- Smith, L. Neil.
Down with Power.
Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-61242-055-4.
-
In the first chapter of this superb book, the author quotes Scott
Adams, creator of
“Dilbert”, describing
himself as being “a libertarian minus the crazy stuff”,
and then proceeds to ask precisely what is crazy about adopting a strict
interpretation of the Zero Aggression Principle:
A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right,
under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human
being for any reason whatever; nor will a libertarian advocate
the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else.
Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians,
whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently
with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.
(p. 20)
The subsequent chapters sort out the details of what this principle
implies for contentious issues such as war powers; torture; money
and legal tender laws; abortion; firearms and other weapons;
“animal rights”; climate change (I do not use scare
quotes on this because climate change is real and has always
happened and always will—it is the hysteria over anthropogenic
contributions to an eternally fluctuating process driven mostly by
the Sun which is a hoax); taxation; national defence; prohibition
in all of its pernicious manifestations; separation of marriage,
science, and medicine from the state; immigration; intellectual
property; and much more. Smith's viewpoint on these questions is
largely informed by
Robert LeFevre,
whose wisdom he had the good fortune to imbibe at week-long seminar
in 1972. (I encountered LeFevre just once, at a libertarian gathering
in Marin County, California [believe it or not, such things exist, or
at least existed] around 1983, and it was this experience that transformed
me from a “nerf libertarian” who was prone to exclaiming
“Oh, come on!” whilst reading
Rothbard to the flinty
variety who would go on to author the
Evil Empires
bumper sticker.) Sadly, Bob LeFevre is no longer with us, but
if you wish to be inoculated with the burning fever of liberty
which drove him and inspired those who heard him speak, this book
is as close as you can come today to meeting him in person.
The naïve often confuse libertarians with conservatives:
to be sure, libertarians often wish to impede “progressives”
whose agenda amounts to progress toward serfdom and wish, at the least,
for a roll-back of the intrusions upon individual liberty which were the
hallmark of the twentieth century. But genuine libertarianism, not the
nerf variety, is a deeply radical doctrine which calls into question
the whole leader/follower, master/slave, sovereign/subject, and
state/citizen structure which has characterised human civilisation
ever since hominids learned to talk and the most glib of them became
politicians (“Put meat at feet of Glub and Glub give you much good
stuff”).
And here is where I both quibble with and enthusiastically endorse the
author's agenda. The quibble is that I fear that our species, formed by
thousands of generations of hunter/gatherer and agricultural experience,
has adapted, like other primates, to a social structure in which most
individuals delegate decision making and even entrust their lives to
“leaders” chosen by criteria deeply wired into our biology
and not remotely adapted to the challenges we face today and in the
future. (Hey, it could be worse: peacocks select for the most overdone
tail—it's probably a blessing nakes don't have tails—imagine
trying to fit them all into a joint session of Congress.) The endorsement
is that I don't think it's possible to separate the spirit of individualism which
is at the heart of libertarianism from the frontier. There were many things
which contributed to the first American war of secession and the independent
republics which emerged from it, but I believe their unique nature was
in substantial part due to the fact that they were marginal settlements
on the edge of an unexplored and hostile continent, where many families were
entirely on their own and on the front lines, confronted by the vicissitudes of
nature and crafty enemies.
Thomas Jefferson worried that as the population of cities
grew compared to that of the countryside, the ethos of self-sufficiency
would be eroded and be supplanted by dependency, and that this corruption
and reliance upon authority founded, at its deepest level, upon the
initiation of force, would subvert the morality upon which self-government
must ultimately rely. In my one encounter with Robert LeFevre, he
disdained the idea that “maybe if we could just get back to the
Constitution” everything would be fine. Nonsense, he said: to
a substantial degree the Constitution is the problem—after
all, look at how it's been “interpreted” to permit all of
the absurd abrogations of individual liberty and natural law since its
dubious adoption
in 1789. And here, I think the author may put a bit
too much focus on documents (which can, have been, and forever will be) twisted
by lawyers into things they never were meant to say, and too little on
the frontier.
What follows is both a deeply pessimistic and unboundedly optimistic view
of the human and transhuman prospect. I hope I don't lose you in the
loop-the-loop. Humans, as presently constituted, have wired-in
baggage which renders most of us vulnerable to glib forms of
persuasion by “leaders” (who are simply those more
talented than others in persuasion). The more densely humans are packed,
and the greater the communication bandwidth available to them (in particular,
one to many media), the more vulnerable they are to such “leadership”.
Individual liberty emerges in frontier societies: those where each person
and each family must be self-sufficient, without any back-up other than their
relations to neighbours, but with an unlimited upside in expanding the human
presence into new territory. The old America was a frontier society; the
new America is a constrained society, turning inward upon itself and devouring
its best to appease its worst.
So, I'm not sure this or that amendment to a document which is largely
ignored will restore liberty in an environment where a near-majority of
the electorate receive net benefits from the minority who pay most of
the taxes. The situation in the United States, and on Earth, may well
be irreversible. But the human and posthuman destiny is much, much
larger than that. Perhaps we don't need a revision of governance documents as
much as the opening of a frontier. Then people will be able
to escape the stranglehold where seven eighths of all of their work is
confiscated by the thugs who oppress them and instead use all of their sapient
facilities to their own ends. As a sage author once said:
Freedom, immortality, and the stars!
Works for me. Free people expand at a rate which asymptotically approaches
the speed of light. Coercive government and bureaucracy grow
logarithmically, constrained by their own internal dissipation.
We win; they lose.
In the Kindle edition the index is just a list of
page numbers. Since the Kindle edition includes real page numbers,
you can type in the number from the index, but that's not as
convenient as when index citations are linked directly to references
in the text.
October 2012 