Kevin Vallier — What’s the Best Argument for Libertarianism?

Let us know how it turns out. Sounds like a survival reality show.

I participated in libertarian intentional communities in the Sixties and Seventies, and also studied them at the time, since they were proliferating and I was a grad student in philosophy interested in social and political philosophy. 

I soon found that freedom is a lot more difficult to handle than most people realize, for several reasons. 

First is personal disposition. What one thinks may not be totally in accord with what one is. 

Secondly, what one thinks one is like may be very different from what one is actually like in specific circumstances that evoke cognitive, volitional, affective, and behavioral biases. 

Thirdly, everyone has historical and social biases that result from hysteresis and path dependence. No one grows up in a vacuum.

Finally, everyone has a world view that is embedded in ideology. Ideologies are distinguished by differences in criteria, which basically rule-making and drawing lines. Social interaction is based on rules, and some of the most important rules are boundary conditions. Even those in small groups find that their approach to values and norms is different. These becomes painfully apparent as boundaries are approached.

The idea of free and self-sufficient individuals voluntarily cooperating for mutual benefit sounds great, but it is difficult to attain even in a small group from what I could see. 

My final conclusion is that the success of harmonizing freedom and responsibility, universality and particularity, unity and diversity, and other such opposites so that they are complementary rather than conflicting is the collective level of consciousness of the group. This has directed my approach to social, political, and economic thinking since that time.

Maybe people are different now. But I don't think so. It seems to be that young people were much more idealistic then, and the social pressure was toward making communities based on freedom work. It still was not easy. 

I don't want to give the impression either than no groups were successful then, or that such groups aren't alive and well today. Neither is true. but it takes rather special people and commitment to do the necessary "psychospiritual" work both individually and as a group. Monk and nuns have known this for ages, for example.

I think it will be even more difficult for Libertarianism as anarcho-capitalism. There is even less of a foundation for social interaction than with libertarianism of the left as communalism. With Libertarianism, there seems to be an assumption that the right arrangements will lead to the expected results. Conversely, libertarians of the left know that the starting point is doing one's own work on oneself to enable one to play the game on a high enough level to make it work.

Bleeding Heart Libertarians
What’s the Best Argument for Libertarianism?
Kevin Vallier