As many of you know, after floating for a long time near Anarchist Island, I finally made the swim to its sunny shores within the last year. It is clear and green and beautiful here. When ones sees something so beautiful, one experiences a natural desire to tell others about it.
That impulse is not particularly well received, however, when one tries to tell people about anarcho-libertarian ideas.
It is easy enough to understand why people on the political left attack and deride anarchism. At the end of the day, the core principles of leftism must be imposed by force. They tend to know, either intuitively or explicitly, that what they want can only be accomplished through the power of a large state.
Certain inherent personality traits—the same natural tendency towards greater group-orientation that drives people leftwards in the first place—also cause them to revile anything that even remotely smacks of rejection of the group. In the minds of many, the modern democratic state has become synonymous with the collective. The state protects, embodies, and is the holistic expression of, the tribe. Thus, I entirely expect hostile reactions from people on the political left.
I was surprised, however, at the reaction from some on the conservative right.
I have been solidly on the political right for most of my adult life. I am a classical liberal—somewhere in that large overlapping area of shared ideas and provenance in the Venn diagrams of conservative and libertarian. Even though I no longer accept any involuntary governance as morally permissible, it is still entirely reasonable to call me a conservative. I believe that any libertarian order—minarchist or anarchist—can only survive if the majority of the people occupying that order model the kinds of values we tend to associate with conservatives.
It has thus been quite shocking to me to be assailed so viciously by some people whom I have long considered ideological allies.
Heated debates and discussions are common enough, especially online. The spats between Trump supporters and DeSantis supporters, for example, got a little testy a few months ago (and maybe they still are—I have stopped paying much attention to all that). But in every case that I have observed, such disputants still end up agreeing to disagree in the end.
Apparently, as long as all you’re doing is arguing over which monkey gets to rule the monkey cage, all is well.
Things change drastically the instant one suggests that there might be something fundamentally wrong with the cage itself or—heavens forfend!—that a world might exist outside the cage. I have never experienced such a combination of vitriol and condescension in my life—certainly not from people who are supposed to be ideological kin…
The suggestion that there is something fundamentally wrong with democracy—especially the American kind—brought down a torrent of derision (from someone who had called me friend) so extreme that I was just plain gobsmacked.
The observation, grounded in very careful analysis, that involuntary governance shares its fundamental qualities in common with involuntary servitude elicited, from a friend of more than 30 years, a quality of rudeness that was truly next-level. To this day, I still don’t know how I ought to respond.
The best adjective I can find for these levels of anger? Disproportionate. Definitely not appropriate as a reaction to comparatively academic ideological and philosophical propositions. The kind of anger that ought to be reserved for serious personal slights.
Naturally, I have been curious as to why this is. Why is everything okay so long as you’re within everyone’s accepted Overton Window, and not okay when you go anywhere considered to be out of bounds?
I am thinking out loud here, but I can think of six reasons. They are all interrelated, but each is sufficiently distinct to be worthy of separate treatment.
Indoctrination
Hoppe, Rothbard, and others have written extensively about the long relationship between intellectuals and the state. The gist, in essence, is this:
There have always been intellectuals, but in centuries past, there was not as much use for them. Yes, intelligent people occasionally produced important innovations, but for a long period, what matter most was that 97% of all people farmed their brains out just to ensure that everyone had enough to eat. Some intellectuals managed to find another use for their natural proclivities, however, in the courts of princes and potentates. Simply put, they devoted their mental talents to justifying the existence of the state, and in exchange, they got fed. The state gave them jobs they otherwise could not have had.
This (plus other factors, of course) has produced a body of argument going back for millennia that there are only two choices in this life: government or chaos. There have of course been intellectuals on the other side of that debate, but they have been far fewer in number.
As a consequence, most people believe the government or chaos formulation without question.
Fear
Naturally, no one wants chaos. If all you’ve ever been told—and all you’ve seen in fiction—is that government is the only thing standing between us and cannibalism, you are not likely to react well to any suggestion that we try anything else.
Ignorance
Virtually no one has ever heard any analysis of what that something else might be. A serious body of thought exists on the subject going back into the 19th century—with deep roots in classical-liberal thought going back 2,000 years—but few even know it exists. When a person is completely ignorant of any ideas on how we might possibly have order without government (“rules without rulers”), the indoctrination and the fear are going to win out every time.
I have had the words “Walking Dead” and “roving gangs” hurled at me repeatedly. I have also found that the more ignorant a person is of any of the anarcho-libertarian literature, the greater the levels of vitriol and sarcasm.
It is also important to note the degree to which people demand an instantaneous summation of that literature. I have had this said to me in almost as many words: If you cannot explain it to me in a short paragraph, to a degree I deem satisfactory, then all your ideas are stupid.
Patriotism and inertia
The same people who demand this one-paragraph satisfaction defend the Constitution as the only possible way we can ever govern our affairs (if only we would vote harder and get back to the way the Founders intended things to be). What they forget is the massive amount of apologetics it took to get the Constitution ratified in the first place.
The Constitution was not well liked. It had serious opposition. The Federalists had to write an extensive series of arguments to try to convince people. Even then, it was rammed through over major objections. The people defending the Constitution today take it so much for granted that they assume—entirely unrealistically—that they could have been convinced of its worth in a single paragraph.
Such is the way of things. As I mentioned last week,
“The system the Founders gave us changed the world. It was the best of its kind then, and arguably still is. It helped move the world away from the myth of hereditary authority. All of this is good and true. The problem is that we have converted that truth into a secondary belief: that this system is the best that can ever be. It is thus entirely unsurprising that conservatives should seek to defend it tooth and nail.”
Unsurprising, but also, at this point, unhelpful.
Lower trait-openness
Here’s where I don my Jordan Peterson cap and piggyback on one of the many things I have learned from that great man over the last five years: conservatives are, in the aggregate, lower in trait-openness. This means that conservatives are, in the aggregate, less open to new ideas and less creative.
There are upsides and downsides to this. Conservatives will better preserve accumulated human wisdom and not rashly throw out a baby with bathwater…but they sometimes cling to the known and familiar even when it is time to let go. Lower openness means more conscientiousness (and less neurosis), which is good, but it also means a lack of imagination. (Again, these are average correlations; they do not apply across the board.)
This all serves to make the patriotic inertia problem so much worse. This is how our great Founders did things. This is how we have always done things. I cannot imagine any other way of doing things. I like doing things the way we do things. Therefore, this must be how we continue to do things. All of that forgets, of course, that this is not how we have always done things, and that our Founders were, in many ways, radicals.
The Overton Window
Last week, Demi Pietchell (Starfire Codes) wrote a magisterial piece: “How To Smash the Overton Window.” The whole thing is must-read, but for our purposes here, the gist is simple: some people are freaked out by anything outside the range of what is deemed “normal.” Like, really freaked out.
Imagine a normal-distribution bell curve:
Within one standard deviation of the mean are ideas that pretty much no one thinks are radical. Between 1σ and 2σ are ideas that not everyone shares, but that most people recognize as within the Overton Window. Beyond 2σ and you’re at the edge of what is deemed to be acceptable. Beyond 3σ and you’re just a nut job…at least according to all the normies in that big bulging middle.
Some people will react negatively—even violently—to anything that is deemed out of bounds, and anarcho-libertarian ideas are definitely on the fringes. Of course, ideas from outside the Window often make it inside eventually, with the help of brave people who stick to their guns and prove their case. Unfortunately, this often has to wait until a generation of sticks-in-the-mud die off.
So there you have it. Those are some possible explanations for the disproportionate anger—and sometimes outright slavering rage—I have observed and experienced.
I don’t wish to sound holier-than-thou. I have put in great effort to learn to be civil, even in disagreement. I have met with success in recent years, but there were times, especially when I was younger, when I lost my cool. There were times when I proved Dunning-Kruger right. There are positions of which I am now ashamed that I once defended vehemently. I get it. I am not angry at those who seem so angry at me.
I just hope to convince them one day. After all, they are natural allies.
They recognize that the market does almost everything better than government—they just need to get over the hump and see that it is possible for the market to provide security, justice, and roads better too. They have the same core principles as anarchists—they just have not carried those principles out to their logical conclusions yet. They take as an article of reverent faith that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, but they continue to support a government that is not consensual in any way, and never was.
As soon as they realize all that…well, they will have had the same realizations that I have recently had. And once that happens on a large enough scale, involuntary governance is done for.
And the sooner, the better.
Good article! I happen to agree with conservatives on many issues, but it's purely by coincidence. Conservatives don't arrive at their ideas through logic or reasoning, but rather through inertia and indoctrination. Their parents/church/school taught them a good idea and therefore they believe it. Conversely, there's just as many bad ideas being mindlessly repeated by traditionalists as good ones.
If you challenge any of their ideas, they can't actually reason about it very well because they associate allegiance to their ideas with allegiance to their group, religion, cult, etc., so they just end up getting defensive and shut down.
It's easy to see the left-wing cults as insane because many of them are new and arose in our lifetimes. For instance, the LGBT nonsense has just happened in the past decade or less. Many of the conservative cults and ideologies go back decades or centuries - well before most of us were born, and so it's easy for conservatives to just take them for granted as valid traditions.
Conservatives are in just as many wacky and destructive cults as lefties. I wrote about a few of them here: https://www.libertarianprepper.com/p/conservative-virtue-signaling
In England conservatives are pro-monarchy. Conservatives in the US just happen to be anti-monarchy because they were born into that environment.
Conservatives conserve the status quo. They don't care what it is.