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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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The point of going to Mars is to flee the game. To Escape From Terra to a place where the looters and moochers cannot reach us. "Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations."

Space Libertarianism runs afoul of the problem that any credible space colony is going to have a level roughly the same level of personal freedom as a warship. It's all the problems of dense urban life magnified a hundredfold crossed with all the problems of being in the military. Maybe you volunteered to be there, but now that you're there you're going to be living under the strictest regime imaginable. Your penultimate link seems to explicate a fantasy more of being king of your own desert island than escaping the abstract tyranny of living in a society. And you're far more likely to end up there as the Space King's serf than as the Space King.

The "good" reasons for space colonization for the foreseeable future are:

  1. Science
  2. Because We Can

While I am positively disposed towards both reasons, we should not pretend that these are going to economically fruitful or politically emancipatory any time soon (and by the time we reach a point where they are economically fruitful, they're not going to offer much hope of escaping from pre-existing political systems).

But plenty of people define freedom as their community getting to boss people around without the imperial overlord getting up in its business. The median human being who has ever lived was a peasant farmer living under the tyranny of the village, itself subject to a brutal but remote empire. There's a deep instinct to favor local elders' petty tyranny and resent central leadership.

The "good" reasons for space colonization for the foreseeable future are:

  1. Science
  2. Because We Can

Commonly added as a third is "as an insurance policy in case life on Earth is destroyed"; do you dismiss this?

If life on Earth is destroyed, off-world colonies are probably fucked. I'll allow it is a theoretically valid reason, but I think it's going to be a very long time before truly self-sustaining colonies are possible.

Space Libertarianism runs afoul of the problem that any credible space colony is going to have a level roughly the same level of personal freedom as a warship.

This is true and I think extremely under considered by Space Libertarian types. Even without the harshness of the governance, I think the fact is that that the spaceship would be a quintessential nosy village, with little room for privacy or property, the very thing that many libertarians are trying to escape. This would render space colonization a very unpleasant prospect for many libertarian types.

However, on the other hand, I think it's more compatible with Right Libertarian sorts than one might expect on the tin. It's also worth noting that the United States originally went through the exact same transformative process (both Jamestown and Plymouth were very harshly regulated early in their infancy) and from those kernels came forth a society with a very high opinion of liberty (or at least ordered liberty).

I suspect there's more of a causal connection there than ideologues (left, right, and libertarian) are willing to admit. A society full of self-disciplined people can afford to be very libertarian; it has little need for governance because its people regulate themselves. But most, perhaps all, people do not self-discipline. They must learn it. Some learn as children; some learn in college or on the job, some learn in the military, and some never learn. I don't think it strange for a society that has had tremendous constraints placed upon it (whether the strictures of military governance, or of ship-board discipline, or of simply needing desperately not to starve) would create a culture of self-discipline, which would lead to a culture of liberty (although perhaps one dissimilar from what we might think of when we imagine the term.)

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