I Learned Today That I Am A Psychopath

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-fair-society/201108/what-s-the-matter-libertarianism

 

It's kind of interesting, but I have never understood the liberal mindset when it tries to refute a libertarian argument in favor of self-ownership.  Look at this particular passage:

 

We evolved as intensely interdependent social animals, and our sense of empathy toward others, our sensitivity to reciprocity, our desire for inclusion and our loyalty to the groups we bond with, the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from cooperative activities, and our concern for having the respect and approval of others all evolved in humankind to temper and constrain our individualistic, selfish impulses (as Darwin himself pointed out in The Descent of Man). 

So we are not, after all, like bumper cars in a carnival, where we all range freely, and, if we cause "harm" by crashing into others, we simply say "excuse me" and move on.  Rather, we are (most of us) embedded in an exceedingly complex network of social relationships, many of which are vital to our well-being.  Every day we confront issues relating to the needs and wants of others and must continually make accommodations.  And in addressing these conflicting interests, the operative norm is - or should be - fairness, a balancing of the interests and needs of other parties, other "stakeholders."

It's a very fuzzy complaint at best.  Let's assume for the time being that he is talking about Randites here who value "selfishness" (and of course as anyone who has read Rand nows that her definition of "selfishness" is not "go f*$& yourself, I'm looking out for #1"), but the objection really stems from a muddled type of, "yeah, well, we kinda are cooperating beings and we're very social, so therefore 'we' have the right to extort you because self-ownership is really a man-made construct."

 

My response to the above article is:  And?  What is your point?  What does this have to do with the central thesis of libertarianism, about the right to exercise bodily control over your person?  The answer is that it has nothing at all to do with it.  This may be very good advice and it is very good advice to understand human psychology and what will probably make someone happy.  If so, you should get involved in your community, love your neighbors and family, and be there for them when they fall on hard times.  This of course dodges the issue of whether or not threatening to kill and/or throw them in a rape cage if they do not comply is justified.  They say yes because they value a nebulous fairness over the cloaked violence that they perpetuate.

 

Indeed, libertarians generally have no model of society as an interdependent group with a common purpose and common interests.  For instance, the canonized conservative economist Friedrich Hayek posited a stark choice between two alternative models - either a "free market" of atomized individuals rationally pursuing their self-interests in transactional relationships or an authoritarian, coercive "state" that seeks control over us. In Hayek's words, "socialism means slavery."

Is not forcefully taking the product of one's labor against their will a form of slavery?  Why are you avoiding that definition and deriding it?  It would be more honest of you to say that slavery, in some instances, is justified.  The difference between a slave in ancient Egypt building a pyramid and one filling out an IRS form is only a matter of degree.  And no libertarian seriously thinks we are atomized individuals, only in the sphere of action or in the sphere of having rights ("society" is a concept without concrete existence, only the component parts make up society).  Not many libertarians are against society, just initiatory aggression.

 

The whole point about splitting the possibilities into two options is that a little bit of socialism is socialism and a little bit of centering society around violence is centering society around violence.  It sounds absolutist, but you are ceding the concept of all self-ownership in the name of utility, so you do not have an absolute right to ward off a rapist or a murderer, you only have a right to do so because it increases societial utility, or something.  That strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive (if we'll grant moral realism on its face).

 

Anyway, I'm done.  The rest is leftist cliches.  Perhaps you guys could savage it

The author obviously knows nothing about ethics and how rights are derived.

Always remember how "dissidents" were treated in Maoist China and Soviet Russia. Some were shot on spot, others were sent to labour camps. Others still were declared "criminally insane" and locked up in asylums. This is exactly the same mentality: since they cannot shot us on spot nor have us arrested for voicing our ides, they are trying to brand us as insane, the rationale being exactly the same in both cases: to oppose such great and perfect ideas one must be out of his mind. So much for freedom of speech and thought, usually very prized when they are endangered in a faraway country like Burma or Iran.

You also have to understand the Leftist mentality: they have been on roll for the past two decades. Even so called "right wing" parties now practice their ideology in public with minor changes in rhethoric. Problem is their empire is crumbling once again as it did in the '80s. Leftists in the US are confronted with Obama's close ties with the banking and military system they despise so much. Leftists in Europe are confronted with the failure of the Welfare State. Leftists in Japan are confronted with the meteoric ascent of "cut spending and taxes" politicians. Despite owning the political system lock, stock and barrel they are failing to create the "Workers' Paradise". Despite beating the free market into a pulp, the free market, like a bloodied and invincible Rocky Balboa, has made a comeback: tax and spending cuts, the bane of Leftists and bureaucrats, will arrive, no matter how much restrictive legislation and inflation is forced upon the people.

Just like Stalin (one of their spiritual forefathers, which says quite a lot) they have been taken aback by their plans' failure. Just like Stalin they think they can do nothing wrong so someone must have sabotaged their plans. Scapegoating has already begun: our plans are failing because a bunch of retarded and possibly mentally insane libertarians are spreading false ideas among the people. In doing so they are effectively throwing away the mask: their pretense of being out to free the masses failed the minute the insulted the hard-hat Tea Party supporters as a bunch of retards. In the days of cheap mobile phones and computers even hard hat workers have the Internet, not courtesy of Stalin's grandchildren...

Straw man.

Decreasing marginal utility is merely definition of partial derivative applied to function of several orthogonal variables. Pareto optimality is just not much more than definition of gradient. That is why every scheme which tries to go beyond Pareto optimality is totally meaningless, Rothbard pointed out long ago.

Leftists love to say:

"Boo! Partial derivative is not fair! It is insane."

Such meaningless phrases reveal their authors to be incompetent morons.

The author simply conflates human cooperation with state action in many flowery words.

"No man is an island!" is such a tired old strawman against the libertarian conception of human society, I wonder when they will put in the effort to figure out something new.

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

"We evolved as intensely interdependent social animals, and our sense of empathy toward others, our sensitivity to reciprocity, our desire for inclusion and our loyalty to the groups we bond with, the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from cooperative activities, and our concern for having the respect and approval of others all evolved in humankind to temper and constrain our individualistic, selfish impulses (as Darwin himself pointed out in The Descent of Man). 

So we are not, after all, like bumper cars in a carnival, where we all range freely, and, if we cause "harm" by crashing into others, we simply say "excuse me" and move on.  Rather, we are (most of us) embedded in an exceedingly complex network of social relationships, many of which are vital to our well-being.  Every day we confront issues relating to the needs and wants of others and must continually make accommodations.  And in addressing these conflicting interests, the operative norm is - or should be - fairness, a balancing of the interests and needs of other parties, other "stakeholders."

But coerced "cooperative activities", aren`t cooperative activities.

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

So-called free markets are routinely distorted by the wealthy and powerful

Exactly, the markets in a corporatist/statist society ain`t free, i.e. they`re run via the state by special interest groups like the wealthy and powerful

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

, and the libertarians' crusade for lower taxes, less regulation and less government plays into their hands.

No, it`s the opposite, lower taxes, less regulation and less government decreases the special interests groups influence in society.

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

Perhaps unwittingly, anti-government libertarians would have us trade democratic self-government for an oligarchy

No, replace the current statist/corporatist oligarchy with democratic self-government.

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

In a very real sense, therefore, every organized economy and society represents a "collective survival enterprise" - an immensely complex "combination of labor" (a term I prefer to the traditional "division of labor") upon which all of our lives literally depend.  And our first collective obligation is to ensure that all of our basic needs are met.  If there is a "right to life," as our Declaration of Independence and pro-life conservatives aver, it does not end at birth; it extends throughout our lives, and it imposes on all of us a responsibility for ensuring the "no-fault" needs of others, when they cannot for various reasons provide for themselves.

So why does the statist/corporatist government prevent people from getting their basic needs met, what good does it do?

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

So why is libertarianism unfair?  It rejects any responsibility for our mutual right to life, where we are all created approximately equal

We are not created approximately equal.

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

It would put freedom and property rights ahead of our basic needs, rather than the other way around

Did slaves get their basic needs satisfied at the expense of freedom and property rights, i.e. did the their master organize their lives/work, and thereby feed them?

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

It is also oblivious to the claims for reciprocity, an obligation to contribute a fair share to support the collective survival enterprise in return for the benefits that each of us receives

So how the h... do you freeload in a libertarian society, without government redistribution?

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

It presumes a priori that property holdings are deserved, rather than making merit a precondition

What`s the difference between deserve/merit?

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

 Finally, it is anti-democratic in that it rejects the power of the majority to restrain our freedom and limit our property rights in the common interest, or for the general welfare

Who says what is the common interest, or the general welfare, is it the wolves in a society comprising of a mojority of wolves and a minority of sheep?

Johnny Doe:

Peter Corning, Ph.D:

It presumes a priori that property holdings are deserved, rather than making merit a precondition

What`s the difference between deserve/merit?

Oh man, this is such a bigtime corporatist trap that it's just laughable! Who gets to decide who's property is meritous? Presumably the government. Who makes the decisions in government? Congressmen? Who buys the congressmen? Presumably Businessmen...

What you'd get with this is the eradication of small businesses deemed unworthy, unclean, or inefficient, i.e. the competitive ones just like with the progressive era. Coordination and combination for the sake of efficiency, i.e. shoveling money into the pockets of selected enterprises.

 

On an unrelated note, can anyone tell me where Psychology went wrong? When did it transition from a study of the minds functions and their causes to a vehicle for diagnosing any irregularities in the human mind so that they can be medicated?

It's funny, Jargon, I watched a video on Reason's Youtube page about libertarian psychology which was interesting to me.  I earlier read the Jonathan Haidt research paper and wanted to see if there was any other research or discussion on the topic.  I stumbled across this one which was a political sound-bite paper worthy of a .blogspot domain name.

+1 Eric... awesome analysis

This article is a high-density collection of strawmen, zingers and cleverly-worded weasel phrases. I'll just pick on one because there really are way, way too many to address them all:

"combination of labor" (a term I prefer to the traditional "division of labor")

Why is it that everyone feels free to rewrite economics to suit their tastes? Economics is science, not just some postmodern narrative. It doesn't matter if you called it foofology, what matters is what the term denotes. The "division" in "division of labor" is with respect to a task. Making a primitive, sharpened-stone axe requires a variety of skills. If one individual possesses all those skills, he can make the sharpened-stone axe for himself just from stuff he can find lying about in the woods. But as soon as you get out past sharpened stone tools, in terms of complexity, you enter the world of specialization. You just simply can't make even the simplest objects - even a pencil as Leonard Read has pointed out - without division of the task into specialized components.

This goes to show the author's general conflation of classical liberalism with egoist individualism. The whole subject of economics was earlier called political economy because it was understood that the domain of economics is the study of society with respect to economic activity. Of course human beings exist in an insanely complex social network but if you're trying to find the order or structure within this rat's nest, you're going to have to try a little harder than throwing your hands up and saying "It's just all so complex!" That's called mysticism.

Austrians have vehemently repudiated Homo Economicus as unrelated to the study of economics altogether. It's just a useless little thought-experiment that makes other useless thought experiments (calculus-based, cardinal utility marginal curves) possible. But each human being is, indeed, an individual in the sense that he alone feels his pains and pleasures and he alone exerts volitional control over his body. Such a point is so obvious that it's embarrassing to have to explain it. This basic point is the starting point or foundation of the analysis of action.

Lately, with the advent of evolutionary psychology (a new school of psychology that mainstream psychologists are generally terrified of), we can begin to place human action in the context of human biology. Human beings do so many things that are apparently against their own "self-interest"... why? Well, we can just say "they have faulty brains!" but this is just giving up; it's mysticism. Evolutionary psychology gives us a way to extend the analysis of human action down into our biology and answer some of those tough questions.

Summary: This guy was writing a softball hit-piece to a cheering crowd of like-minded leftists.

Clayton -

That's a very interesting history of things, but so what?

Neither science nor psychology dictate man - man dictates science and psychology.  Besides all that, how can one have a social science/ philosophy that is "antisocial" - it's a simple tautology that can't be true.  The "magic" of the invisible hand isn't "magic" at all - it is saying that since we exist "As such" - by the very nature of existing and observering.  It is just a simple calling out of BS with ethical or narrarative structures and kooky intellectualism gone awry.

Bottom line this article is hinting at a tribalistic Plutonic conservative culture with set values and things - while our liberalism is a hyper bourgoiese cosmopolitan "creative destructive" process (not things).

If their science is a "will to truth" - it is no better or worse than a "will to untruth" in the case they are trying to present.

In so much as their Plutonic and stagnant "fixed" anthropology exists - the same may as well hold true for me as well.  And if the claim is, it isn't fixed, once again the same holds true of me.

One can value fairness, nonviolence, psychopaths, nonpschopaths or baking cookies all they want - it doesn't mean anything relevant.  These are just customary/ fashion terms the minute you break "leftist peace" or "liberal peace" when they are relevant fashions you die by the social fashions/customs in place.  That's just the nature o things.

  All that matters is  real positively asserted power i.e. atomic facts, force, human action (all are the same) -  and how we speak of the consequences.  The fact is meaningful only if I am forced to observe it, deal with it, confront it - if not, it is nonsense.   And in so much as the facts are observed they are my observations and my perspective - in so much as I am "bound" to society or whatever other fashionable / customary word you throw out I "render it unto Ceaser" and move on - just as everybod else does all the time wether they like it or not. 

Psychology, ethics, and history are the last refuges of scoundrels.  Turn them out - they are knaves all three.