almost without exception, they are politically left , many professing to be socialists (actually social democrats). I learned early on that if you want to have any influence on someone, they first have to like you. It starts with having something in common. In our case, it is art. Also, we all want the same things for everyone, like prosperity, good health, peace, etc., but we have different ideas on achieving these. I have not made many converts, but I have made many friends where there is mutual respect and tolerance of each other's views.
There isn’t a lot of “libertarian art” out there to bond over.
The closest might be the small c/small l work for Mike Judge. I’ve generally considered Hank Hill the embodiment of the kind of virtuous small town person Charles Murray tends to champion in his books.
The first episode is literally about an idiotic progressive from LA abusing his government authority.
I think that one thing the author ignores with his comments about socialism and religion is that both of these things are reputed to be about the love of mankind and community. Libertarianism, conversely, has the opposite reputation: atomism and selfishness. Libertarians being prickly and aggressive reinforce this stereotype. Libertarians being nice allow us to convey the proper meaning of our beliefs, that we are not against community and mutual help, just against it being forced and therefore devoid of any moral significance.
That is a good concern to raise, thanks for sharing!
I would respond: When you get down to it, many American leftists (Democrats?) are not really into the whole authoritarian control aspect of the harder left. Most are just nice people who worry about others and want to help them, and otherwise want to leave people alone to do their own thing. I had exactly that realization with one of my best friends, who agrees with me on pretty much everything, but has been a life long Democrat. "You aren't a Democrat, you are a bleeding-heart libertarian" was how I explained it to him.
For as angry and not nice as most American leftist activists are, the bailey in their motte and bailey dance is that some people are hurt and need help, we should help them, and mean old right wing people don't want to do that. Now, the last part of that bailey is incorrect, but the core of their argument is something that nice people care about, and arguing against that makes you look like not a nice person. Demonstrating that you do care about other people, but think that using government to do that only makes for worse problems, that really works.
Being a genuinely good person who helps other people, and getting close enough to people for them to know that is the case helps a lot too, but admittedly that is rather difficult to do for everyone :D
The problem is that while there are many honest libertarians who are genuinely interested in solving social problems but think that governments are terrible at doing this, there are also bad-faith libertarians who use the ideology as intellectual cover for their own selfishness. How is one to tell these two groups apart?
I think you can replace the word "libertarian" in that paragraph with just about any other political ideology, and it is still true. Separating the good from bad people is a problem that is unsolved by political labels, even though people seem keen to use those as a rough and ready heuristic. (Admittedly, if you are self labeling as "Nazi" or "Communist" it is probably a safe bet you are a bad person, but for the more normal ones it doesn't help much.)
For some reason libertarians get hammered with that selfishness accusation more than any other group, and it baffles me. Every group has selfish people who use the ideology to their advantage. I'd expect that selfish people probably distribute themselves among groups pretty evenly to reduce competition between themselves.
One of the main political implications of libertarianism, & probably the most politically successful part of it, is that taxes should be much lower; while different ideologies' ideas often turn out to benefit their supporters or at least seem to, it's probably a lot more intuitive to someone who doesn't think about such issues much to see why lower taxes benefit a taxpayer than, e.g., why occupational licensing benefits the more educated or why a protectionist believes higher tariffs would bring their jobs back. ("Libertarians just don't want to pay taxes" is probably the most common strawman of libertarianism I see.)
Yeah this is about right. The thing about "libertarians just don't want to pay taxes" is that it's a poor description of libertarianism, but a good description of what many people who claim to be libertarians actually believe. But probably also true of the statement "socialists just want other people to give them money."
It's projection. When someone accuses you of selfishness, remember that they have adopted their chosen -ology (most likely something leftist) to reassure themselves that they are generous people, not selfish (as they secretly fear they might be).
That's a good one. I used to run a libertarian meetup but eventually abandoned it because it was dominated by the latter (coupled with a lack of appreciation for the non-aggression principal).
Huemer is a bit sloppy there. For example, in his example of Rand grading his papers and him mowing the lawn, Rand herself would say that he violated the NAP by failing to uphold his part of the bargain. That is, by violating the contract he stole from her. That failing to uphold your end of a contract is wrongfully taking from another goes back a long way, at least to Adam Smith off the top of my head, and almost certainly to Cicero.
To be a little more clear myself, the non-aggression principle typically is formulated as not initiating aggression, at least that I have ever seen. I can't think of any big libertarian thinker that claims that ANY use of force is improper, and one who did would certainly be outside the normal set.
You probably need a mixture of friendliness and hostility to be a sucessful social movement: with a big dose of social desirability biasy mottos like “to each according to their means”
When i explain to people my libertarian leanings, they are usually surprised as i come across as very altrustic: i spend plenty of time helping people, give to charity, or just being friendly and non hostile: they usually read libertarian as being antiasocial or pro selfishness.
One usually needs to emphatically explain and signal their prosocialoty/friendliness for people to listen to libertarian ideas in my experience
Doesn't anybody else on this interesting comment thread agree with me that the aspects of agreeableness/disagreeableness under discussion are (i) highly heritable; (ii) mostly fixed after mid-childhood and therefore (iii) not generally altered well in adulthood as a conscious strategy?
I suppose we do have greater control in choosing our preferred messengers than in choosing our own personal messages. But even there, my liking Milton Friedman and despising Ayn Rand doesn't seem like a strategic calculation I'd even be constitutionally capable of making. It feels like I just like the kind of person he was and despise the kind of person she was, because of the kind of person I am.
Having good conduct in debate is far more important than any particular viewpoint.
When there is good conduct, then well-justified ideas get selected for. Because good conduct is when the whole discussion is about justifications of the ideas themselves, on the object level, rather than resorting to illegitimate subject-level social persuasive tactics like how bad your opponent's underwear might smell.
When there is bad conduct, then loud, dishonest, insulting rhetoric gets selected for, because that's what seems socially dominant.
If you want good ideas to be selected for, or if you want your ideas to be selected for because they are good, then you *have* to have good conduct. If you have bad conduct - i.e. not being "nice" - then even if you win at promoting your idea, you have lost the more important battle of promoting the social norm of good conduct of debate, which harms society.
Interesting thoughts, but the part on religion is superficial. Successful ideologies such as Christianity and Islam are so at least to a large degree because they bring hope of salvation, both for yourself and your wider community. This was replicated to some extent by communism/socialism/fascism etc.
If the point is to learn a lesson on how libertarians can be more successful, then think about how the ideology gives people hope for a better future for them and their families.
wow, the old firebrand vs. dove debate from the atheism heyday a decade ago... I'd guess the atheism -> libertarian pipeline is strong. Specifically the kind of libertarian who's predisposed to the same 'everything is politics, we're at war' worldview as those darned leftists he hates!
This is sort of related to a thought I’ve had before. People like to say that you should be especially nice when debating because you’re more likely to change your interlocutor’s mind. Maybe. But my experience (like everyone) is that you rarely change your interlocutor’s mind regardless. When debating someone, the real payoff is arguably changing the mind of observers who may not yet have a strong opinion. When it comes to this, though, it seems that sometimes being a bit cool/dismissive/nasty can be a benefit, as long as you don’t do it at the cost of sound arguments.
You don't change your interlocutor's mind. You might change audience members'.
(At least for public debates. At that point, a belief is entrenched. For more casual debates, maybe you could change their mind, because they're likely not as committed as if they were speaking on it publicly. Oh, and hey!--maybe *you* [general 'you'] could change your mind too! *wink*)
> Should libertarians become less nice, and more self-righteous, to gain popularity?
I don't know enough about the libertarians you mentioned to comment, but it seems to me that this strategy would work only for a group that already has significant power. If you already have substantial social or institutional power, being less nice to people who disagree with you is a way to get more power by making your political enemies socially less influential or pushing them out of (or at least reducing their power within) powerful institutions. If, on the other hand, you have only a small amount of power already, this sort of action marks you as an enemy of much of the rest of society, & thus probably prevents you from gaining allies & possibly makes your enemies decide to suppress you more directly. (If you're entirely powerless, you will probably be ignored entirely unless, like e.g. Satanists in Christian societies or white supremacists in modern America, your opponents' ideology requires them to treat you as a threat anyway.) Early 20th century communism seems like a good example: in post-civil-war Russia, where the Bolsheviks controlled the army & the higher levels of government, not tolerating non-Bolsheviks disempowered their enemies & won over opportunists to their side, while in Germany in the same period, where the Communists were a minor party in a democratic system (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_(Weimar_Republic)#Election_results they generally got less than 15% of the vote), their tendency to treat anyone to their right as an enemy prevented them from gaining power in a coalition or being able to effectively politically oppose the Nazis. Likewise, it seems like no coincidence that Christians supported freedom of religion before Constantine but afterwards supported the Roman Empire's suppression of paganism: in each case, they were only doing what was to their own advantage.
My take would be that niceness doesn't really matter and socialism and libertarianism have the relative popularity they do based on the appeal of their ideas.
I'd say Christianity and Islam are different; the lack of niceness is probably causative there. They captured governments and oppressed nonbelievers while encouraging conversion.
>infamously full of angry hateful rants (no pun intended) Ayn Rand
Rand created a rational morality for life and happiness and wrote philosophically profound novels concretizing those values with inspiring heros. For this, she is hysterically and evasively condemned by religious, nihilist and hedonist advocates of sacrifice.
Rand had a lot of failings in her life brought about by her philosophy and a lot of people in the objectivist movement tend to end up in the same trap. Randism is for instance almost always poison for families, there is a reason that protagonists rarely have families.
I enjoy her rejection of slave morality and the extolling of human achievement as much as the next guy, but if someone told me they were a card carrying objectivist I would consider it a red flag.
Perhaps it's time to eveolve the definition of socialism or social democrat or whatever currently deserves the ire of the less friendly libertatians. Let's face it, libertarians who are doing very well for themselves financially are also the ones who appear to be the loudest in defaming what it is to be a social democrat or maybe just simply a more compassionate citizen of the planet.
Maybe what the world needs now is a bit more compassion, a bit less rant & rave from those who have so much & who refuse to share with those less fortunate. Just try being kind for a change.
P.S. You may be thinking about anarchists. Different thing entirely. Seriously. Liberarianism is a philosophy of government (parallel to advocacy of democracy or of government multiculturalism or religious neutrality); anarchism is a philosophy that rejects government. They're truly different things.
Milton Friedman might be a libertarian counterexample. Surely one of the most influential and popular libertarians and he seemed to be a charming and friendly guy.
I am a lifelong libertarian. I own an artist residency where we invite artists worldwide to live and work during the summer for free. I usually host around 16 artists a year. Almost without exception, they are politically left , many professing to be socialists (actually social democrats). I learned early on that if you want to have any influence on someone, they first have to like you. It starts with having something in common. In our case, it is art. Also, we all want the same things for everyone, like prosperity, good health, peace, etc., but we have different ideas on achieving these. I have not made many converts, but I have made many friends where there is mutual respect and tolerance of each other's views.
There isn’t a lot of “libertarian art” out there to bond over.
The closest might be the small c/small l work for Mike Judge. I’ve generally considered Hank Hill the embodiment of the kind of virtuous small town person Charles Murray tends to champion in his books.
The first episode is literally about an idiotic progressive from LA abusing his government authority.
I think that one thing the author ignores with his comments about socialism and religion is that both of these things are reputed to be about the love of mankind and community. Libertarianism, conversely, has the opposite reputation: atomism and selfishness. Libertarians being prickly and aggressive reinforce this stereotype. Libertarians being nice allow us to convey the proper meaning of our beliefs, that we are not against community and mutual help, just against it being forced and therefore devoid of any moral significance.
That is a good concern to raise, thanks for sharing!
I would respond: When you get down to it, many American leftists (Democrats?) are not really into the whole authoritarian control aspect of the harder left. Most are just nice people who worry about others and want to help them, and otherwise want to leave people alone to do their own thing. I had exactly that realization with one of my best friends, who agrees with me on pretty much everything, but has been a life long Democrat. "You aren't a Democrat, you are a bleeding-heart libertarian" was how I explained it to him.
For as angry and not nice as most American leftist activists are, the bailey in their motte and bailey dance is that some people are hurt and need help, we should help them, and mean old right wing people don't want to do that. Now, the last part of that bailey is incorrect, but the core of their argument is something that nice people care about, and arguing against that makes you look like not a nice person. Demonstrating that you do care about other people, but think that using government to do that only makes for worse problems, that really works.
Being a genuinely good person who helps other people, and getting close enough to people for them to know that is the case helps a lot too, but admittedly that is rather difficult to do for everyone :D
The problem is that while there are many honest libertarians who are genuinely interested in solving social problems but think that governments are terrible at doing this, there are also bad-faith libertarians who use the ideology as intellectual cover for their own selfishness. How is one to tell these two groups apart?
I think you can replace the word "libertarian" in that paragraph with just about any other political ideology, and it is still true. Separating the good from bad people is a problem that is unsolved by political labels, even though people seem keen to use those as a rough and ready heuristic. (Admittedly, if you are self labeling as "Nazi" or "Communist" it is probably a safe bet you are a bad person, but for the more normal ones it doesn't help much.)
For some reason libertarians get hammered with that selfishness accusation more than any other group, and it baffles me. Every group has selfish people who use the ideology to their advantage. I'd expect that selfish people probably distribute themselves among groups pretty evenly to reduce competition between themselves.
One of the main political implications of libertarianism, & probably the most politically successful part of it, is that taxes should be much lower; while different ideologies' ideas often turn out to benefit their supporters or at least seem to, it's probably a lot more intuitive to someone who doesn't think about such issues much to see why lower taxes benefit a taxpayer than, e.g., why occupational licensing benefits the more educated or why a protectionist believes higher tariffs would bring their jobs back. ("Libertarians just don't want to pay taxes" is probably the most common strawman of libertarianism I see.)
Yeah this is about right. The thing about "libertarians just don't want to pay taxes" is that it's a poor description of libertarianism, but a good description of what many people who claim to be libertarians actually believe. But probably also true of the statement "socialists just want other people to give them money."
It's projection. When someone accuses you of selfishness, remember that they have adopted their chosen -ology (most likely something leftist) to reassure themselves that they are generous people, not selfish (as they secretly fear they might be).
That's a good one. I used to run a libertarian meetup but eventually abandoned it because it was dominated by the latter (coupled with a lack of appreciation for the non-aggression principal).
Not appreciating and sticking to the NAP is a good sign someone is a libertarian in name only. That's quite fundamental to the philosophy.
Unworkable, even in principle. When you try to apply it, the definitions quickly become circular and devolve into "he was wrong first".
I'm not sure I understand the logic. Could you provide an example showing the NAP and non-initiation with significant ambiguity?
I am not so sure about that. Here is a post by Michael Huemer:
https://fakenous.substack.com/p/naps-for-babies
Huemer is a bit sloppy there. For example, in his example of Rand grading his papers and him mowing the lawn, Rand herself would say that he violated the NAP by failing to uphold his part of the bargain. That is, by violating the contract he stole from her. That failing to uphold your end of a contract is wrongfully taking from another goes back a long way, at least to Adam Smith off the top of my head, and almost certainly to Cicero.
To be a little more clear myself, the non-aggression principle typically is formulated as not initiating aggression, at least that I have ever seen. I can't think of any big libertarian thinker that claims that ANY use of force is improper, and one who did would certainly be outside the normal set.
I don't think I would enjoy talking to this person, he seems very angry.
You probably need a mixture of friendliness and hostility to be a sucessful social movement: with a big dose of social desirability biasy mottos like “to each according to their means”
When i explain to people my libertarian leanings, they are usually surprised as i come across as very altrustic: i spend plenty of time helping people, give to charity, or just being friendly and non hostile: they usually read libertarian as being antiasocial or pro selfishness.
One usually needs to emphatically explain and signal their prosocialoty/friendliness for people to listen to libertarian ideas in my experience
Doesn't anybody else on this interesting comment thread agree with me that the aspects of agreeableness/disagreeableness under discussion are (i) highly heritable; (ii) mostly fixed after mid-childhood and therefore (iii) not generally altered well in adulthood as a conscious strategy?
I suppose we do have greater control in choosing our preferred messengers than in choosing our own personal messages. But even there, my liking Milton Friedman and despising Ayn Rand doesn't seem like a strategic calculation I'd even be constitutionally capable of making. It feels like I just like the kind of person he was and despise the kind of person she was, because of the kind of person I am.
Having good conduct in debate is far more important than any particular viewpoint.
When there is good conduct, then well-justified ideas get selected for. Because good conduct is when the whole discussion is about justifications of the ideas themselves, on the object level, rather than resorting to illegitimate subject-level social persuasive tactics like how bad your opponent's underwear might smell.
When there is bad conduct, then loud, dishonest, insulting rhetoric gets selected for, because that's what seems socially dominant.
If you want good ideas to be selected for, or if you want your ideas to be selected for because they are good, then you *have* to have good conduct. If you have bad conduct - i.e. not being "nice" - then even if you win at promoting your idea, you have lost the more important battle of promoting the social norm of good conduct of debate, which harms society.
Interesting thoughts, but the part on religion is superficial. Successful ideologies such as Christianity and Islam are so at least to a large degree because they bring hope of salvation, both for yourself and your wider community. This was replicated to some extent by communism/socialism/fascism etc.
If the point is to learn a lesson on how libertarians can be more successful, then think about how the ideology gives people hope for a better future for them and their families.
wow, the old firebrand vs. dove debate from the atheism heyday a decade ago... I'd guess the atheism -> libertarian pipeline is strong. Specifically the kind of libertarian who's predisposed to the same 'everything is politics, we're at war' worldview as those darned leftists he hates!
Truly interesting
This is sort of related to a thought I’ve had before. People like to say that you should be especially nice when debating because you’re more likely to change your interlocutor’s mind. Maybe. But my experience (like everyone) is that you rarely change your interlocutor’s mind regardless. When debating someone, the real payoff is arguably changing the mind of observers who may not yet have a strong opinion. When it comes to this, though, it seems that sometimes being a bit cool/dismissive/nasty can be a benefit, as long as you don’t do it at the cost of sound arguments.
You don't change your interlocutor's mind. You might change audience members'.
(At least for public debates. At that point, a belief is entrenched. For more casual debates, maybe you could change their mind, because they're likely not as committed as if they were speaking on it publicly. Oh, and hey!--maybe *you* [general 'you'] could change your mind too! *wink*)
> Should libertarians become less nice, and more self-righteous, to gain popularity?
I don't know enough about the libertarians you mentioned to comment, but it seems to me that this strategy would work only for a group that already has significant power. If you already have substantial social or institutional power, being less nice to people who disagree with you is a way to get more power by making your political enemies socially less influential or pushing them out of (or at least reducing their power within) powerful institutions. If, on the other hand, you have only a small amount of power already, this sort of action marks you as an enemy of much of the rest of society, & thus probably prevents you from gaining allies & possibly makes your enemies decide to suppress you more directly. (If you're entirely powerless, you will probably be ignored entirely unless, like e.g. Satanists in Christian societies or white supremacists in modern America, your opponents' ideology requires them to treat you as a threat anyway.) Early 20th century communism seems like a good example: in post-civil-war Russia, where the Bolsheviks controlled the army & the higher levels of government, not tolerating non-Bolsheviks disempowered their enemies & won over opportunists to their side, while in Germany in the same period, where the Communists were a minor party in a democratic system (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_(Weimar_Republic)#Election_results they generally got less than 15% of the vote), their tendency to treat anyone to their right as an enemy prevented them from gaining power in a coalition or being able to effectively politically oppose the Nazis. Likewise, it seems like no coincidence that Christians supported freedom of religion before Constantine but afterwards supported the Roman Empire's suppression of paganism: in each case, they were only doing what was to their own advantage.
My take would be that niceness doesn't really matter and socialism and libertarianism have the relative popularity they do based on the appeal of their ideas.
I'd say Christianity and Islam are different; the lack of niceness is probably causative there. They captured governments and oppressed nonbelievers while encouraging conversion.
>infamously full of angry hateful rants (no pun intended) Ayn Rand
Rand created a rational morality for life and happiness and wrote philosophically profound novels concretizing those values with inspiring heros. For this, she is hysterically and evasively condemned by religious, nihilist and hedonist advocates of sacrifice.
Rand had a lot of failings in her life brought about by her philosophy and a lot of people in the objectivist movement tend to end up in the same trap. Randism is for instance almost always poison for families, there is a reason that protagonists rarely have families.
I enjoy her rejection of slave morality and the extolling of human achievement as much as the next guy, but if someone told me they were a card carrying objectivist I would consider it a red flag.
Your intuitions are noted. Are they better than racist intuitions?
Perhaps it's time to eveolve the definition of socialism or social democrat or whatever currently deserves the ire of the less friendly libertatians. Let's face it, libertarians who are doing very well for themselves financially are also the ones who appear to be the loudest in defaming what it is to be a social democrat or maybe just simply a more compassionate citizen of the planet.
Maybe what the world needs now is a bit more compassion, a bit less rant & rave from those who have so much & who refuse to share with those less fortunate. Just try being kind for a change.
There, I said it.......
Your assumption, that libertarians are less compassionate citizens of the planet, is noted. I suggest that it's also wrong.
P.S. You may be thinking about anarchists. Different thing entirely. Seriously. Liberarianism is a philosophy of government (parallel to advocacy of democracy or of government multiculturalism or religious neutrality); anarchism is a philosophy that rejects government. They're truly different things.