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From: peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley)
Newsgroups: net.politics,can.politics
Subject: Libertarians considered psychotic
Message-ID: <5140@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 9-Sep-84 17:30:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.5140
Posted: Sun Sep  9 17:30:03 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Sep-84 19:14:03 EDT
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 41

I've just caught up on net.politics and can.politics and have noticed an
implicit belief in many of the libertarian postings which reminds me of
early AI work.  It is the belief that the way to get a good society is to
let everyone act with as much freedom as possible, for their own immediate
self-interest.  This reminds me of some of the early work on "neural nets"
and "perceptrons", which were to be left to their own devices and "naturally"
organize themselves into intelligent, useful systems.  That idea has since been
abandoned, simply because it didn't work.  The idea that a society can prosper
in a parallel situation is equally impractical; for a society to be a useful
construct, there must be a means of deciding on goals on *some* level.

One can, however, view libertarianism more as a force to balance natural 
forces of totalitarianism, however, and in that way, I am somewhat more sym-
pathetic.  However, I think philosophical anarchism does a better job of this,
because it explicity recognizes that we live in a *necessarily* inter-
dependent society (made so by our need to share resources and our social
natures).  It seems to me that libertarians say "release me so that I may
compete with you (and make my life better, possibly helping you also)".
Philosophical anarchists say "let us be released so that we may cooperate on
an individual basis, so that we can produce more together".

I cannot help but associate libertarian thought with the spectre of use-em-
up-and-toss-em-out capitalism, which justifies such treatment of people by
the mythical belief that they don't "have" to take a job if they don't want
to.  The myth seems to be based in an essential psychosis:  the feeling that
the world is limitless, that there are always more resources to exploit,
always another job to be found, always new products to invent.  While this is
a useful fiction in some ways (it is easier than thinking about how one's
actions impact on global resources), it *is* psychotic-- the world is *not*
limitless, Ayn Rand notwithstanding.  When one realizes this, one recognizes
that individial rights can conflict in *many* ways and some means of
compromise has to be found.  If one can't say much for mainstream political
parties, one can at least say they recognize the need to compromise.

So, in a phrase, I think libertarians are psychotic competition fanatics
while anarchists are useful proponents of decentralization in order to
make society better adapted to local conditions, and to encourage cooperation
between people treated as equals.

peter rowley,  University of Toronto Department of C.S., Ontario Canada M5S 1A4
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