Essences, Orcs and Civilization:

The Case for a Cheerful Libertarianism

A Keynote for the 2002 Libertarian Party National Convention

an article by David Brin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2002, by David Brin.
All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

First, a disclaimer: I get confused looks from some libertarian pals when I say that I'm one of them. Oh sure, I send money to the LP and routinely vote Libertarian in primary elections. I appeared as a keynote speaker at the California LP Convention, in 1998, and here at the national convention in July 2002.

On the other hand, I admit turning around and often voting for Democrats in general elections! I send cash to Greenpeace and the ACLU and support my local public schools. So what the hell am I?

After serious thought, I can only conclude that I must be a... (shudder)... pragmatist.

Horrors. No word is better guaranteed to offend those who love the memic pleasures of ideology.

According to the philosophical tradition first expressed by Plato, our world is made up of "essences" or quasi-linguistic elements that are more fundamental than the murky world of complex physical people and objects. Belief in these essences retarded the arrival of Galilean science for 2,000 years, because it was so widely assumed that a real thinker would prefer to spend time pondering pure thoughts, than getting dirty with experiments.

To a religious person these essences are articles of faith. To men of reason, they can be logical syllogisms or well-wrought ideological principles. (Ain't it odd that faith and reason are so often viewed as polar opposites? To a pragmatist, they look like very close cousins, operating under the same very questionable assumption -- that words can somehow over-rule gritty reality.)

Some essences may be right and others wrong, but Plato's tradition holds that any person worthy of respect must believe in some essential "truth," some law or model of human nature -- whether it's the labor theory of value or an absolute right of property. Men of the True Right and True Left often respect each other, but they cannot bear those wishy-washy 'practical' types who say "whatever works."

If the world is not the way they like it -- if it stubbornly refuses to match the ideal essence -- then something must be wrong with the world! We must have fallen from that natural state of grace. Moreover, somebody must be to blame. This is the core of the Look-Back Worldview -- a romantic fixation that dominated most cultural systems of the past.

Want specific examples that strike close to home? In the Libertarian community, essentialists are typified by Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, who were admired for making grand generalized derivations or propounding idealized truths. While Rand often spoke in praise of objective reality -- and was cogent in her demolition of postmodern relativism -- her works seldom proposed falsifiable experiments that might enable skeptical parties to verify or reject particular statements, one at a time. This is the litmus that real scientists live by, as elucidated in the works of Karl Popper. Rather than deal in gritty tests and iterative experimentation, Rand used "objective reality" as a mantric phrase -- an incantatory touchstone that served as a rock, an unquestionable axiomatic foundation. In effect, an article of faith.

Around this she would go on to weave cajoling and persuading rhythms, almost identical in form to the Plato's Socratic dialogues, such as Phaedrus -- and, indeed, similar to much of the Marxist dialectic -- though to see this you must strip away the specifics and details. Viewed from outside this tradition -- from the pragmatic perspective of Galileo and Franklin -- the commonalities leap out.

Central to this zeitgeist is the implied and desired assumption of mental superiority. Over those who came before. Over contemporaries. And yes, over future generations! This is implicit, because belief in human improvability makes any ideology or belief system automatically contingent and tentative. If our children will be smarter than us, and their children smarter still, then none of us -- no matter how bright -- can ever offer up a "TRUTH" all in capital letters. We can at best nudge knowledge forward a bit, offering a slightly higher platform for our heirs to work upon.

This humbler attitude is typical of real science. Galileo's laws were improved and superseded by Newton's, and Newton by Einstein, in a process that does not demean those earlier sages, even though each newer model replaces the old. We scientists have learned to be cheerful about this... or at least pretend to be.

Among libertarians, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and F.A. Hayek are the central pragmatists, willing to make falsifiable predictions and live by them. Hayek in particular recognized the contingency of his own fresh perspective, avowing that it depended upon the highly variable landscape of human knowledge. Finding exactly the right mix of market laxity and regulation might be a variable thing, Hayek mused. Some regulation is surely needed in order to overcome the human propensity to cheat, though Hayek comes down favoring a general rule that less is better. That the urge to regulate should always face a steep and constantly renewed burden of proof.

Also in the pragmatist camp we find Robert Heinlein, whose famed works emphasized the desired future outcome -- people who are increasingly smart and capable and, above all, more free. Such people will be able to think for themselves. In other words, our formidable descendants will probably be libertarians -- (and environmentalists and non-racists) -- not because of ornate philosophical incantations but because that is how anyone with more than a gram of sanity and sense would want to live.

Moreover, according to pragmatists like Heinlein, it doesn't matter very much how pure the path to that better era turns out to be. Even if (shudder) the state winds up playing a useful role, helping to pave the way.

This gulf between pragmatists and idealists is one of the widest and least understood in human nature! It blows orthogonally across almost every boundary of politics, religion and ideology.

So let me establish my credentials right now. I do not believe that any "Golden Age" lies in our past. The story of the last six thousand years was almost unrelenting misery, bullying and woe. I wake up encouraged every day that barbarians have not burned my house and that some king has not taken my daughter. So encouraged that I have to admit that my fellow citizens simply cannot be as stupid as they look!

So encouraged that I peer forward to a day when coercion has become a faint memory. To a time when all children are equipped with the skills and tools to be formidable beings, fully capable of making all decisions for themselves, aided by a mere wisp of residual government that continues to wither gradually as sovereign adults wean themselves of its services, not through rancor or ingratitude, but by the simple, revolutionary step of learning to treat each other like grownups.

Not only will I bend the efforts of my life toward helping bring about that era -- I won't let anybody's doctrinaire litmus test categorize me as "not libertarian," just because I see a nonstandard route to getting there! A route that is considerably more optimistic and cheerful.

A route that seems more likely of achieving success.

Plato to Galileo: "Our senses are defective, therefore we cannot discover truth through experience. That chair, for instance. Despite all your gritty 'experiments' you will never determine what it is. Not perfectly. Empiricism is useless. Therefore give up! Seek the essence of truth through pure reason."

Galileo to Plato: "You're right. My eyesight is poor. My touch is flawed. I will never know with utter perfection what this chair is. Nevertheless, I can carve away untruths and wrong theories. I can demolish fancy 'essences' and epicycles, and disprove self-hypnotizing incantations. With good experiments -- and the helpful criticism of my peers -- I can find out what the chair is not."

Have you ever attended one of those rare open-forum debates where the Democratic and Republican candidates actually let themselves face -- or are trapped into facing -- representatives of small, dissenter parties? Often the Libertarian Party candidate does rather well. Intelligent, knowledgeable and sometimes skilled at debate, the Libertarian makes a lot of good points... one more reason why great efforts are usually made to exclude them.

And yet, I'll bet none of you have actually turned your back on the candidate and watched the audience instead.

Do so! Especially when the Libertarian weighs in against the bloody awful "War on Drugs."

Watch the audience! They sit up as the Libertarian Party candidate dissects the horrible illogic of this endless prohibition campaign. Its futility. Its counterproductive habit of benefiting social predators while leaving behind only a trail of shattered lives. People aren't fools. They know most of this already, as evidenced by recent (albeit timid) trends away from the draconian penalty philosophy of the 1980s. At this point, audience members lean forward, nodding, and the Republican and Democrat on-stage begin to sweat...

... only to smile in relief, as the audience sags back in their chairs with a murmur, with a groan. People do this the very moment that the Libertarian switches from complaining about the Drug War to presenting his alternative --

-- which is often blanket and immediate legalization. Not incremental common sense like decriminalizing marijuana -- around which a growing consensus is already building -- but unfettering all addictive or dangerous compounds without delay, as a matter of basic principle. No compromise. No pragmatic halfway measures. No innovative or experimental public health approaches to contagious addiction or proposals to support a scientific push to find out -- at last -- what addiction really is. Just the ideologically pure prescription. And people aren't buying it.

Go ahead, call them fools. Why not? It's what you've been doing for decades. The voters are idiots! It feels good to say that, right?

Alas, pragmatically speaking, that won't change any minds. And it sure won't get them to vote for you!

In a market -- one of your beloved markets -- an entrepreneur who presents the same product over and over, deriding customers for not buying it, would be the real fool. You'd laugh at such a fellow and tell him he deserves what he gets -- bankruptcy. Yet, you never view your political program that way, do you?

No. Instead, it's the same lapel-grabbing doctrine. Your fellow citizens are fools because they voted time and again for statists like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Are you ever going to forgive the American public for FDR? It happened seventy freeping years ago... let it go!

This habit of contempt is demeaning, futile and self-defeating, on so many levels:

1. Science has learned recently that contempt and indignation are addictive mental states. I mean physically and chemically addictive. Literally! People who are self-righteous a lot are apparently doping themselves rhythmically with auto-secreted surges of dopamine, endorphins and enkephalins. Didn't you ever ask yourself why indignation feels so good?

2. It gives voters the creeps.

3. Libertarianism isn't the only dogma that encourages true believers to wallow in contempt for the masses. But only among Libertarians is contempt so blazingly and blitheringly hypocritical! Think about it. Your fundamental postulate -- the core basis -- is a belief that people, left alone, can be trusted with more than a burnt match! They should be treated like grownups, capable of making their own decisions, right? Yet, your excuse for failure is that they are fools. You can't have it both ways! (See Questionnaire section #3 "The Toxicity of Ideas.")

4. It gives voters the creeps.

5. If this civilization is so stupid, fallen and flawed, how come it's the first one to produce so many Libertarians?

6. It gives voters the creeps.

7. Contempt is utterly redolent of the Look-Back Worldview!

You, who raised your hands earlier, nearly all of you pledged fealty to the Look-Forward view. And yet, you behave as if fixated in the older, traditional direction. Nostalgic, bitter, past-oriented. Otherwise, you would have let go of FDR long ago, as an artefact of our primitive ancestors! Ancestors who did pretty well -- all considered -- with the tools at hand.

If you really held a Look-Forward view, you'd spend your energy forging the next product, not bemoaning the past.

Think about it. The vague feeling -- contrary to all evidence -- that freedom had some better day long ago. That liberty and markets are some kind of ideal, a state of grace, from which we have fallen because of an error or sin... in this case, the sin of government. Can't you see the similarities to all those other faith-based systems that you claim to despise? The nostalgist tradition pulls even at you, the most modern of men and women, people who love to read science fiction and claim to be gung-ho about the future.

Go back to that magnificent polemic by John Perry Barlow that had you all nodding in agreement moments ago. Recall how Barlow propounded that everything happened "invisibly to most of us"? It feels good to be one of the few who see The Truth. Not only does he share this general thrust with the security mavens and officials he opposes. The fundamental roots are similar to the terrorists' own deep need to feel special and in-the-know -- superior in some profound way over the clueless rabble.

Can we step back to see that this emotional need to feel superior runs deeper than any of our superficial differences over politics and ideology? It makes you far more like your opponents than you would ever like to admit.

In other words, spanning all extremes of reason and morality, it's human.

Want to question some more assumptions? Pick up your questionnaires again. Let's talk about propaganda.

I sometimes ask audiences to name the most relentless indoctrination campaign the world ever saw. Some mention Stalin or Hitler. Others cite some major religions... or Madison Avenue advertising. Come, raise your hands and tell us which campaign you think most thoroughly brainwashes your fellow citizens, here and now.

Inevitably, quite a few claim that today's mass media push conformity on a hapless, sheeplike population. It's a smug cliché -- since it implies that a select few have risen above to shrug off the conditioning. Is that how you see yourself? Yes?

I'll bet you cannot name, offhand, a single popular American film of the last forty years that actually preached conformity, or homogeneity, submission, or repression of the individual spirit. Go ahead, try.

That's a clue!

In fact, the most persistent and inarguably incessant propaganda campaign -- appearing in countless American movies, novels, myths and TV shows -- preaches quite the opposite message! A singular and unswerving theme so persistent and ubiquitous that most people hardly notice or mention it. And yet, when I say it aloud, you will nod your heads in instant recognition.

That theme is suspicion of authority -- often accompanied by its sidekick/partner: tolerance.

Indeed, try to come up with even one example of a recent film that you enjoyed in which the hero did not bond with the audience in the first ten minutes by resisting or sticking-it-to some authority figure! Rebels are always the heroes. Conformity is portrayed as worse than death. Even in war-flicks, irreverence for some pompous commander is a necessary trait. Often, the main character also presents some quirk, some eccentricity, that draws both ire from an oppressor and sympathy from the audience.

Oh, you do hear some messages of conformity and intolerance -- but these fill the mouths of moustache-twirling villains, clearly inviting us to rebel contrary to everything they say. Submission to gray tribal normality is portrayed as one of the most contemptible things an individual can do -- a message quite opposite to what was pushed in most other cultures.

This theme is so prevalent, and so obvious, that even though you can probably see where I am going with this -- and hate the inevitable conclusion -- you aren't going to dispute the core fact. You have to sit there and accept one of the most galling things that a bunch of dedicated individualists can ever realize -- that you were trained to be individualists by the most relentless campaign of public indoctrination in history, suckling your love of rebellion and eccentricity from a society that -- evidently, at some level -- wants you to be that way!

Oh, the ironies abound.

Consider a normal, decent Republican and a normal, decent Democrat. Both simmer in resentment against groups they consider oppressive authority figures! The Democrat worries about undue accumulations of influence and power by religious fanatics, plutocrats and faceless corporations. The Republican stews over undue accumulations of influence and power by snooty academics, technocrats and faceless government officials. And oh, yes. Libertarians like to pick one authority figure from column A -- religious fanatics -- and bureaucrats from column B.

When you put it this way -- the answer is "Duh!" All of those elites merit watching! Put in this context, it seems there is a dram of wisdom in all three parties. We've been guarding each others' backs for generations, while never lifting our heads enough to recognize how similar the basic attitude is, motivating even some of those whom we oppose.

Our main difference lies in which elites we choose to worry about -- a matter of individual fixation and inclination. And that, too, is a clue, ladies and gentlemen.

Let me ask, what are you feeling right now? Nothing could more clearly delineate the differing worldviews that underlie all ideologies.

Those of you who are romantics and Platonic essentialists probably feel simmering resentment at this moment. You've just been told that suspicion of authority -- a private, special trait that you thought you shared with just a few friends -- was actually spoon-fed to you and millions of others, including some of your worst foes! How dare this impudent sci fi author come and tell me it's the most normal American trait! Dammit, I invented individualism! Rebellion too. And black leather, for that matter.

Right.

To you pragmatists in this room, who look forward toward the end-goal of a truly free, happy and prosperous civilization -- and don't give a damn about indignation or ideological purity along the way -- this news about pervasive suspicion of authority couldn't feel better! It means you are winning, boys and girls. The whole momentum of society is with you... and me... including the moral of every movie, book and song!

Moreover, you can help steer this unstoppable momentum. If you care to learn how.

Next... is libertarianism "natural"?

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