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From: power.Wbst@Xerox.COM
Newsgroups: mod.politics
Subject: Re: Poli-Sci Digest V6 #51
Message-ID: <12232430817.54.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 20-Aug-86 20:29:22 EDT
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Posted: Wed Aug 20 20:29:22 1986
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Tom Bensons' note to this DL professing his disappointment with the
tendency towards endless speeches about libertarianism, and his
perception of this philosophy as basically racist, prompted me to post
this reply.  Three things:

One - In defense of this DL, the libertarianism faction is actually
very small, but quite vocal.  And this small faction is in fact
totally dominated by one person.

Two - I don't seperate people's talk from their actions, or rather I
feel that what people say is only meaningful when one also knows how
they act.  The few libertarians I know are racist, although they talk
a good non-racist argument.  The basic tone of the libertarian
philosophy has strong elements of social darwinism in it, long used as
a scientific veneer for racist thinking.  (I'm perfectly willing to
defend this assesment of social darwinism if anyone wants to debate
it.)

Three - I find libertarianism fascinating, but I'm not sure why.  To
me it has a very fundamental flaw in its premise; the same flaw as in
true Marxism, true Monarchy, true Socialism, among others.  It's a
very simple flaw: they base their premises on false pictures of human
beings.  In libertarianism the false picture is to deny the existance
of society as a sum greater than the whole of its parts (people).  I'm
not saying that humans beings are mere ants in the ant colony of
society.  (It was a popular notion earlier this century that the
'animal' was the ant colony as a whole, and that the ants were merely
the equivalent of the cells in the human body.  I'm not sure why this
fell out of favor.)  Rather I'm saying that to evaluate all 'rights'
as belonging only to individuals and never to society goes to the
other extreme.  The answer lies somewhere in the middle, but I'm not
sure where.

I contend that the concept of 'rights' are a conveniant tool, a useful
fiction that serves the survival of our species.  They are an
abstraction, and to give all rights to the second abstraction called
'indivdual' (libertarianism) is as anti-survival as giving all rights
to another abstraction called 'society' (Socialist communism?).  But
more important than being anti-survival, such a designation is
impossible, BECAUSE HUMAN BEINGS DON'T WORK THAT WAY.  They never
have.

-Jim
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