breach of social contract

and why the left (and the right) are misunderstanding libertarianism

it seems that a number of criticisms of libertarianism have come into vogue of late. they tend to align into two general camps.

this meme is basically a rorschach test/sorting hat to elicit a reader’s priors on that.

the right reads this and says “see, all libertarians ultimately have to grow up and join us!” as soon as one becomes active or oppositional to other individuals or groups, it is seen as “giving up your libertarian principles and getting real.” then they get angry about “not voting for our big government programs because we know the correct way to abridge rights and redistribute wealth.”

the left reads this and says “see, all libertarians are really just right-wing extremists hiding behind being pro-weed or maybe gay!” they all want to oppress us and take our “rights” then they produce a laundry list of positive rights like healthcare, housing, or welfare that amount to the involuntary indenture of others in order to produce such “free” goods and services.

both find this to be some sort of “own.”

neither is correct.

the little libertarians mostly grew up to be big ones, and it is not predominantly they who have changed.

(note that i qualify this with “predominantly.” obviously i cannot speak for everyone, and i’m sure we can find variation among groups of humans, especially libertarians and the sad pastiche of the “libertarian party” but just because someone says “i am a libertarian” does not mean they are in any classical sense. i speak here of the actual foundational libertarian ideals.)

it’s how the world has interacted with them that has caused this alteration in perception.

this is an easy mistake to make because we all tend to imagine the world as rotating around us and thus often ascribe our own movement away from others as that of others moving away from us. absent a constant frame to use as reference, there is really no way to tell the difference. i have refered to this in the past as “redshift,” the seeming radicalization of the right caused by the left moving to such leftward extremes.

i suspect that both left and right are having a similar experience along the liberty/authoritarian axis that separates them from libertarians.

to assess this theory, let us see if we can establish something of a constant frame by which to assess libertarianism.

to accomplish this, we’ll go back to its foundational concepts (hobbes, locke, rousseau) and use them to define this gap and assess which end of the spectrum has been moving.

the claims of left and right both embed a fundamental incomprehension of the idea of libertarian/rights-based thought and value structures.

each side is making up history and philosophy alike as it has become fashionable on both ends of the axis of donkey and elephant to assail libertarian ideas as though they are either evil hitlerian assault or naive utopian immaturity, but both these claims are misapprehensions rooted in a failure to really grasp what sits at the base of a rights-based social contract.

unless you are an oppressive government or one who supports or stands to gain from such, there is nothing extreme about such a structure which, as history has shown, is neither impossible nor utopian. these ideas took ragtag colonies to a manifest destiny of human flourishing. they were the guiding philosophy of the founding of america and its constitution and civilization:

that all people possessed inalienable rights derived from their personhood and that these rights stood paramount to the state whose only just purpose or role was to defend the social contract underpinned by such individually owned negative rights to non-interference.

this gets misread in a number of ways, and stepping back to see the full forest as opposed to just trees provides needed perspective.

the goal of this structure was that in this fashion all might be secure in their liberty, property, speech, and self-determination.

the concept of “inalienable rights” gets misconstrued in this context, so let us consider the proper frame of this notion:

the purpose of this idea is that no just state may alienate a peaceful person from his or her self-determination or property.

it is at leviathan that the term “inalienable” is pointed. it exists to limit the boundaries of moral, consent-based government and to establish standards for just revolution against an unjust state.

the term is not intended as, nor can it represent a general case absolute for all human interaction.

the state may not alienate you from your rights,

but a person may, by actions or ill intent against others, so alienate themselves.

and that is a critical distinction.

if a person violates the rights of others, they step outside the social contract and lose the protection it afforded them. this includes the protection of the state itself as well as that of the citizens who live there.

it’s the golden rule in reverse: by failing to respect the self-determination and property of others, you have forfeit reciprocal respect for your own. this applies both to other individuals and to the state.

the just citizen and just state alike stand arrayed against those who break the social contract of non-interference. they will not force peaceful people to act against their will, but neither will they tolerate being forced to act against their own wills

defense of such agency is a form of self-defense most needful and most justified.

there is no part of “being a libertarian” that states that “you have to act like a chump.”

it’s very much the opposite.

“social contract” is an important term here.

in essence, it’s bone simple: peaceful people agree to leave one another alone so long as each and all remain peaceful people and respect the liberty and property of others. you are not forced to join. you may go your own way and live in peace so long as you live in accord with the compact of self-determination and do not harm us or violate our liberty or property.

it’s a deal you choose to live by because you find the deal to be to your benefit.

i give up the right to steal in order that in return i am not stolen from. so long as neither of us takes from the other, we remain in a contract together. we are playing an iterative prisoner’s dilemma, over and over eschewing the opportunity to defect and turn upon the other for short-term gain and thereby sustaining “high equilibrium” of cooperation to mutual benefit.

and so long as this continues and no one defects, our contract holds.

but if you steal from me, you step outside this compact, and it is broken.

and let’s be VERY clear about something: urging others to steal from me by proxy is still stealing from me. urging the use of the state for such ends is worst of all. “legal plunder” represents the most malign and durably rapacious form of plunder.

what does such practice look like?

it looks like this:

the entitlement here is astonishing.

this is not even the “appeal to democracy,” a practice as hackneyed as it is saccharine, so often used to slap faux-ethical lipstick upon the pig of “tyranny of the majority.”

nicholas wants dictatorship.

“how do we oppress the proles who do not seem to know that we know best?”

“how do we take their things and give them to others by building unaccountable authoritarian systems?”

sorry, nikky. i don’t think we’re going to be friends.

i don’t care if you have not done it yet (though you have certainly tried and are mostly describing a system already extant and in need of further dismantling).

you have declared your intent as a combatant hostile to the idea of a rights-based republic and of just government deriving its mandate from consent.

you’re “the other guy.”

the protections of our high equilibrium no longer apply to you.

this seems to be a place where people get libertarianism and rights-based thought quite wrong.

if an army of barbarians states that they are coming to tear down the walls of your city, only a fool of a polity would claim “well, we cannot defend ourselves until they are actually shooting at us and our people are dying.”

doing so is not “respecting rights,” it’s placing them in peril.

pre-emption in the face of credible threat stands not only permissible but virtuous.

when someone declares a commencement of hostilities upon your civilization and its foundational tenets, they no longer get to hide behind the protections (like rights) that such tenets afford.

they are outside of them and a threat to them.

how, if you act as nicholas does, can any reasonable rights advocate imagine sharing a social contract with you?

they can’t.

this is not a state of comity; it’s a state of war, a state of nature.

the intent is crystalline in its clarity.

you have failed to respect my rights. in return, neither i nor a just state need any longer respect yours.

you become outlaw.

nicholas imagines this will function as a game of “punch, no punchbacks” and seems oblivious to the extent to which he is “saying the quiet part out loud.”

we should thank him for this.

“how can we force others to do what we want them to do but that they themselves do not wish to?” is not an ambiguous structure, and therefore neither is what comes next.

let us be painstakingly clear about something: nicholas and those of his ilk are, by far, the global norm. low-trust, high-avarice oppressive systems of taking are the global norm.

“the role of government is to codify which tribe may plunder the other tribes and dominate them” is the modal outcome of leviathan at every scale from tiny township to nation-state and international order.

carving out a society of high-trust, high-function civilization in this vast state of nature is the exception, not the rule, and as george III would tell you, the rules of dominion-based structures absolutely take exception to such exceptions and exceptionalism. they hate them. such lives and liberty stand against their power, outshine their prowess, and indict their morals by unlocking humanity to live in a better way.

this “contract with humanity” has been the engine of post-enlightenment human flourishing.

and it can, will, and must defend itself as both moral and existential imperative.

and the tree of liberty is not watered with the tears of the performatively aggrieved nor the sweat of the shackled.

“follow me for more tips on raising a healthy garden”

i think it’s really quite simple:

whether or not a libertarian seems like an extremist to you depends upon whether you reside inside or outside of the social contract.

once you show yourself to be a non-rights respecter with whom i cannot make a useful or durable deal:

welcome to "a state of nature."

your stay here will likely be nasty, brutish, and short.

this seems to be the part that people keep missing. there is nothing new that has occurred nor any obligation to coddle those who backbite in return for fellowship.

this comes as a profound shock for those who have mistaken good will and a desire to live in high-trust peace for weakness, incapacity, or failure of nerve.

the underpinning of the libertarian ethos is to leave the state of nature for something at once grander and kinder. adherents to such will live in peace if they can, but robbed of such possibility, they will make a different choice.

and then the world becomes a vastly different place for all concerned.

this was always their structure. (again, ask georgie the trey)

but “you who have enjoyed life inside the high-trust world of reciprocally peaceful people that others have built but now find yourself outside it and shorn of its protections and privileges?” yeah, i’ll bet that sudden shift does feel extreme.

your life and your risk factors just changed very significantly.

“well what about my rights?” scream those who would hold the libertarian to a standard to which they themselves refuse to adhere.

“what about them?” says the libertarian. “you forfeited those when you violated mine. this is a social contract, not indentured servitude where i have to give to you while you take from me. see ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ as above.”

“wait, what?” says the dilemma defector who miscalculated his marshmallow test.

but by then it’s too late.

actions have consequences.

there is nothing right-wing or extreme about modern libertarianism. if anything, it has moved left, especially socially.

this has not stopped what essentially amounts to a war of all against all with much of the left. it has probably worsened it as so much of leftism sees accommodation as invitation for further depredation and aggression.

"the left" has moved so far left and become so self-absorbed and deranged by over-exposure to its own echo chambers that two things have happened:

1. the self-styled “progressive” now sees anything not exactly like itself as "fascists literally worse than hitler" precisely because they have become so fascist and authoritarian and cannot admit this to themselves. it's a movement of grasping projection.

2. the fact that "the leftists" are now so fascist and authoritarian has placed them outside anything that a libertarian could mistake for a valid or useful social contract, and this means the libertarian mindset toward the left has shifted. they are self-announced combatants and civilizational wreckers at once despising rights to self-determination while advancing prerogatives to plunder and dominate and calling them rights.

nothing requires a libertarian to respect or to tolerate this.

you see, the point of a social contract is that we all limit ourselves for the greater good. i refrain from hurting you and taking your things so that you, in turn will refrain from hurting me or taking my things.

i do this willingly because i value living in peace and keeping my things more than i value being able to prey upon you and taking your stuff by force. i find this both constructive and moral, and so long as i can make this choice, i will.

it is the pathway to the civilization i wish to inhabit.

“be the neighbor you wish your neighbors to be.”

this "golden rule" of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you brings about the high-function, high-trust social systems that are the only way to create large-scale human flourishing.

but, if you consistently show yourself to be someone who will not respect the rights of others, who wants to hurt me and take my things, then you are not someone with whom i can make a social contract.

why should i respect your rights if you will not respect mine?

when you declare your intent to pull down my high-liberty structures and to dominate them and me by placing your state above my self-determination, you have shown me that you value dictatorial power and legal plunder over living in peace and mutual respect.

worse, you have shown yourselves to be anathema to high-trust systems, human flourishing, and basically everything that makes the first world rich and free.

you are the dilemma defector, the scorpion begging passage upon the frog.

and the libertarian owes such a person nothing.

you are civilizational solvent.

and now, as i look to those of my neighbors with whom i still share trust, i begin to wish of them something different because no longer can we safely live in peace.

purging and removing you from positions in which you may harm us is the manner in which high trust and high function may be restored. if you are a peaceful person who never took a dollar from anyone by force (or accepted as a government handout one collected by such force) then go in peace and pursue your happiness. you have not harmed others or taken their things. we may live in contact, comity, and and trust with one another.

but the minute you bring yourself from some low-trust place to mine and begin to act as you once did there, commencing taking stuff and hurting people whether it be free houses, free food, or free school?

i no longer give a rat’s wet flatulence about what you think your “rights to stay” are.

“invade me and take my things” is not consistent with a high-trust, high-function society.

libertarians go full 80s: “ICE, ICE baby.”

this seems to surprise the right and left alike, but what they see as "extreme" is nothing new.

this is neither extremism nor radicalization.

it's just you stepping outside the penumbra of the social contract that protected you from me.

the third rail of “outside” was always present; you simply did not realize from whence this benefit of “inside” accrued to you or why.

you assumed it was some intrinsic characteristic of the universe or that the high-trust denizens were stupid or weak.

you had no idea that you had a side of the bargain to uphold or that “peaceful people” can be capable of quite profound responses in self-defense.

and lessons can be hard.

i was happy to let you live as you liked so long as you afforded me the same courtesy and rights.

but you have not.

you broke the deal but still ask to be protected as though you were upholding it.

and that's not going to happen.

if you want your rights, you must respect those of others. if you will not, then you must accept the fact that you just picked a fight with some of the highest-function, most effective humans in the history of humans and that this is unlikely to go well for you and your colicky baby entitlement clique, be it imported or domestic.

we'd be happy to leave you alone if you'd just return the favor and stop trying to dominate, control, and plunder others.

this is not being "done to you," you brought it upon yourself by attacking others.

this choice is and always was yours, but F’ing Around will inevitably come with Finding Out.

that part is not negotiable.

it comes suddenly. those who step outside the house and into the outdoors find the change in the weather jarring. i’m sure this can be disorienting. those who find themselves embroiled in this newfound war of their own making may mistake it for derangement, for radicalization, or for madness.

but this is not madness.

and again, this has been the libertarian position since the beginning.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

and we will preserve that which we have made against all enemies, foreign and domestic, including and especially an unjust state that seeks to rule or plunder us without our consent.