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I don't know what context this is in, but yeah, pretty much.
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Well, Moldbug isn't a libertarian either: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-am-not-libertarian.html
But as for why I'm not a libertarian: 'libertarian' these days tends to mean strictly 'market libertarian', which requires that forms of power outside that of the state are ignored, or at least blamed somehow on the state. Of course, that can be done in the abstract; but in practice, there's information asymmetry, human irrationality, and status marking (see: Lacoste), not to mention limited time and patience on the part of consumers, and the opposition of 'big business' to any restraint on the market, and therefore to a healthy (non-commodifiable) culture.
I tried to be a market libertarian once, when I was in high school; but I couldn't pull it off. I accepted its abstractions for a while, but even then, I couldn't buy that the best way to implement market libertarianism would be to head straight for it in the Reaganite sense. A sane free market would require a radical decentralization of power, a concern with *long*-term profit, and a cultural shift against recentralization, but all that the libertarians I knew were concerned with was deregulation, which would lead only to an obscene caricature thereof, wherein the people are reduced to isolated serfs whose interactions with each other and the world are ruled and controlled by the iron fist of megalomaniacal Mickey Mouse emperors concerned only with maximizing short-term profits.
Some market libertarians will point out that corporations are the cause of a lot of those problems, and that the market would be much less dysfunctional without that particular government construct; but this never seems to translate into their actual platform.
I ended up clinging to the trappings of market libertarianism throughout high school, mostly for social and psychological reasons: most of the people I talked politics with were market libertarians who I didn't stand a chance against in a debate, and anyway, the ideology seemed to offer a challenge to the absurdity I saw at the time, of a Third World-like monster-government, cancerously corrupt, run by tribalistic incompetents intent on advancing those they personally favored regardless of merit. (Of course, I saw myself as one of the meritous, who could easily succeed in the proper meritocracy they sought to destroy. I was in high school, so I guess that's to be expected.)
But once I landed myself in community college, all illusions of meritocratic success were forced out of my head, and I ended up a distributist. (That's something I'll admit to still being sympathetic to, although I really don't get their thing about guilds.)
Now, if you mean libertarian in the sense Robert Anton Wilson used it, or in the sense Thomas Sowell occasionally hinted at, a decentralistic paranoia, a distrust of authority due to their probably-inherent cluelessness, then I'd probably count as one. But nobody means that anymore. -
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It seems to me that they're asking different questions.
The left tends toward thinking about pseudo-Rawlsian, binarized justice: pseudo-Rawlsian in the sense that it's concerned, at times exclusively, with raising the maximin, and binarized in the sense that it draws binary divisions with regard to finding the minimum to be raised. Men are the Oppressor, women are the Oppressed; whites are the Oppressor, nonwhites are the Oppressed, etc. The left also tends more toward thinking globally than the right, but that's not universal; there are many leftists who are concerned primarily with countrywide issues.
The right, on the other hand... well, I'm not sure it's fair to paint the right as one unit. That said, the characteristic that distinguishes it from the left is that it doesn't phrase the question of politics in terms of justice alone; the best examples of this are Moldbug, who is concerned explicitly and exclusively with preserving order, and Carlyle, who at least seems to phrase the question of politics as one oriented toward (a particular vision of) the good. (I think Lasch tends toward that as well, given his criticism of the 'culture of narcissism' and conservative tendencies, but the visions are obviously different—to say Carlyle was not a conservative would be an understatement—and, at least in what little I've read of him, Lasch is not particularly forward about such things.) -
I'm not sure how much sense it makes to postulate a one-dimensional 'political spectrum' of the sort you're referring to there. If the partisanship it leads to isn't enough of a reason to oppose it, the endless, tedious ideographic ping-pong over whether 'fascism' 'is' of the 'left' or the 'right' should be.
That said, there definitely is a thing that can be referred to as leftism. It seems to me that one of its key axioms is Rawlsianism, the supremacy of distributive justice, defined as the (game-theoretically and psychologically flawed) minimax. I don't buy that, so I'm probably not a leftist. I don't hold to the liberal ideography, so I'm not a liberal, making me a 'rightist'.
There's not really such a thing as the 'right', as far as I can tell; it's the leftover category for everyone who doesn't fit into one of the other movements. I doubt Pat Buchanan and Alain de Benoist would agree on... well, just about anything. -
I started reading Front Porch Republic, which made me start to realize the problems with the libertarian worldview: if value is expressed solely in economic terms and anything larger than the individual is dismissed, as happens quite frequently within libertarianism (although I admit it's not strictly necessary; I called myself a paleolibertarian for a while), the sort of community whose noted absence had made my life quite a bit worse (alienation!) is essentially impossible. Until then, though, I didn't recognize the possibility of community. I, typically for my generation, thought that such structures could only propagate through force, and were unequivocally negative. (New Atheism with culture instead of religion, I suppose.)
And I guess it helped that, a month or two before that, I managed to get myself forced out of a four-year college (for, basically, being too much of a 'redneck') and into community college. It's a bit hard for a dead-ending prole to be a market libertarian. -
A bit of both. Our value system is a wreck, but I think we get that there's a paradigm shift going on, so maybe the wreck will clean itself up a bit as we figure things out / grow the hell up. Also, we're the first generation to grow up with the internet, so who knows where that'll go. My guess is that it'll be much more toward webcomics than Carlyle, but I'm generally rather pessimistic. Of course, what we really have to worry about with the internet, I think, is the destruction of place, or at least the detachment of culture from place, feeding into alienation: if we can find people across the world who are very much like us, why should we bother associating with the people around us? (This is only problematic because internet interaction cannot properly substitute for real-world interaction.) I can relate more to some people a ten-hour plane flight away than I can with just about anyone within a ten-mile radius, and from what I gather, my situation there is not at all uncommon.
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Definitely something by Robert Anton Wilson, although I'm not sure what. My guess would be Cosmic Trigger, although the Illuminatus Trilogy is definitely somewhere up there.
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Everyone I'd be interested in meeting either doesn't speak English, is dead, or most likely wouldn't qualify as famous. If I'm allowed preparation time beforehand, I'd probably go read up on dialectics so I can explain it to Chomsky.
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nydwracu’s Bio
sure why not
