My Libertarianism
Lately I have been trying to avoid the explicitly political and focus, instead, on scholarly work. While it is true that that scholarly work could have political consequences if read, developed, used, etc., it’s not explicitly political. There are political consequences to what one believes about economics, and of course a strong indication of what one’s politics are can be traced to one’s beliefs about economics, but there is a difference between making the explicit connection and writing about, say how cities create far-from-equilibrium states and thus are more creative and create more wealth.
I would prefer to also write my poems and plays and perhaps even get back to a novel manuscript that’s been sitting around, unfinished, for far too long. Now, there are political consequences to art as well, even when it is not explicitly political (and all the great works of art were never explicitly political — a few satires being the exceptions). This doesn’t prevent art from having that effect, though. Why else would tyrannical governments constantly and consistently engage in censorship? The excuse is always the same, that the work is inciting the people and disrupting society, but the fact is that, well, they are right. Great art disrupts societies by providing what-if scenarios that challenge the current cultural/social/political situation. That’s why it’s dangerous to tyrannies. If you want to know if you are living in a tyranny, look at the list of banned books. The longer it is . . .
I am essentially a classical liberal and, politically, a libertarian. I became a libertarian as I learned economics. The more I learned about economics, the more libertarian I became. But my goal for myself has been to develop a cohesive, coherent world view, no matter where it led me. So here is my basic world view, in a nutshell.
Metaphysics.
Everything is information. That is the fundamental “element” of the universe. Thus, I have an informational ontology. For something to be information, it has to be both orderly and disorderly, have elements of order and randomness. It must also have redundancy to be able to communicate that information well. As information becomes more dense and complex, it leads to the emergence of ever-greater complexity of form. (To inform is to give form to, thus information creates form.) This information is neither purely digital nor purely analog, but a combination of both simultaneously. Quantum elements are both particles and waves. Their particleness allows for physical autonomy; their waveness allows them to interact. They are thus interacting individual elements.
We see this at each level of complexity, from the quantum physical to the atomic/chemical to the biological to the mental to the social. At each level we have interacting individual elements. The complexity of those elements allows for greater complexity of interactions, of course, but this is what it all basically boils down to. You cannot eliminate the individual elements and deal only with collectives or aggregates. No, each element interacts in its own way, as we see in spin glasses (at the atomic-interaction level), neurons in the brain, or humans in an economy. We see this kind of social individualism all the way from the quantum physical level to the human level. When social individuals interact on large scales, we get spontaneous orders. When there are only a few elements, one can have any number of simple, hierarchical interactions; but when there are a large number of elements, one has spontaneous orders of various kinds (also known as self-organizing systems or processes). This organization is of necessity bottom-up. The order does not have to be imposed from the outside. On the contrary, attempts to “help things along” only disrupt the process and keep the system simple.
Epistemology and Values.
It is impossible to have perfect knowledge. It is impossible to have good knowledge, especially of things far away. All knowledge is by necessity local. We do not understand things “as they are,” because our brains necessarily abstract things and categorize them. Thus, all thinking is abstract. More, our brains create working theories of the world, which adapt to the world as information changes. A pile of data is exactly that unless there is a theory with which to make sense of it. We are thus natural theorizers. We are constantly testing.
Knowledge/information is transmitted most efficiently and quickly in scale-free networks. Spontaneous orders are scale-free networks. The further away one gets from a spontaneous order, the more rigidly hierarchical the system becomes, collapsing the network, necessarily simplifying it, as information/knowledge faces bottlenecks and information is lost as it goes up the hierarchy.
No one can know what is best for you better than you can know it. Each person has their own rankings of values. All anyone can do is impose their own values on others, or allow people to pursue their values as they see fit. You can judge what someone’s values are by seeing what they do, but you cannot know what the person’s value rankings, which may change from moment to moment, truly are. Knowledge is local and values are subjective. Thus economic/social planning is impossible and interventions will have unintended and very often unimaginable negative consequences.
Ethics.
Ethics allows us to interact with others peacefully. If one’s ethics disrupt social order, then one’s ethics are in fact unethical. We have become more ethical as a society the more we have extended our ethical behavior — from family to tribe to city-state to region/fellow religious believers to anonymous others in the spontaneous order society and catallaxy. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not covet (which is wanting the very things others have; to be contrasted with greed, which is wanting the kinds of things others have). Do not rape. Do not bear false witness (which is different from lying — as there are lies which maintain social bonds). Each of these things strain or break social bonds. Thus, they are unethical. One cannot have an ethics which includes covetousness. Yet, those who advocate redistrubitionism in fact are using covetousness as the driving force behind their ethics. If covetousness is ethical, then stealing is ethical, as that is the only way to get the exact things others have. And if someone doesn’t want their things stolen from them? The redistributionist’s answer is simple: Threaten them with murder. And be sure to murder a few people just to let everyone else know you’re serious about it. The connection between ethics and politics should thus be obvious.
We can thus see that the socialists are ironically named. Their policies are in fact anti-social. They break social bonds. The result is that people are increasingly atomized and desocialized. Welfare statists are less extreme versions, but the motives are the same. In what should be a complexly interacting spontaneous order, we get warring groups in the welfare state. There are those who find that one can gain political power from keeping various groups at war, and they then actively encourage such divisions. A person with a collectivist world view sees not individuals, but groups. That group may be a small group, such as a race, a binary division, such as men and women, or “society”, but the commonality is that the individual is dissolved, is not taken into consideration. Thus racism, sexism, fascism, socialism, and communism are all fundamentally the same in being collectivist. It is a very primitive world view, brought up to date.
Politics.
The word “politics” comes from the Greek word “polis” meaning “city.” Politics is thus the art of living together in a city. We have of course expanded it to mean the art of living together in a nation-state, but the essential principles are the same. We are forced to live in a society of unknown strangers. And we have to get along with them. And we do. Especially when we are left alone to get along.
There are two basic interactions among strangers: 1) if you do something good for me, I’ll do something good for you, and 2) unless you do something good for me, I’ll do something bad to you. The first is the principle of trade, where both people gain from the interaction. This is known as a positive sum game, and it is the very nature of all economic interactions. The second is the principle of theft, where one gains at the cost of another. This is known as a zero-sum game (it is in fact a negative sum game, as it breaks social bonds), and is the very nature of all criminal transactions. We see the first in the economy; we see the second in government when it oversteps its proper bounds.
And what are those proper bounds? To ensure that only interaction #1 takes place among its citizens and that interaction #2 does not take place. And that would include itself. The proper interaction of government with the citizen should be, 3) so long as you do nothing bad to others, we’ll do nothing bad to you. Its role, then, is protection — to protect us from individuals or groups, including other governments, who wish to murder, rob, rape, or cheat us. Thus its proper role is to maintain the conditions for society to emerge as a spontaneous order. Anything beyond that, and the government is acting as a criminal, no matter what the “intentions.”
No government should be allowed to do anything the citizens of the country are not allowed to do. This is the essence of equality under the law — the law must apply to all equally, whether they are in the government or not. No welfare state or socialist government can abide by this rule. They must of necessity treat people unequally. More, the government must be allowed to engage in what would be criminal activity if it were done by a private citizen in order to achieve the goals of those in government — who are, after all, trying to impose their values on others. They thus oppose pluralism, because that means others are allowed to pursue their values in nonviolent, noncoercive ways. The welfare statist who wants to gain politically is bound to preach pluralism, but use it to divide people politically where, in the catallaxy, each would be able to achieve their goals. In government, there are winners and losers — it is a zero sum game. In the catallaxy, there are winners and winners — it is a positive sum game. But there are only winners if you are willing to provide another with what they want to achieve their goals. There are those who do not want to do that, but rather want to make other people accept their values and help them realize their goals. These are the people who turn to government for subsidies, bailouts, or to achieve some personal vision.
My Models
In Phaedrus, Plato says that he likes dividing things up into categories because it aids in thinking. Nietzsche came along 2300 years later to remind us that conceptual categories are, ultimately, artificial, and that we need to challenge them periodically, and remember that the divisions among things are not really so clear-cut.
That having been said, let me lay out several models I am using that determine my thinking.
1) Information theory. I support an ontology of information. If something is inform, it has no form. If something informs, it gives form. Thus, information is that which is without form, yet gives form. All things in the universe are information, and the universe itself began as information and continues to exist as information.
2) Chaos theory, bios theory, and fractal geometry. All things in the universe are self-similar regardless of scale, in several different fractal geometries.
3) emergence. All laws of the universe evolved from separate entities interacting to give rise to those laws. These laws are called strange attractors. Self-organizing processes are found at all levels of reality.
4) Nested hierarchies. Everything in the universe evolved into its level of complexity from lower levels of complexity. Biology evolved from chemistry which evolved from quantum physics (atoms), and atoms evolved from quantum strings. New levels of complexity arise naturally from lower levels of complexity as the entities of that lower level interact as a complex, dynamic system.
The idea of nested hierarchies comes in several flavors:
1) The physical model exemplified by J.T. Fraser’s umwelt theory of time. With his model, the timeless level of pure chaos evolved into the probablistic time of quantum physics, which evolved into the deterministic time of chemistry (Newtonian physics), which evolved into the weakly forward direction of biotemporality (biological time), which evolved into the strongly forward direction of nootemporality (human time). Each level contains more and more time. And, I would argue, each new level becomes increasingly fractal in nature.
2) The human cognitive and social model developed by Don Beck. With his model, the pure survialism of animal life evolved into the weak communitarian structures of tribalism, which evolved into the weak individualism of Achilles-type heroism/belief in power gods, which evolved into the stronger communitarianism of authoritarian-religious systems (like Medieval Christianity of modern-day Islam), which evolved into the stronger individualism of the capitalist/scientific social system (the Modern Era in Europe and America), which evolved into the stronger communitarianism of secular egalitarianism (Marxism/Communism, environmentalism, postmodernism), which evolved into integralism, which recognizes the value of each of the lower levels (lower in the sense of being less complex, as each level is more complex than the lower levels), which evolved into holism, which attempts to more smoothly unify all the lower levels. The last two levels recognize the value of complex, fluid, nested hierarchies, as opposed to the egalitarian level, which rejects all hierarchies, and the authoritarian level, which tries to impose rigid hierarchies on everyone.
To have an even more integrationist way of thinking, we cannot forget these four things: I-we-it-its : individualism-communitarianism-traditional science-systems science. And these must be fully integrated into the two forms of nested hierarchy mentioned above (as those two ideas must themselves be integrated).
All of the above are united by an understanding that the world is fundamentally dialectical and agonal in nature. That is, interacting opposing forces create new complex processes which create new opposing forces which in turn interact to create new complex processes. Synthesis is never complete (contra Hegel and Marx), but rather maintains the agonal relationship in order for the synthesis to occur (Nietzsche). Context is king, meaning we are created by our environment, but at the same time we are part of the environment and contribute to the creation of that environment. The causation is never just one way. There is feedback from entity to system and from system to entity, and that feedback is bipolar — negative and positive feedback simultaneously. This view of the world is supported by all contemporary science, including cosmology and evolutionary biology.
My Thick Libertarianism
I did not start my life as a libertarian. I was not a libertarian in high school. I was not a libertarian until well into college. I did not become a libertarian by reading Ayn Rand. When I started college, I was at best a centrist with Republican leanings, the latter in no small part due to my Baptist upbringing. I had no real notion of how the economy ran other than my folk economics I was born with, and which was reinforced by our political culture. My moral beliefs were almost entirely formed by my Baptist upbringing and my parents’ tolerant natures. If there were any libertarian seeds planted during that time, it was the moral aversion to racism planted by my parents.
I went to college and majored in recombinant gene technology. Through that major, I came to understand the world as complex, self-organizing, and evolving. This was reinforced by books I read in college on chaos theory, self-organization, quantum physics, cosmology, etc. I saw the world as complex, self-organizing, and evolving, and so, when I took an Intro. to Philosophy class, in which I was first introduced to economics — specifically, free market economics — by Ronald Nash, I found that this fascinating area matched well the world as I understood it to be.
It is perhaps difficult, in one’s path to libertarian thinking, to avoid going through Ayn Rand. Which of course I did. I read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (which it is), which led me to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and on to the rest of her philosophy. At the same time, I read a number of other economists, from Walter Williams to Milton Friedman, but somehow did not come across too many Austrian economists. They remained to be discovered much later, after my world view had become even more complex, even more developed. Through Rand I discovered Nietzsche and Aristotle, with the former becoming a close companion.
All of this led me to abandon biology and pursue creative writing. I wanted to write stories that showed my world view. That led me to a Master’s in English, and to the Ph.D. program in the humanities at UT-Dallas. I went through a postmodern-nihilist stage of sorts during my Master’s time, but came out ready for a revaluation of values at UT-Dallas. It was there I met Alex Argyros and Frederick Turner, both of whom introduced me to the ideas of J.T. Fraser, the great philosopher of time. Through these three, I developed a far more complex world view — one that was fully universalist, complex, self-organizing, emergentist, and evolutionary. I learned more and more about human evolution, evolutionary psychology, the way the brain worked and processed information about the world, the way we came to know about and understand the world, the ways in which we were social and individualistic — and the ways in which we were not collectivist and individualistic.
In the beginning, nothing. But nothing, or perfect symmetry, is unstable. The symmetry thus broke, and the universe came into existence in the big bang. Waves of energy spread the universe, and spread through the universe, resulting in interference patterns that, as the universe cooled, crystallized into particle-waves that were capable of interacting to crystallize further into atoms. These atoms were pushed around by the waves of the universe, causing many to pool. As they pooled, gravity increased, attracting more and more atoms, until fusion occurred — thus did the first stars self-organize and enlighten the sky. Fusion and, later, supernovae created more complex atoms, which were then able to engage in more complex chemistry, creating more complex molecules, and less volatile objects, like planets, on which life could emerge. Complex organic molecules are self-organizing, particularly in an aqueous environment. Life self-organized out of the early earth conditions — life indeed is likely to be found throughout the universe, so likely is self-organization to occur. Complexity evolved as simple organisms competed for the available space. Competition is a discovery process, and thus life discovered many ways of doing things, including becoming more complex to create new environments. Self-organization to create more complexity is a natural process of the universe itself. One result was the emergence of intelligent species, including one intelligent enough that, with sufficient population density to make them socially intelligent as well, there emerged the ability to understand the universe itself. Yet, humans evolved in a particular environment, even as we are able to adapt to many environmental conditions. Yet, we are adapted to particular social conditions, which we cannot disregard if we want to live a moral, human life. Further, our brains are complex neural networks, which take in sensory data and convert that data into concepts. We are both born with instincts that allow us to learn certain things — like language — very rapidly, and subtract differences in common things to create concepts. We must forget to know, meaning we can never know everything possible in the universe. More, our practical knowledge is local. Humans interact with one another to create emergent, self-organizing social processes (spontaneous orders). These range from the moral order to the artistic orders to the economic order. These orders emerge as we become more moral, including more and more people in our “tribe,” which really means, in our moral sphere of common humanity. We are thus social individuals whose interactions allow us to be smarter than we are as individuals, and which allow us to coordinate our actions and cooperate better. Organizations emerge which help us achieve our individual goals in that spontaneous order.
Thus, I am a libertarian because libertarianism is the political position that comes closest to mapping onto the way the world works. It is the political system one should hold if one believes in human equality, if one believes all people are in fact people and ought to be treated that way, meaning it is fundamentally the most moral system of them all, since all people, regardless of who they are, must be treated morally, meaning, as fellow human beings. The ethical person does not and does not support theft, rape, or murder, regardless of who the person is, whether they are rich or poor, black or white, of a different ethnicity, of a different culture, speak a different language, or are from a different country. These things are immoral for an individual, a group, or an organization to do — even if that organization calls itself a government. Thus, I am a libertarian because libertarianism is the most moral world view — not just political view — one can hold. There is a recognition that good intentions are not good enough. The actions one takes to reach one’s goals matter as much as the goals themselves. Which is in part why I’m an Austrian-school economist (the other reason being that this school of economics also is realistic in its understanding of epistemology, its tendency to reject equilibrium, and its understanding of the economy as a self-organizing process, or spontaneous order — meaning it is the school of economics that takes more of the world into consideration in its understanding of the economy, and which actually matches the way the world actually works).
It is because I understand the universe to be a self-organizing, complexifiying, emergentist, evolutionary process, with humans and their social systems a part of that process, that I am a libertarian. It is because of my inclusive moral system, which is itself a spontaneous order, that I am a libertarian. It is because of my understanding of human psychology and human evolution, of how the brain works, of the presence of a variety of instincts we cannot do away with, and the way these all interact to create each individual, and how each individual in turn interacts with others to create organizations and spontaneous orders that, in turn, affect our emergent minds, which affect our neuro-chemistry, -physiology, and -actions that I am a libertarian. It is because of my understanding of human epistemology that I am a libertarian. My libertarian came out of these things; these things were not informed by my libertarianism. I followed the logic of discovering a consistent world. A free market and a free people interacting in spontaneous order societies reflects the self-organizing complexity at every level of reality in the universe. The world is inexorably and inevitably evolving toward libertarianism. It does not matter if there are conservative elements who oppose this movement. The universe will evolve as it will. All the enemies of reality as it truly is can do is delay it — with all the negative consequences that delay necessarily brings.
Delay means we are trying to keep the world simple, or we are trying to simplify the world more. If you simplify a human, you make him an animal; if you simplify a living thing, you make it a pile of molecules undergoing entropy (you kill it). If you kill people, you simplify society. If you protect companies from competition, you stand in the way of new ways of doing things, and thus prevent more complexity from emerging. You thus stand in the way of the natural tendency of the universe. To do so is as immoral as actively simplifying the world. Thus, those who would destroy wealth by attempting to redistribute it (wealth can be created or destroyed, but cannot be redistributed — only riches can be redistributed), those who would stand in the way of social complexity by opposing immigration in all forms, those who would stand in the way of economic complexity with their socialist or interventionist schemes (anti-natural religious schemes, if the truth be told), those who would prevent cultural and artistic evolution, are all from this point of view immoral people, standing in the way of the complexifying drive of the universe.
