From: michael.bast@convergys.com
Date: Tue Dec 05 2000 - 11:02:23 MST
And THIS is exactly why libertarians won't ever be a real force in American
politics. Almost universally every libertarian I know (including me, most of the
time) comes off as a self-righteous know-it-all, acting as though everyone else
is beneath them. We all seem to say "If only they could see what we see, but
they're not bright enough, so we'll have to make them do it anyway."
>From: Chris Russo <extropy@russo.org>
>Because people are really really really stupid.
A lot of the people I know don't like the libertarian philosophy, no matter how
well you explain it. Why? They don't value the same things we do. (Wholly aside
from the things in the last paragraph) Conservatives value order and/or faith
more than individualism, liberals value fairness, socialists value equality of
outcome, etc. Values underlie HOW we reason, by causing us to choose differents
facts, lines of thinking, or even different outcomes. We're never going to get
what we want without force, thus negating everything we value.
You can't expect people to change their minds because you think something
is logical, if they value something else more. Telling a mother receiving ADC
she'll be better off without the money she uses to feed her children after the
economy is freed up is NOT going to work. Telling corporations they'll have to
work in a totally free-market is not going to get it done.
Quoting favorite libertarian authors doesn't help, since people have either
never heard of them (Hayek, Mises) or if they have, they usually are quoted by
people who sound like fundamentalists (this happens to me when people quote
Rand, and I have always liked her work. Quoting what she says as a weapon, as a
lot of objectivists I've known do, marks you as a nut, largely.)
Another thing which happens is that anyone who isn't "100%" libertarian is
castigated for lack of purity, no matter what kind of person they are, no matter
how much they could have helped us win some of what we want. I've seen this over
and over, and the attitude of the people doing the flaming is "good riddance".
Well, that's great, but there are so few people who will pay us any attention
now, we can't really afford to piss them off.
Libertarians also take words and "re-define" them, so that a person using
normal language thinks they agree with us, when they don't. When they realize
this, it pisses them off. This isn't exactly a way to get what we want.
I'm not sure I'm really a libertarian anymore, since so much of what they
seem to want is unrealistic. Maybe I'm wrong, I certainly hope so. Not all of
the people on this list are libertarians, which is good, but a large number seem
to be. So, how do we get from here to there?
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but so be it. Maybe I'll learn
something.
Sorry for the somewhat dis-ordered order.
Mike
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