The U.S. Goverment

[Skorm]

Sounds pretty familiar.

do they point you with a gun as well? or burn whatever you use to make money in order for you to NEED to sell your vote?

[Potjeh]

Nah, they just point bureaucracy at you. Businesses get "temporarily" suspended with court processes that take decades, deeds get lost, taxes are "accidentally" overcharged, that sort of thing. And yeah, they purposefully keep unemployment at ~40% while making it virtually impossible to get unemployment benefits (all 15€/month of it). So no, they don't use guns, but if you want to eat you have to dance to their tune.

[Skorm]

P much the same, just not as brutal.

How about the drugs? is your country run by Druglords as well?

[Potjeh]

Nah. We're a pretty important drug transit station, true, but most of it is within lower levels of the same power hierarchy that includes the political leadership at it's top.

[Tonkyhonk]

do they point you with a gun as well? or burn whatever you use to make money in order for you to NEED to sell your vote?

that sounds almost as bad as north korea... and people actually call that democracy?
at least you are not starving to death for now and can play online games and speak out, though.

and potjeh, i really dont know much about your country except as an ex-yugoslavia (and the olympic in 80s). isnt your current government under some international supervising by EU or whatever it is after the war, yet?

[burgingham]

Well, wrote a pm with ArvinJA. Might as well post it here even if we drift off to a slightly different sector of the topic.

If you find libertarianism so offensive you should really post in the U.S. Government thread. Make sure to be as intellectually honest as you are everywhere else though, it's kind of frustrating as it is with people writing one-line responses to carefully drafted posts [...]

Well, to be quite honest I didn't read all the comments in that thread. Only very few actually. It seems to me everyone is mainly arguing from an economic point of view and I am not very interested in economics or convinced that it should have such an impact in political debates. I am also not very knowledgeable in the sector of economics so it would be very easy for some of you to use my own words against me, or to put it the other way around very hard for me to even find an entry point into the debate.

My point of view is that of a political scientist without much of an economic background, but even more so that of a sociologist. So first of all I am not sure how or if it would help the discussion if I started to argue using a whole other science and terminology now. Second of all from the sociologists point of view I am not quite sure what my opinion even is. I cannot argue that I don't find it to be a great opportunity to be able to live my life quite similar to what Libertarians idealize probably. At the same time I would argue that the idolized individualism and the intrinsic hypocrisy or one might even want to say impossibility of realization of this individualism are the very bane of our society.

To argue alongside Horkheimer or Adorno (Frankfurt School might be a term you are familiar with if not those two) the very industry that is postulating individualism, which is mainly the what they call "cultural industry", is taking care of that individualism never to become reality, but instead being a mere masquerade for the instead existing submissive dependance on an authoritative system which is our economy. They are producing surrogates of invidualized lifestyles and they produce them by the million! Not only that though they are even producing the ideology as a little additional treat too (which then is Libertarianism). The true solution or the true way to indiviudalization is the acceptance of an equality (democratic core value and here I am not sure on how to argue with Jorb who flatout denies that those core values of democracy are a good thing) paired with what Adorno calls "education to maturity". Granted he has a very narrow definition of what maturity is including such things as the complete banishment of all pop-cultural goods from our minds (only classical music is acceptable for example in his opinion). I would probably modify that point of view a little since I am sure even in the context of pop-culture that there are minds capable of critical thinking and transforming that into the medium of whichever art*. The real problem in any kind of critical thinking is the power of the status quo though that has so many variables influecing us that we can hardly even recognize them anymore, yes sometimes even use them as arguments for liberty and freedom while they are just the aforementioned masqued messengers of authoritarian, economic control mania.

Now that I wrote this little piece on my thoughts to the topic of Libertarianism to you I might as well publish it on the forums I guess if you are ok with using your message you sent me to explain why I wrote what I wrote and that I wrote it how I wrote it.

*One could even go further and argue that only from within you can break a system. That however leads deep into sociological territory and away from the original topic which has been my fear all along as stated in my first sentences.

[jorb]

I have somewhat of an intellectual attraction to things like paleoconservatism and traditionalism, so I would actually not at all disagree if someone told me that individualism wasn't all it's cracked up to be. I recognize fully that I am a social being, that my social context is important to me and that it has been instrumental in making me who I am, and I am willing to make certain sacrifices in order to be able to live in a society with other people. That being said, however, the values of individual liberty (which is something quite apart from individualism) are very dear to me, simply because I do not believe that compulsion and force foster healthy social ties. In fact I am of the -- controversial, I know -- strange opinion that nothing is more unhealthy for a social existence than the use of force within it.

We witness in the eighteenth century the preparation of the French Revolution by individualism and the degeneration of the old "liberal" trends into economical liberalism of the deterministic Manchesterian pattern. Egalitarianism only appears in strongly collectivistic societies where strong exogenous powers try to shape persons into "individuals," deprived of their original character. The "individual" is merely the last indivisible unit of the "mass," and individualism the last, grotesque, and hopeless fight of depersonalized man within the ocean of collectivism to withstand the encroachment of the masses. Charles V had a personality but Gustave de Nerval, who promenaded a tamed lobster in the streets of Paris, was a mere individualist.

The Menace of the Herd

[burgingham]

It seems the discussion is very America centered. Ok, not too surprising with America being the threads topic, but these philosophies are quite America specific, yes exclusive and as such not all that interesting to me actually.

Also, what I meant to emphasize was that I doubt it is possible to make the distinction between individualism and individual liberty. They have been tightly crammed into one ideological package, so tightly that they lost all of their value and serve as nothing more than a marketing sheme today. With this being the status quo it is next to impossible to unravel the combination again and split the useful components from the authoritative ones. A critical theory or a critical discourse is necessary to even start such a proccess. So in order to make Libertarianism have any value again you will need to resort to theories you probably object to like the critical theory which is kinda tightly linked to Marxism (a sociological Marxism btw, not an economic one. That is quite the difference!) or to philosophers like Habermaß and the aforementioned Adorno. This is a somewhat wild assumption that you need critical theory to make use of Libertarianism again, but it seems to be true to me.

We live in such a heteronomic state of existence that the system seems to incorporate even antidromic opinions or life scripts into itself and continues to exist as it has before even after such an incorporation. They get reduced to mere masquerades or illusions. Systems strive for self-preservation before anything else after all and will do whatever it takes to ensure the continuation of their existince. Luhmann would speak of continuous self-production here, Adorno of the improbability of change.

That knight your are citing there I would agree with for the second part if the quote that individuals are just the last indivisible units of the collective and that individualism is a struggle to be different and a futile one at that. Not sure why he assumes that has to be linked to Egalitarism though, that seems kinda presumptuous to me and I disagree.

[jorb]

For pete's sake critical theory is the disease, not the cure. Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno and Habermas are intellectual fountainheads of the whole modern malaise of multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, deconstruction, post-modernism and every other intellectual disease that plagues modernity. What I want is a return to the traditional pre-war European order of peace, quiet, monarchy and less ideology in general.

And I think Julius Evola would very much resent being called an American Ideologue.

[jorb]

Helmuth Graf von Moltke calls your critical theory and raises you a batallion of Totenkopfhusaren, how do you like that, you little troublemaker?