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Notes -
Some notes on stuff I read and the work of Luke Smith
I have been binge-reading the essays Luke Smith wrote on his website, LukeSmith.xyz, and have also finished more than a quarter of Watership Down. It is slightly harder to start reading physical books again, as I am used to my Kindle and mostly read short form on my computer and phone. Great book so far, but the comment is about Luke Smith.
Some essays by Luke Smith I liked
In particular, I liked his podcast on the book Against Method by Feyerabend, and I have been trying to draft out a post that is not haphazard, concise and makes a novel point.
His critique of libertarianism ending in feudal states was probably correct. My main point, though, is an admission of defeat, weakness rather. How do I survive in a world where the heuristics people hold holy on both sides end up being wrong so often?
You have religious reactionaries on one side who stick to their beliefs just because they were born with them; on the other hand, you have the rest of the world, where you find shades of post-enlightenment thought. In his essay 'Not Even Libertarians Believe in Libertarianism', Luke quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, in a rather casual manner
This later connects to his other podcast where he discusses Against Method, largely agreeing with Feyerabend's viewpoint of Epistemological Anarchism and in another podcast titled - When You're Too Rational To be Rational! notes the gaping flaws with Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow with the help of Gerd Gigerenzer's books such as Simple Heuristics in a Complex World and later uses his other work Mindless Statistics to showcase the modern academic stat raindances in his podcast - The Flaws of Academic Statistics: The Null Ritual.
I provide this context because I feel unsure of what to believe in as a person. I grew up seeing a bunch of superstitions that made no sense, did not care much about god and slowly became a reactionary when I realised the cathedral or the modern elite simply used the scientific method as a garb to justify bioleninism or values like it. The essays I read have, however, made me question the very means and sources of what I can even trust. Do you simply agree to go along with your maulvi who is fine with you marrying a girl who is barely done growing up or do you deconstruct everything and reach a point where you can later either deny the existence of gender or worse, be an hbd obsessed online type who cannot see his own people as anything beyond iq scores.
The ancients here in India tried their hand at this problem with the Dharamsutras, before the lawbook of Manu, the Manu Smriti. These texts were not the word of god, something that is difficult to explain since the thinking and the people behind these ideals are long gone. I mean to simply ask how one can know what's right in a way that sounds dumb.
Is the world just humans trying to understand systems too complex for them, and all efforts are kinda wasteful, at least in the current model of the world? How do you decide what you think is wrong or right? The Maulvi example is helpful since people deny and outright ignore the existence of all religious mandates that are at odds with modernity. Modern banking and democratic values have dented a lot of orthodox people in parts that are not in the West. My post is terribly worded, but I cannot honestly tell people what is right or wrong in a consistent way, i.e. by seeing tradition as the all-knowing lindy culture machine fighting modern "logic".
This post will get downvoted badly, I cannot fully explain the entirity of my inability to grasp what is correct as both the opposing forces here are wrong in many ways, but I am unsure if you can live in a world that does not inevitably bend towards one and goes through pointless pain because of it. Marrying within your caste or race works; it worked before we understood IQ as a metric that has clear scientific backing and the very ideas of genetic tests with coordinates and a detailed breakdown of your haplogroup. At the same time, man evolved from a primitive state where religion, even though it came after a certain point, was the new thing compared to the pre-agriculture past. Is the answer to just never think, meditate and go on with my life, should I break down only some things with arguments, or do I simply find the first old scripture that agrees with me?
I know that the Dharmasutras did try something in this regard, and like most things religious, I presume they were ahead of their time. But yeah, I am beginning to question some things, not because I am anti-vaxxer or something, I am not, I do lean towards modern meds being good in nearly all cases, I just don't know how many of these Chesterstons fence issues we will face. Most religious preachers, popular ones, are mostly incorrect; my intellect can sense the outright stupidity and dishonesty in many things, and I hope I can get some personal anecdotes or any advice on how one deals with these issues. Learning philosophy to convince others of your preconceived notions, for instance, sounds dishonest, yet many do it.
This ties into culture war heavily, I know that having women not marry young, allowing heterogeneous societies, and deconstruction lead to chaos, do I need to wait for science to approve of it? Conversely, how can I deny the existence of many modern phenomena that I know are true? Hinduism conveniently has sects that do not care very much about any of this, but I want to finally see reality for people reading this who know more about the world than me
Wish I hadn't seen the libertarian critique. It was bad like most critiques of libertarianism are bad. Scott still holds the record for the only good critique I've ever read.
Every other critique makes it sound like libertarianism is a group of scolds that just want to take away the toy that everyone calls government.
I would push back here. Do you think anything in particular would demonstrate exactly what he says is wrong? He does have a bone to pick with economics as he later published articles against fiat as we see due to inflation but so far I do agree with a lot of what he said about drugs and other things.
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
Libertarianism poses a simple question for any would be government bans: is the thing you are trying to ban worth killing and imprisoning people to reduce that thing?
For many libertarians there are things that definitely meet that criteria. Murder, kidnapping, serious bodily assault, etc.
They phrase it in the post as "who are you to ban that thing, why should we listen to you?" But really it is "who are you to say we get to kill people just because you think something is bad?"
There are a lot of things that are bad but less bad than killing and kidnapping people. And it sometimes feels like everyone is just playing signalling games when they say the government should ban something but can't affirmatively answer "yes it is worth killing people and imprisoning them in order to ban this thing" Meanwhile it feels like libertarians are one of the few groups acknowledging the on the ground enforcement costs of government actions.
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
This is not true. Private citizens can be reasoned and negotiated with. Sovereign rule is absolute. Especially in the context of the administrative state.
The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.
You may argue that the lives of private citizens would bear similar relationships of total violence as they do with the State in the state of nature, but this is an argument against anarchism, not against libertarianism.
Let's again go back to the analogy. If a parent with a maximally-oppositional child or a board game master with a maximally-oppositional player decides to press with their rule, what redress of grievances is available other than their pleasure? Yes, they can at will decide to give up on enforcement of the rule. There are tons of examples of that happening with the government, too. Moreover, there are many overlapping methods of petition for redress of grievances in a system like what the US has. That was kind of an important part of the founding movement. One might not like them; one might not think they are working in the way that they "should", but that is a separate matter from the mere question of what is required to state that all government rules are uniquely enforced by violence/kidnapping. You need to posit other things like maximal-opposition. In fact, if you ask someone who makes such a claim how they end up in such a situation, they almost by necessity appeal to maximal-opposition. "This rule seems to be enforced by a $5 fine, not violence/kidnapping." "Well, what if you don't pay that fine?" "The next step is X." "What happens if they refuse to comply with X?" "The next step is Y." "...what happens if they refuse to comply with Y?" And so on and so forth until you get to the point where violence/kidnapping occurs. There may be offramps along the way, but they all tend to be ignored in such reasoning. I'm simply pointing out that if we apply the same reasoning to essentially any other rule in the world, you either have to posit an offramp occurring, or you still end up in violence/kidnapping. Fewer people are quite as willing to think about this and apply the same reasoning to any other rule in the world.
There is a bit of a Clauswitzian feel to this reasoning. Any time you're trying to enforce any rule, either someone backs down, comes to an agreement or something, or escalates further. If we take any conflict over anything that seems like 'rule enforcement', if parties are willing to escalate and go further in their maximal opposition, you end up in warfare/violence. Politics is just one form of conflict management, but just as sure as war is politics by other means, violence in general is conflict management/"rule enforcement" by other means. Just take almost any example of a rule you want to enforce and walk through the exact same steps of, "Well, what if they're maximally-oppositional?"
Finally, to be completely clear, this is not an argument "against libertarianism". It is simply bringing clarity to the nature of one particular type of argument.
Parental relationships are indeed similar in nature to that of a sovereign to his subjects. Is is common the words are the same even.
What you seem to be denying is that civilization allows us other types of relationships. But it does.
Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.
Libertarians, Classical Liberals and other legalists seek to extend the domain of this boon granted by civilization to the largest possible extent.
This is not fundamentally opposed to the base idea that this ability is grounded by violence, either in individual self defense or through the means of sovereign enforcement of law. This connection is in fact one of the core components of the philosophy since the beginning.
One in fact so characteristic the derisive name the fascist gave it as the "night watchman state" stuck as a self description of minarchism.
I don't see anything in here about the question of the uniqueness of government rule enforcement being with violence/kidnapping. Mayyyybe this:
But it doesn't actually discuss rule enforcement. How do you do rule enforcement? Like, any example of rule enforcement? I've given two example scenarios. You can give others. How do you do it in the case of maximal-opposition?
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