Some observations on libertarianism and anarchism

Like many intellectually-curious people, I once went through a phase of taking Ayn Rand seriously, and was quite enamored of her ideas for a time. But that's not how things work in reality. Like most primates, humans exist in social groups and couldn't really function normally outside that context. Highly successful people in the modern world do, in many cases, owe their success to personal talents to a great extent -- but none of them could have become anything like what they are without the benefit of the education, written languages, technology, infrastructure, and stable societies which existed before they were born and are maintained by masses of people. I have talents which have served me well, but if I'd been born in the year 1360 instead of 1960, my life would have been utterly different, stunted by the sheer backwardness of that environment. Randism is the philosophy of "those who were born on third base and think they hit a triple".

I abandoned economic libertarianism partly because I came to realize it was essentially a scam concocted to justify the position of the parasitic financial elite, but also because I'm basically a pragmatist and care about results, not about ideological purity. Most libertarians seem to have an attitude of following their ideology completely inflexibly no matter what the consequences, or they insist that whatever consequences follow from libertarian ideology must by definition be the right ones. That's not how you actually get anything done in the real world. It's voluntarily turning oneself into a mindless robot following a program.

As for real anarchism, it also couldn't work in reality. There are reasons why all complex societies have states. The death rates from violence, both inter-group (war) and intra-group (murder) in hunter-gatherer societies are astronomically high by our standards, as they are in chimpanzee social groups. The history of civilization is a history of increasing size and complexity of societies, increasing power and sophistication of states, and falling per-capita levels of violence. The per-capita death rates from violence in modern times are much lower than in pre-state or weak-state societies, even when phenomena like World War II are factored in. When the authority of the state breaks down for any length of time, chaos and violence explode out of control, Somalia after the collapse of the Siad Barré regime being the best-known recent example.

One thing that might be of interest here is the fact that very few women are anarchists or libertarians. I think biology (relative physical weakness, plus an awareness of the vulnerability that comes with pregnancy and nurturing small children) makes women less susceptible than men to the delusion that a human can exist purely as a "rational economic actor" or some such abstraction. In most democracies, women vote in greater numbers than men for parties which promise a strong social safety net, and they also attach more importance to the state's role in maintaining order. They are more conscious of the dangers implied by weakening of those things.

Civilization cannot exist without a strong state. Even hunter-gatherer bands have leaders; even chimpanzee groups have leaders. Dominance hierarchies are a distinctive feature of all primate social groups. When dominance hierarchies break down, the result is escalating violence, not greater freedom. The simpler forms of social organization in primitive pre-state societies don't allow much personal freedom in practice, since in those societies human behavior is strongly constrained by the expectations of tradition; and as we now know, levels of violence in such societies are staggeringly high by our standards. Also, such systems only work for small population sizes. If a society has a population above a few tens of thousands, in practice the only workable form of organization is the state. Historically, most states have not provided much freedom because doing so hasn't been a priority (in fact, historically one of the features of the state is large-scale slavery), but they do at least usually maintain order fairly effectively, which is actually a higher priority -- freedom is not meaningful in a situation where violence and thuggery are pervasive. The only societies where anything like freedom as modern people understand it has existed have been some societies with strong states which, for whatever reason, did choose to make protecting individual freedom a priority. Modern socialist states do the best job of this, since they restrain the tendency of the wealthiest to dominate everyone else.

[Note:  This post is adapted from my side of some correspondence I had with an anarcho-libertarian a few years ago.  I thought some of these points might be of broader interest.]