Five Questions Libertarians Can't Answer w/ Auron MacIntyre (NHRN): Ep. 453

As I said before we went live, I think that many libertarians have been taking a victory lap after the war in Iran. Oh, we told you so. You should never have tried to get involved in politics. You should never have casted a vote, cast a vote, because this is what happens, right, you should simply be like and then the kind of you know, vague prescriptions of whichever chapter of libertarian you're speaking to come up so or

before we launch into it. I'm just curious. Did you go through the sort of infamous libertarian stage, and I guess if you could, what has been your should we say, relationship to that school of thought?

the future of conservatism was somewhat libertarian. That obviously we had lost on the issues like gay marriage and abortion and other you know, kind of the culture war as it would eventually be called, and so what we really needed to do was focus on economics and free trade and these things, and ultimately that's what would make the

right work. We had guys like Neil Bort's and Herman Kin who were libertarian adjacent and would talk about, you know, getting rid of the income tax and these kind of things. And that was the winning agenda for the right. I bought into some of that for a while. It quickly became clear to me that wasn't the case. Now every time I say this, a bunch of libertarians run around screaming their heads off. Oh, that's not libertarian, that's not

real libertarian. The GOP never a libertarian. There's no trend towards libertarian in the GOP. But like obviously, this was relatively a large switch from the religious right, and it's understanding that we had and perhaps the eighties or earlier nineties, and so I think it is fair to say that, however imperfect and in not illogically pure, the kind of drift to libertarianism was in the Republican Party. It was

a real phenomenon. It did really exist. We were told this, if we're not adopting libertarianism as such, at least our messaging on social issues should be more libertarian. And that was what was gonna, you know, take us into the future. As long as your gay neighbors can have gun rights and you know, ultimately push for free trade, that's what

was going to make right wing politics work. I think we've seen pretty much the collapse of that understanding, I think we've seen a resurgence in the idea that perhaps right wing governments can be interested in the good of their people, and that the culture war isn't it actually a winning issue as opposed to a losing issue. Again, I'm sure many libertarians will, you know, kick back at the idea that this is the structure of kind of where the party was going, But it's very clear that

it is swerved back the other way. In some places, you know, to to I think you know, our profit, in other places, to our detriment. I think you might be muted on that one.

could stand was well, I'm a libertarian. I believe in freedom of choice, and so I believe in the freedom for you to you know, get gay, married, or to have an abortion, and so we don't touch those sort of subjects that are quite hot. But also I, you know, get to keep gun rights. I don't want to live

around certain types of people, whether stated or unstated. And so for a while it was sort of a spot on the slippery slope where you could hang out right, a way to talk about politics without you know, being subjected to a rant about you know, racist rednecks, right, sort of a third position. But the problem is, and I think many of us realized, and that's why there are so many post libertarians or you know, people who pass through that is that you realize very quickly that's

a losing prospect. You don't win there. You are simply ushered to one side at best. And I think that's part of the reason why so many people left it. Right we saw during COVID very dramatically, well, that doesn't work, right,

The state will get you. And so at the most basic level, I'm going to title this something you know, clickbaity, like the five questions libertarians can't answer, because I do have five general objections that I have seen no convincing answer to And look, there are good libertarians, you know, obviously,

you know Tom Woods and Scott Horton. I'm not talking about them, but I think the most fundamental right if we assume that libertarianism is this philosophy or tendency that puts individual choice right, some form of self determinism at the center. Right, the best society is the one where you were constrained by the least things, you were the most free. Well, an important question is, well, what is freedom right? Is this a universal right, a sort of right granted to you by God. You will hear that

idea even from some self described conservatives. Or is it specific and cultural? Is it the product of a tradition? Because one, when we talk about freedom, we're basically talking about a Western conception.

I mean now that I say that running around naked with funny hats is pretty close to it. But in all seriousness, right, clearly this is a different conception of what freedom is. This is a through line in Western thought. But we've seen many different permutations of even the society we see so often in constitutional conservative and libertarian means that of the American founding? Is that a libertarian society?

On one level? Well, I mean, yes, you know, you didn't have a lot of taxes, but a sodomy was illegal, there were blasphemy laws. It's sort of ridiculous on its face. So i'll throw it to you, arin, Right, what do we make of that question of well, what is freedom? And how is it sort of twisted in the kind of you know, Twitter dot com version of what libertarians think?

is just terrible. The libertarian anthropology is deeply flawed in this understanding that freedom is simply an absence of official government control by something called the state TM, and if we just get rid of the state TM, then people will live in some kind of spontaneous order and everything will be good. And this is what we're looking for from life. Now. It's very interesting because there's actually a perfect answer to this, and it sits inside the libertarian tradition.

Bertrand Jujuvenile is a guy I reference all the time because he's one of the most important and underappreciated figures in political theory. And he wrote a book on power and another one on sovereignty, which are just absolutely critical. They're actually even put out by Freedom Press, a libertarian you know, imprint, and he's often cited inside the libertarian tradition, or at least the class of liberal tradition. He's literally the basis for Hans Hermann Hopp's Democracy The God That Failed.

Like if you like Hoop, if you've thought his arguments against democracy were persuasive, congratulations they were stolen directly from Bertrand di Juvenal and I say this with like the greatest admiration for hop because like only the great seal from bertrand di juvenal, like this is not me slandering him. I say all that to point out that this guy is really well grounded and is somebody that like especially Mesa's style, libertarians rely on without recognizing that they owe

him the intellectual lineage that they do. And inside on Power, Dijuvenile makes exactly the point we're making now that radical libertarianism and radical communism were always destined to meet in the center. They were always destined to create the same outcome. And his point is that what we're looking for is not just radical freedom. What we're looking for is order liberty, and liberty in the classical sense is the freedom to

pursue the good as your society understands it. It is an Aristotilian concept that it is only inside our interactions with other political entities that we can grasp our role and we can recognize our or we could realize our liberty. That is what creates liberty, is having a shared understanding of the good and having the ability to pursue it. In fact, in on Sobiergty di Juvenal goes a step further and says that it is not the power of the government that makes a man free or not free.

It is that the government acts in accordance with the general understanding of the good. People who are asked to only pursue that which they already inherently understand through their traditions and their folk ways and their religion as virtuous. They are people who are free. That feels now natural

to them. Even if they can never achieve exactly what they set out, they feel those goals to be ones that are in alignment with what they already want to pursue, and so the government encouraging them or bolstering the pursuit of something they already agree with, does not feel oppressive.

It feels liberate. What really makes people feel oppressed is a government or a state that tries to force them into doing things they don't agree with, things that they do not see as virtuous, things that do not work inside their tradition, their understanding of the good. This is what tyranny ultimately is. It's not the abuse of government power,

it's not the exercise of government power. It's the use of government power to force peoples into a way of being that does not complement them, that does not attain that ultimate good that they are aiming for. And so when we're talking about liberty, what we need to understand is it's not about the government having more or less power. It's about the government working for the good of people, the collective understanding of where we should be as a people,

as a nation. If it's doing that, we feel liberated. If it doesn't, we feel constrained. That's why even if a group of people fights for their liberation from another nation, so they can immediately impose a bunch of religious restrictions on top of themselves, which is exactly what America did. We feel like that's our independence day because we are now free not to do math or you know, get gay married, but to live in accordance with a religious tradition and our understanding as a people.

Where he goes from that that sort of desired end state of spontaneous order, right, a truly liberated society where you know, what state as it exists is in line with the people. Right, there is no feeling of tyranny or disconnect between the state and those rules. And he says, of course, well, if that's what you want, speaking, shall we say slightly hyperbolically, you should be a fascist, right,

You should want to crush disorder so that order can exist. Now, this comes from his understanding of that duality of order and chaos. He believes, and as did many before him, this is not D and D right, You cannot be chaotic good. Chaotic chaos is synonymous with evil. An order that which is necessary, you know, for a functional society is a good and what steps you need to take

towards that are good steps. Now, I think it's important to say that this misconception that in order to achieve an end you should act as if it already is the case. It runs rampant through education and child rearing. Right in our last episode, it's never quite stated this way, but the idea is, well, I want X y Z child to be a functional adult. So if I just treat them at age four, how I would one of my coworkers, one of my friends, Well, then they will

become that. Clearly that doesn't work, right, We've all been to the supermarket and seen a mother trying to reason with her three year old. Doesn't work. Sure, you or I might feel very embarrassed that we are causing a scene at a local coals. You know that we're screaming and crying and throwing things A three year old does not. You have to act in a different way so that later down the line you can pull back. Right, you don't have to have that insane level of top down control.

And to that point, when we look at libertarian societies, you know what are often tauted as you know, a successful functioning society full of spontaneous order. Well, how do the people act? Right? Do they act like modern libertarians from a certain perspective? Maybe right, they don't have a policeman over their shoulder. But what got them there?

a very basic level of freedom. That's not free for you. But you look to places like, up until recently, something like England, right, kind of the pre Tony Blair version. Well, you know Victorian England, We'll go to that. Well, functionally, you have an immense amount of freedom. You can walk wherever you want. You know, infamously women walked around London late at night without being bothered. Well, how did we get there? One of the most punishing criminal justice regimes

in history, right, hanging people, sending them to Australia. It was what many moderns would call fascistic. I go back, as we mentioned multiple times to the American founders, right, a society much freer than ours. But again, if you stole a horse, they hanged you. You could not be gay. Gay marriage was I mean, it would be comical to explain it. You cannot create a libertarian society by acting as a libertarian. And so the question is, okay, even if you are, you know you have that end goal,

you have that vision of society. Well it's not how you should act now, you should be much like Crothbard was closer to the end of his life, right encouraging the cops to send in the hounds, right to stamp out disorder, because disorder is inherently in tropic It will make it impossible for rational spontaneous order to exist because quite simply, it is not safe to do so. So are That's a bit of a monologue for me, but I'd be curious to get your thoughts as well.

As Moldbug lays out, humanity starts in a state of war. Then you move to a state of order. Then you move to a state of law, and if you're very, very lucky, then you move to a state of liberty. And it is only after going through those steps that you achieve that final state. And if you do not go through this process, you cannot expect that final state to emerge. Libertarians say, I don't need the state, I don't need the thing that brings order. I don't need

the thing that ends the war. I just need the last part of that, and I will therefore then generate out all the benefits. But that is just observably false. We see this over and over again that as long as you say people are allowed to take certain actions that they seemed themselves as being free to take, they actually reduced the amount of order, and therefore the liberty inside it is virtue that creates liberty, not liberty that

creates virtue. And if you don't spend time with the population cultivating that virtue, you simply cannot bring about the type of society that liberty that libertarians want. So, for instance, Alexis de Tokville famously observed that the reason that America was basically allowed to more or less self govern, as we often put it, is that actually it didn't self

govern at all. That it was all of these smaller civic organizations, the church, the guild, the you know, the community, you know organization, these things came together and created a straight from which American society could emerge. And because people had a loyalty to their union, or to their church, or to their community, or to their club, or to their fire brigade or all these other voluntary associations, the government, the official state TM didn't have to take very many actions.

And again this is what bertrand Juvenile echoes in on power, that is, these alternative spheres of sovereignty that limit the government. In fact, he takes at another level and says, it is not the constitution and it's checks and balances that ultimately limits the government. It is the fact that those checks and balances of the Constitution are meant to represent different social forces that actually brings limitation on the government itself.

And so if you don't have a virtual society and which people enter into these voluntary organizations and see themselves as beholden to them and see power to them. Then there is no social force to push back against the central power of the state. And we can see that as those intermediate forces, the family, the church, the community, have eroded, we've required more and more government to step

in and take action. But it's not the loss of you know, it's not the removal of government that creates that. Freedom is the imposition of order from virtuous people spontaneously. But you can't have that until you have virtuous people. You don't get those just because you were liberated in some way. If you do not enhance the character of the people, you simply cannot live in the way that

libertarians would like. And so that's why, for instance, neo reactionary theory has always been authoritarian on the outside, libertarian on the inside. This was the post libertarian realization that a libertarian order, while desirable, can only come through authoritarian means. And that's kind of the realization that occurred after they

really looked at all the libertarian theory. This is a beautiful worldview that only exists when a certain type of environment is produced, and the only way to produce that is through strict amounts of authority, often handed down by the state.

is libertarians presupposed, at least from what I've seen that at the base of Maslow's hierarchy of need is liberty, right, that that is what all men are striving for, what all people want. And maybe that was true. We can put a pin in that at a previous point in time. Very clearly that is not true today. As the total state has grown, as it has taken more and more institutions, whether it is marriage, the rearing of children, education, out of informal social structure and into the realm of the

political well, we very clearly see people want that. They want security, They do not necessarily want maximum liberty. You may remember several years ago there was a pandemic, and well what happened. Did the masses rise up? Did people say, you know, I will not be confined to my home? Well, clearly not. The majority of people went along with it. And sure there were relocations within the US to escape the excesses of the COVID regime. As someone in Florida,

you're note out aware of that. But nonetheless we understand and we're seeing it on almost a daily basis. The average American does not desire liberty, at least in the sense often meant by libertarians. And so if you have a universalist ideology, right, an idea for everyone all at once, and not even and everyone, but just almost everyone disagrees with it. Well, what is to be done there?

this assumption when it comes to human organization. Well, of course we can't force you know, liberal democracy on the Afghanis, But of course every human being actually yearns to be free and looks for libertarian ideology and existence. As you point out, this is just absolutely not true, and you can evidence is if only because the ideology of communism, well equally ridiculous and universal, has always had more adherents

than the ideology of libertarianism. If libertarianism was so much truer to human nature, you think it would just naturally went out in that old marketplace of ideas, and yet it never does. In fact, reliably, if we look at the libertarian quadrant of the political compass, we find it is the place with zero voters, It has almost no support, and pretty much every bit of polling and data finds that libertarians are the least likely to actually produce any

kind of popular movement. And that's for a very simple reason. Most people can't live this way. And you know a lot of people have made the joke that classical liberalism, and therefore libertarians, which is its spiritual descendant, it was made for one hundred and thirty iq Anglos. It works for a society of one hundred and thirty iq Anglos.

To the point where my buddy Carl Benjamin has put it this way, classical liberalism is Sharia law for the English, which I think is a pretty good formulation for how to understand this. So we have in libertarianism is not a universal understanding of you know, human behavior, but a very specific understanding of how a very particular set of

people and a specific culture can conduct itself. And this is the problem is so much of libertarianism is based on this idea that because you have understood economics at some level, well, I have Kinsian economics, and this is the magic bullet. It explains the world. It's just Marxism, it's just inverted Marxism. It's just materialism for you know, the guy who wants to make money and do drugs.

It doesn't. It has this anthropology that says, well, people are driven by these material causes, and as long as you arrange the material underlying material cause this is correctly, this will produce the society that you're looking for. I've studied the economics, and that is the universal science that will allow me to understand all human beings. What we see is that's absolutely not the case. And if you don't tailor your understanding of your social organization to the

people it's actually organizing, you lose. Which is why again people like Bertrand to Juvenil to the extent they are in any way libertarian or inside the libertarian tradition are correct, because they're the ones who are saying no, you have to actually look at the people you're governing. It matters what their folk ways are. It matters if you want to create liberty in the society, you must align it with the way of life of the people who are actually going to be subject to the rule of the state.

You can't just go around saying, well, because I think in this abstract sense that everyone should be able to spontaneously order their life, I'm just going to impose that on the world because what we see reliably, and this is always the problem libertarianism is that while they advocate for a total removal of state and vault, the only places where they ever make gains are the leftist ones.

Right Like, they help push open the door for gay marriage, they help push open the door for drug legalization, but they never push open the door for anything that's actually going to conserve society. They never happen to push away the welfare state. Oh, they never happened to push away public education. They never win any of these battles. The battles they win are almost exclusively ones that help degenerate society because they're pushing an open door in those situations.

And so this is why we never end up creating the society they're looking for, because they never bother to look at the people they're actually trying to create the society for. They start with the ideology and then they just try to universally apply it to whatever people they happen to have any level of influencer control over.

the Stars, it's really not that different. And when presented in that marketplace of ideas, you know, which is going to win out the the story of socialism, which we understand is not true, but the idea of you know, you will have these things taken care for you. You know you will not have to pay for this, you will not have to pay for that. And sure, hypothetically you might not be able to make seven figures, but most

people can't do that. Most people don't want that. The social safety net sounds great, you know, that is a certain degree of freedom, right, freedom from worry. Now, let's look at the kind of story presented, you know, of the of the ancams. It's this idea that you know, I will be able to become guy earning seven figures by finding the best workers, you know, the best eight

year olds to you know, man my meth plantation. It's like, well, okay, sure, but again, remember you were playing for people who are or let's be honest, more often view themselves as exceptional and desire that same material abundance, but only for that right they think that they will and it is you know, materialism plus a certain amount of social Darwinism is what you often see as well, the idea that simply we will create a society where it will all sort itself

out right, the best will rise to the top. You know, they will be you know, drug lords and crypto scammers, and they will live in you know, this kind of again very truncated version of gay space communism, right, not particularly like they don't say to communism, but effectively unlimited abundance, right with full freedom of personal interaction, and one we have to ask is that a good end goal for society?

That is a separate question. You and I would say no. But also we have to address the factor that it is much much easier to convince people of the original formula of materialism than it is. This what we would say kind of like Anglo innovation, right, And so to kind of carry through another part of this, when we're talking about the libertarian's horrible anthropology, and this is exactly why I wanted you on, right, is a very core point, which is the man who wants to rule always beats

the guy who wants to be left alone. And when we're talking about power, this conception of power, that power must be avoided, that you must take the ring up the ring being power of course, up Mount Doom and destroy it so that you can be left alone, is shot through libertarian and conservative thought, right, This idea of I just want to be left alone. The problem is, of course, there are people who don't want to leave

you alone, and they want that way harder. And you see this anytime there's you know, a riot in the offing, anytime there's one of these disruptive, irritating events, you get the argument of try that in a small town, right that you know, someone will show up and put a stop to it. And the problem is they don't. It is irrational for any one person without the States backing to do that. You know, even in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, who you know, successfully avoided going to jail

for the rest of his life. One that was a fairly miraculous situation on multiple levels, but two that was a near run thing. He almost got sent to, you know, stabbed with the screwdriver sorts of prisons, as we've seen with other enemies of that part of society that does want to rule your life, that does want to step on you. And so this conception that I will simply retreat certainly is very Anglo, right. You see that in lands Cracker Factory. It is sort of our tradition. But

fundamentally it doesn't work. It doesn't let you have that society effectively.

produce any sort of long term results. The best you can hope for is approximate win. Right. I live in Massachusetts. I prefer to live in Idaho, fair enough, and you can do that. But if that's all you're doing, that's the only game you're playing of I just want to be left alone, you know. I only want power so that I can destroy power. At best, let's a loser mentality. And the whole time that that cope has been in vogue, let's just say what last twenty thirty forty years? Pick

your number. The question is, well, has the country gotten more or less free? And by all but a few metrics, the country has gotten dramatically less free. Ar And I'll let you speak.

York become too constrict, a move to the Midwest. When they get too constricting there, head to the you know, further west, to the wild West. And we just kept escaping to frontier to frontier to frontier in order to

kind of avoid this issue. You can see this so much in of course, the American founding, where once the issue slavery becomes central, you just see you know, different peoples going west and trying to kind of incorporate more and more of the states into their ideology, until eventually there's nowhere left to run and the states have to clash over this issue. Right, one side is going to dominate the other. One side is going to rule. And

let's be really clear. The North decides to rule, it kills a lot of people, It crushes the governments, It imprisons the governments that of different states that avoid it. It throws the constitution in the trash. Lincoln decides that you don't need habeas corpus er in these other legal traditions that came from classical liberalism, because ultimately, the question is who's going to rule and who's going to dominate,

and the answer is the North. And as much as you know, any good Southerner like you or me understands the War of Northern Aggression as a violation of constitutional principles, it doesn't matter. We're still under the rule of the Union at this point, right there is no conversation anymore about how we really have these rights in the Tenth Amendment. No one cares. The Tenth Amendment is sitting in the trash.

It doesn't matter. And things like COVID and others just continue to reinforce this point, and so it quickly becomes clear. And this is one of my most hated tweets of all time. I've gotten this response to you know, I hate that. I think you're right about this, about this tweet more than anything else I've ever said, which is the side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. Because as painful as it is in the American mind to admit that, it's

so obviously true that it's simply undeniable. And once you recognize that truth, then you recognize that while at some point the idea that investing the government and let with less power was a noble understanding, it was something that was foundational to our way of being as Americans over time. Instead, what that schibbalith has become is a way to control

conservative America. Oh well, you're the side that thinks we shouldn't have government power, right, Well, then it would be a violation of your own principles to take government power or to use government power. If you happen to win an election, at best, your job is to sit there and sit in place, or maybe you know, diffuse some level of government power for a little while. And then the other guys come into power and they do the thing that's in accordance with their principles, which is to

rule you with an iron fist. And so if one side says power is good and I can do whatever I want with it, and I'm righteous for doing so, and one side says power is bad and if I attain it, then I'm a bad person. And if I attain it and use it, I'm basically hitler. Well, which side is going to win in a contest of power. The answer is glaringly obvious. And so what we're going through now is really just the painful forcing every single idiot who has bought into this to ultimately admit that this

is true, right, And this is the difficulty. This is why I'm so hard on libertarians. You know a lot of people, you know, Oh, you give libertarians so much heat, you must hate them. No, I love libertarians. The problem is that libertarians are so close to understanding the truth,

but they can't get over the last hurdle. They are not They have not made that post libertarian switch, that NRX switch, of understanding that the very society they want to achieve could only be achieved through the acquisition and exercise of power. It is only through absolute authority that they can create the level of liberty they are attempting to achieve. And that's really the barrier that we have

to understand. If you are not looking to rule, if you're not looking to impose even a libertarian order on others, they will impose their way of life on you. And there's simply never some kind of detente in which you live the way you want and they live the way they want.

go back to FDR. Right, that's where this and let's be honest, also, the Libertarians sort of get their start because you have a pre existing order, right, and at least one large portion of this was very pro what

we consider a big business in high finance. And when FDR comes in rules like an American season, starts changing things, you know, violating the previous understanding of the constitution, Well, this force builds up in opposition and They're referred to, depending on who you ask, as sort of the old right, you know, pre uh, you know, pre FDR, kind of that desire, and so you see people like you know, Garrett Garrett who sort of defected from one side to another.

But these are seminal figures. They influenced, you know, Goldwater, They influenced the kind of nation American right, and so I think it is relevant to say, well, what did they do? How successful were they? I have a great deal of affection for these men. I think they were right. You know, FDR was not a good guy, and he didn't do good things to the country, but we're still living in the house that FDR built. Obviously there's a dramatic change in the sixties with you know, how we

understood the purpose of this nation. But fundamentally our government looks much much, much more like FDR's version than the government ten years before he ever showed up. Fundamentally, that that process that or sorry that that protest you could say against FDR, this American dictator, well it failed because he was in charge.

number of metrics. But fundamentally, if you don't have power, it doesn't matter because power lets you not only make changes, but define to crib aligned from Tom Woods right, the three x five card of allowable opinions, you have set what is acceptable for generations. And so fundamentally, if you are unwilling to assume power, you are relegating yourself to a statu of eternal loser. You were also letting your enemy, unopposed,

remake the fabric of society. And this matter is quite a bit going back to earlier in our conversation, because remember what determines liberty, what determines tyranny is that relationship between the ruler and the world. Are they aligned? And if you, like FDR was able to do successfully socially engineer your society, right, you put in all of these programs that have now become entitlements. Social security is a great example for generations. That is simply part of what

it means to be in America. You reach sixty two and you collect social security, well, for any number of reasons. If that, if you have decided that needs to go away, well, all of a sudden, the vast majority of people, you are a tyrant. You're taking away grandma's retirement, You're taking away her ability to support herself. And is that true in an absolute sense, right, comparing tyranny to Genghis Khan. No,

of course not. But functionally, by failing the contest, by being driven out of power, you have allowed your enemy a massive hand up for the next iteration of the game. Right, going forward, you are not simply stuck at a fifty to fifty anymore. If this is tug of war, you're on your tiptoes on the line. And so the idea that you can simply continue to give up, continue not to fight, and then well, at some point in the future things will get bad enough clearly not. That's not

how it works. And so this this assumption about politics, you know, this assumption about power, is deeply, deeply buried in both and I'm using these terms semi interchangeably because on this issue at least they are aligned Libertarians and conservatives. They need to get rid of this because this is why you always lose and as Arun said earlier, this criticism is not coming from a place of personal hatred, far from it. These are my people, this is who

I grew up around. But if I want those people to have a certain degree of liberty, right to escape or to sort of throw off this tyranny, well someone needs to have power and someone who shares those values. That is the only way out of this, because otherwise it will be someone else making that decision. But no matter what, no matter the situation, a decision is being made. It is not simply left up to kind of trends and forces the market whatever. That means. Power and politics

are a function of human organization. There's no way to get around that, no matter how ichy or gross you think that is. And if you're not in power, someone else will and they will impose their there's set of values on you. There's no way around that. One more thing, I think, and we've been dancing around this partially due to the fact that I, as you've probably noticed, arn Am, not the most organized podcaster, is the sort of floating target of what is or what constitutes a libertarian society.

Because these guys will very accurately make fun of socialists and Marxists, they will say, hahaha, real communism has never been tried. But of course the next question is, well, like, where is your ideology been tried? Right, where do we find a version of your society working out? And so arn, I'm curious to get your thoughts on and Kapistan has never been tried. Sort of argumentation that tends to happen when you actually try to, you know, dig down on this issue.

One of the issues that we could run up almost immediately with anytime you have a conversation with libertarian is the minute you point out a flaw, they say, well, that's not real Libertarians, by which they mean there are at least nineteen different splinter groups of libertarianism, and you happen to have not identified the exact boutique brew of libertarianism that I have my head, and so therefore any objection you have, we'll run up against one of the

thirteen niche little things that I believe, and therefore cannot be accurate. And to be fair, any you know, movement has its splinters. Obviously, if we think of ourselves as conservatives or right wingers, we would also be looping in with a lumped in with guys like Lindsey Graham or something with which we disagree quite quite fervently. So I'm

sympathetic to that. But it is a real issue, and that whenever you have a discussion with libertarian the question is, you know, the first thing you should ask is which libertarian are you? Because there's at least twenty different varieties I can think of off the top of my head, and they don't agree with each other on a lot of things. Some of them are open borders, some of

them are pro pedophilia or child trafficking. Some of them think that you can have like really strict contracts that allow you to you know, segregate society inside libertarian society. The differences are vast to the point where they basically share nothing. And so saying the word libertarian society is you know, it's nothing. It means nothing. It has no content. And so if Greg Guttfeld and Bill Maher can both call themselves libertarians, what does the word even mean? Right

like that? That's a huge issue. So the first problem is you can't even nail them down on what a libertarian society would be. But then if you look on like, okay, what versions of like hyper capitalistic libertarian societies are successful? Well, you got to look at a place like Singapore, right, Well, what Singapore got going for it? Is it free? Well, in many instances, yes, is orderly. Oh yes, very orderly. But they'll lasso cane you in the streets for spitting gum.

You know, they'll they'll they'll execute you for smuggling marijuana into their society. So it's the inverse of libertarian in certain areas, which is what allows it to be successfully libertarian in every other area. The only reason that Singapore can be a multi ethnic, multi religious, capitalistic paradise is because it's willing to beat you to death if you don't follow the rules. And so this is what you

know libertarianism requires in the real world. Again, this is the NRX understanding of libertarianism, authoritarianism on the outside to allow for libertarianism on the inside. But there's another problem that libertarians never really want to face, which is scale, which, to be fair, is a problem that no one wants to face, which is why it's my number one hobby horse.

When you don't think about how scale impacts your society, you don't take into account critical aspects of your social organization. So for a while there, you know, we had a situation where governments were so disjointed that a single person acting, you know, with a enough initiative, could create large amounts of wealth and a large prosperity for themselves and the

people around them. But as societies have scaled up, we've seen that the ability to do that shrinks, and it doesn't get solved just because your society is libertarian and

another isn't. A good example would be medieval Europe. Many people call this medieval anarchy, which might sound crazy to people, but if you talk to actual libertarian scholars, many of them will tell you that actually, the you know, feudal Europe was more libertarian then modern societies because there was no central government, not because they didn't desire a central government, not because they were ideologically opposed to central government, but

because after the devastation of the Roman Empire, there was simply no force that could unify the different areas of Europe underwent authority, and so we developed a system where feudal lords, barons and counts and these other dukes would ultimately secure an area for themselves through violence, and then eventually you would have a higher warlord, a king, and

he would kind of unify those barons under him. But still there was a high degree of autonomy in any given region because there was simply no way for the king to ultimately impress compel behavior from his different barons. Most of the time, it was more of the king as a first among equals, trying to convince his different nobles to give their banners to his cause, rather than some almighty emperor who was weighing down on the four

of any given piece of his society. And it wasn't until we started to see the modernization and increase of scale that we started to see what we think of now as absolutism. And again, while absolutism is distinctly something that is monarchical. People like bertrand Jujuvenile I think credibly point to its development as actually an inevitable step towards modernity in which the state would unify under what we

think of now as liberal democracy. But it couldn't have happened until you had kings powerful enough to centralize their power inside their entire kingdom to the point where that medieval anarchy fell away. So you had moments where in that anarchic structure, a quasi libertarian existence was reasonable. But once you saw the absolutism start to solidify in these European nations, less and less it became clear, or more and more it became clear that this libertarian existence was

no longer viable with these larger states. This is Alul's famous tank problem. Once you have the leveon mass, everybody has to have the leveon mass. Once you have control of propaganda in your state, everyone needs to have control of propaganda in your state. And this is the great revolution in managerial styles. This is what James Burnham was pointing to that yes, you have technically fascism and liberal democracy and communism, but FDR and Stalin and Hitler, We're

all trying to do the same thing. They're all trying to bring mass production and mass consumption and the mass understanding of politics under centralized control. They simply gave different political formulas for the same outcome. And so whether libertarianism or not as achievable, it's not something that any given area or group of people gets to decide, because you're not the only actors. It's nice if you have a

nice libertarian society. But if China decides that they're collective, quasi communists, fascistic, neo you know, capitalistic empire, whatever we're calling it. If they decide that they're going to roll you over, well, what are you going to do? Do you have the production to outrun a billion plus people? Do you have the military might to stop an empire of that size? Is your libertarian advantage through three free market economics and the ability of people to choose what

they want? Is that going to stop China from rolling you up like a carpet? Probably not, And so it doesn't matter ultimately if you want to be a libertarian society. If your neighbor has collectivized to the point where they can crush your libertarian society, just like we saw in feudal Europe. Well, then it doesn't matter what you want as an individual, baron or count. And that's again something that libertarians never factor in when they're thinking about their ultimate society.

states are moving to red states and sort of vice versa. Right, we see people polarizing, and at least a large part of that, and I don't want to, you know, overemphasize that trend is the fact that it's almost impossible to get what you want on you know, a specific issue by issue basis from national politics, right, like even issues

like you know, gun control. Right, yes, sure, you know, the Democrats, you know, whine and moan about that, but the probability of federal level gun control is relatively small, right, it seems to be sort of a dead issue, whereas in blue states or recently blue states, well, you can have you know, Britain levels right if you want, and so seemingly if you are passionate about that issue or any others, the solution is we'll move to a smaller place, move to a place where you can create a consensus

around it. Right. But steering this whole ship of you know, four hundred million people is incredibly difficult to do. Now, that doesn't mean it can't happen, right, clearly, you know we have federal level laws at any given moment that are making life difficult. Not my point, but the problem of how to make this massive scrotic machine do anything is yeah, Look, it's felt by everyone, right, We understand that it's very difficult to actually get this ship to

move one side or the other. Well maybe more one side than the other. But that's a discussion for a different day. So Arn, thank you so much for coming on. This was a very fascinating discussion. I enjoyed it greatly. People are interested in you. We've mentioned you have a book now coming out in a second edition, but where else can people find you?