perfidy

Aretae had a post up earlier today, and another yesterday, that hit right at what I've been thinking about. The one thing that holds me back from going full hog Moldbug is just the idea of Freedom. Moldbug would likely say that I'm just confused - that without order, you can't have liberty. And I can see that. Anarchy is not freedom, it's a free-for-all. "What is good?" someone famously asked. Is it better to be able to do whatever you please, or to have a peaceful and ordered society that allows you a maximum, if not theoretically absolute degree of liberty? Does having the vote magically make us free? Clearly not and I think that that points out a key confusion in our modern estimations of freedom, liberty, authority and the like.

Now I know Johno thinks I hate his Freedom, but I think it might be a case of that word not meaning exactly what we think it means. Do we feel more free because we have the right of franchise - does this give us some sort of idea that we are involved somehow in the direction of our ship of state? I think yes to the former, but only to the extent that the latter is operational. We voted, we did our part, and we are satisfied for the next four years no matter what sort of horrific actions are taken in our name - be they the passing of a universal healthcare bill or starting a land war in Asia. That keeps us complacent while dark forces align against us. The permanent civil service bureaucracy, academia, the vast right wing conspiracy, corporate interests, the Bilderbergers.

True liberty is vanishingly absent. I cannot put in a light fixture without paying a $250 fee and filing plans with my county. I can't light up a smoke in a bar after work. I can't have my son sit in the front seat of my car. I can't kill any of the hundreds of deer that wander through my woods. I can't start a business without navigating a frightening wicket of regulations and tax laws. I can't, I can't... Most of these restrictions would be anathema to our founding fathers, who basically started a whole damn war over the equivalent of a postage stamp fee.

So, yeah, I'm on board with the libertarian liberty thingy. Free up everything so we can have that mad economic growth. But how does that society run itself? How does it not encrust itself with all the things we hate, or get invaded by heavily armed agrarian reformers? What if there's a dispute between my private security firm and yours? Do they select champions and let God favor the right?

And really, is liberty everything we need? Equality, I think we have a surfeit of. Fraternity is doing fine, seeing as I'm an only child. What perhaps we are lacking is tradition and order. Look at large parts of our nation's capital and ask yourself if liberty and equality are more important than order. A while back, Aretae had a post about how traditional, conventional wisdom is going to be most right, most of the time, for most people.

In the comments to one of Aretae's posts that I linked up there at the top, I commented:

I'm torn. On the one hand, your defense of libertarianism is righteous and strong. On the other, Moldbug's got history at his back.

Something you said a while back in regard to traditional advice is going to be best for most people, moist of the time has been crouching in the back of my mind, waiting. Could it be, that while the our desired end state is something like what you are advocating - minimal government interference, economic growth, unicorns - requires something more? That the place of a king who is not a dictator is to provide the traditional bulwark for libertarian wackiness?

Back in the late 1700s, as you've argued, we had freedom that was unprecedented, in an intelligent populace largely isolated from danger. This resulted in the growth! growth! growth! that you go on about. It seems that our current system, can't maintain its current vector without running into something ugly sooner or later. We've layered and slathered it with all sorts of things that you, I and Moldbug can all agree are very bad indeed.

The problem with libertarianism for me hasn't been the economics - that, to me, is or should be fairly self evident. But the idea of private security companies does not fill me with joy, exactly. And other like problems. Why not have a king? It would provide something more than an abstraction for the ordinary run of citizen to latch on to, provide a framework of tradition that would provide maximal outcomes for most everyone. We'd have pageantry. Which isn't crucial, but hey, shiny! And still freedom, the "Rights of Englishmen."

To have a monarch that was concerned with foreign relations, maintaining a justice system (with jury nullification, to be sure) and maximizing his profit by creating as close to an ideal business climate, well that would be cool. If someone created a floating Atlantis a la Stephenson's Diamond Age, I'd likely want to move there.

What is lacking, though, is a populace with traditions of living in a society of that sort, the kind that is very aware of their rights as Englishmen even though they do not, and likely never would have the right to vote.