UPDATE: Apparently, The American Catholic joins me in smelling the stench of blood in Tucker’s declaration.:
“Tucker’s remarks about a “fundamentalist sect reminds one of the traditional suspicion and hostility of classical liberalism towards corporations of any kind: churches, guilds, universities, orders of chivalry and the rest.
Witness the French National Assembly’s famous declaration of August 18, 1792: “A State that is truly free ought not to suffer within its bosom any corporation, not even such as, being dedicated to public instruction, have merited well of the country.” As with the corporations, so also with the communes, the towns and villages. Village property—there was a great deal of village property in France—was exposed to the dilemma: it belongs to the State, or else it belongs to the now existing villagers. So too of voluntary associations of all kinds.
The only type of association that aroused no suspicion was the trading partnership or company. F W Maitland has noted the paradox that the liberal state, “saw no harm in the selfish people who wanted dividends, while it had an intense dread of the comparatively unselfish people who would combine with some religious, charitable, literary, scientific, artistic purpose in view” and subjected them to a strict regime of licensing and surveillance, when it did not suppress them altogether.”
Lila: Why is this? Why is it that pornography and its violence, the drug trade and its violence, and corporate/ financial looting and its violence don’t seem to Tucker to be brutalist?
The only brutalists are traditionalists and their voluntary associations that hurt no one and steal from no one.
It is because porn, the drug trade, and Wall Street are intimately connected with the state (the shadow state) and Tucker is dispensing STATE (read, intelligence) propaganda.
ORIGINAL POST
Jeffrey Tucker’s recent article, “Against Libertarian Brutalism,” positions left-libertarian, life-style libertarians, such as himself, as “humanitarians” and contrasts them with libertarian “brutalists.”
He defines brutalists as those who prefer homogeneous religious or racial groups, defend traditional sex roles, and dislike homosexuality.
I posted (March 16) that this was an attempted purge of Christian libertarians
It would take too much time to dissect every nuance of the disingenuity and confusion on display in this piece, and, since it was trounced by a majority of libertarians on the net outside Tucker’s own circle, it’s emphatically not worth the effort.
Tucker’s writing, since he joined the Agora network, shows all the hall-marks of propaganda and do not merit serious consideration, except as propaganda. I don’t think it’s worth getting monitored to deconstruct writing from an ideology whose tenets no longer interest me, let alone internal politics.
But the fall-out is sure entertaining.
Are libertarians (the kind I respect) in for some kind of purge, as Bionic Mosquito suggests?
Of course.
Purges are ongoing in any totalitarian society and Tucker’s black-and-white demand, “You’re either with us or against us” (even while semonizing against black-and-white thinking) is an indication of which way the left-lib wind (and I mean wind) blows.
But for those who buy into theoretical hocus-pocus, I am pleased to inform you that the definitive rebuttal of all Tuckerian pretensions to exclusive and extraordinary humanitarianism has already been made by libertarians themselves, and by American libertarians, no less.
There was Ayn Rand:
...if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his cowardice is humanitarian love, that his subservience is unselfishness, that his moral treason is spiritual nobility, he is hooked.
But, better yet, there is an American female libertarian (God, what pleasure it gives me to sic one of those on a male gynocrat) who has done the job – Isabel Paterson.
The Humanitarian With The Guillotine.”
“The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.
But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people, if unperverted, positively do not want to be “done good” by the humanitarian. When it is said that everyone should live primarily for others, what is the specific course to be pursued? Is each person to do exactly what any other person wants him to do, without limits or reservations? and only what others want him to do? What if various persons make conflicting demands? The scheme is impracticable.
“People always give away a good deal, if they have it; it is a human impulse, which the humanitarian plays on for his own purpose.”Perhaps then he is to do only what is actually “good” for others. But will those others know what is good for them? No, that is ruled out by the same difficulty. Then shall A do what he thinks is good for B, and B do what he thinks is good for A? Or shall A accept only what he thinks is good for B, and vice versa? But that is absurd. Of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”
Hi Lila,
I had run into you long ago on Strangerous’s site during the first big IP Communists flap, and subscribed to your blog… Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, for some reason putting your site’s URL into Feedly only turns up a feed with articles over two months old!
So, something is busted in your RSS feed. This is awful… You should be getting thousands of subscribers! 😀
In Libertate,
Dave
Thanks Dave.
I have no clue about RSS and stuff.
Will try and fix it…
Thanks for the nice words!
Hi Lila,
I wrote the first of these comments before reading either your post here or your comments about Jeffrey perhaps not giving proper credit for the “brutalist libertarian” idea and even some of the wording.
I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know your thoughts, either here, there, or both.
Hi Christoph,
Thank you for your comment. I just read your piece in more detail.
I think you said it very well.
I’ve said everything I want to on the subject already and am in agreement.
I just don’t want to do it on Facebook and prefer not to have anything to do with Facebook.
I somehow have a feeling that all those who self-identified as being the object of the attack are going to be classified by Facebook and tracked maybe? Don’t know.
You never know.
I think a gauntlet was thrown down.
Why I don’t know.
But sometimes these things backfire. Something tells me this one might.