deep thoughts
deep thoughts (by Friday, not Jack Handey)
I’ve been doing some heavy thinking lately. Actually, more than lately. Over the past 2 1/2 years I’ve moved much further from a belief in small/”limited” government towards anarchocapitalism, which makes it increasingly difficult to justify, either morally or rationally, the ways that I and most of my friends spend a lot of our time. Due to a number of reasons, I’ve kept these thoughts to myself for the most part. The reasons include the following:
- –my antisocial nature leaves me with few close confidantes against whom to bounce ideas
- –the fear that what I’m thinking about will not go over well with many members of my social circle, which is largely comprised of people struggling, to various degrees, to maintain or increase personal liberty in New Hampshire
- –the unwillingness of most people (myself included) to face hard truths, because it’s more emotionally satisfying to lie to ourselves. Moving the goal posts, revisionist history, and ignoring glaring numbers smacking you upside the head for years all fall into this category
What, pray tell, am I pussyfooting around here? Could it perhaps be something about the Free State Project? Libertarian Party? New Hampshire Liberty Alliance? Republican Liberty Caucus? The Ron Paul Revolution?
Yes.
I still don’t have the answers, but I have read two things recently (and one thing months ago that was so thought-provoking I’m still chewing on it) which encapsulate what I’m flailing about trying to say here quite well. So in the spirit of campaign season, allow me to plagiarize. 
Subject: Reactive thinking vs. reflective thinking
Thousands of TV hours are devoted to elections, but issues are rarely discussed. We hear a few buzzwords like change, experience, or liberal and conservative, but these words mean so many different things to so many different people that they don’t really communicate anything at all.
Elections aren’t about issues. Elections are sporting events.
We gravitate to elections for the same reason we watch sports or movies. We like the competition. We like the drama. We like to keep score. We liked to see “good guys” pitted against “bad guys.” It’s all about the drama. It isn’t about philosophy.
So the question must be asked: can elections change minds? Can elections change America’s intellectual environment? We think the odds are so stacked against it as to make it almost metaphysically impossible.
Imagine a Yankees fan trying to convince a Red Sox fan that the Yankees aren’t evil. The effort would be pointless, because success would remove the drama of the competition. We don’t want to hear the other side’s case. We want to crush them, dramatically, or if we are crushed instead, then we also want to suffer dramatically, just like we do at a horror movie or a tear jerker.
We are hardwired to love dramatic emotions. Even negative ones. How else could human beings have survived for so long, when for most of our time on Earth life has been nasty, brutal, and short? We are built to endure, and even love, drama.
Sports and movies and electoral campaigns all push the same psychological buttons. They all work on the human mind in exactly the same way. Elections put us in a mode of reactive thinking and dramatic emotion, not sober, reflective consideration.
It doesn’t matter that your candidate has compelling reasons for the things he believes, his compelling reasons won’t be heard. Those who most need to listen will refuse to do so because your candidate is the “bad guy” in the drama, and plays for the wrong team in the sporting event.
But these psychological factors are hardly the only problem with using an “electoral strategy” to downsize the federal government. There is also the problem of perverse economic incentives. People like Milton Friedman taught us a long time ago that coercive government grows because . . .
- Those who receive government favors have a huge incentive to fight for their preservation, while . . .
- The cost of those favors is spread among all taxpayers, in small amounts, giving taxpayers little incentive to fight against them
These natural incentives create an environment that favors expansive, coercive government. These incentives permeate everything, influencing what people think, how politicians behave, what government schools teach, and even what the establishment media broadcasts.
The candidate who opposes expansive, coercive government must shout above this roar, but even if he can accomplish that feat, no one will listen, because he is prejudged to be the “bad guy” in the drama, playing for the wrong team in the sporting event.
But people still try. Then the votes come in, the results are low, and everyone, especially the media, cites them as evidence that the candidate’s ideas must be wrong, or even crazy, because no one supports them.
But the truth is . . .
The result was predetermined by the nature of the vehicle used to communicate the ideas. Ideas communicated by a candidate provoke reactive emotion, not reflective thought.
It really doesn’t matter if there are marginal exceptions to this. Of course there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. But marginal exceptions do not establish rules. Rules are established by the bulk of the evidence. And the verdict is clear . . .
The candidate you support will not convince others to accept your ideas. Rather, convincing people to accept your ideas will lead people to support the candidates you want. The ideas must be sold first, outside the context of an electoral contest, before candidates who favor those ideas will win elections.
Indeed, if you sell your ideas broadly, to everyone, everywhere, every day, in a less reactive setting, then the candidates you want will be everywhere too, eager to march in front of the parade you have created.
But this strategic vision is itself difficult to sell, because it too may provoke reactive emotion rather than reflective thought. No one wants to hear that the electoral contest/drama/sporting event, about which they care so much, has deep inherent flaws. You may even feel this way. So how do we counter this?
All we can do is make our strategic case, and ask that you not react emotionally. Instead . . .
Reflect upon what we are saying. And learn more, because many points relative to our case cannot be made in the space we have here.
Jim Babka & Perry Willis
President & Communications Director
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Also, these two pieces by Stefan Molyneux,
Me too, except the anti- social part.
The Americans hold that in every state the supreme power ought to emanate from the people; but when once that power is constituted, they can conceive, as it were, no limits to it, and they are ready to admit that it has the right to do whatever is pleases… The idea of rights inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing from the minds of men; the idea of omnipotence and sole authority of society at large rises to fill its place…
The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind…
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing…
After having successively taken each member of the community in it powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Suck power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd…
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians, Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York: Alfred Knopf, 19450), pp. 290-291, 318-319.
I can relate a little bit. Some time after I realized that I had made the Libertarian-to-anarchoCapitalist transition, it occurred to me that the only reason I remained a libertarian so long was an emotional attachment. I now realize that my desire to correct the state was no different than wanting to un-sink a sunken ship. And you are right about it being an isolating experience. Solitude seems to be the price paid for insight.
[...] As I mentioned in my recent blog entry deep thoughts, I have been slowly and painfully transitioning from little- and big-l libertarian to full-blown anarchocapitalist. No one is more surprised by this turn of events than me. [...]