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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Suppose communism is bad. How do you teach normies this?

This has been a goal of the libertarian and classical liberal movements for the last century.

I'll try and create a basic walk-through of the general argument. Every single part of it has been greatly elaborated on.

Step 1: The golden rule. Treat others how you'd like to be treated. Establish this first to create some basic level of empathy, and to expand into the idea of rights.

Step 2: Self-Ownership. All humans own three things: their life, their actions, and their body. Taking control of these things from them without their consent is murder, slavery, or rape. Hopefully whoever you are talking with is on board with this.

Step 3: Property-ownership. Humans like to possess things. This is mostly a practical matter. Start small with something the person you know likes to possess, their phone, their car, their clothes, etc. Dyed in the wool communists will generally try to make a distinction between "possession" and "ownership". Don't let them, the distinction is mostly meaningless. Possession is just about how immediately visible your ownership is. Just slowly expand the physical distance between them and their possessions to help them get the point. "You dropped your phone, do you no longer possess it? You left your phone somewhere, should whoever finds it get to keep it?"

Step 4: Examples. You have enough at this point to tear down any communist system. (even just step 1 and 2 might be enough, but step 3 makes it easy). Ask them to provide examples of a communist system or setup, and then show how it violates one of the things they already agreed on. Be aware that communist systems lean heavily into slavery and forced work, so if they don't want to provide examples ask them how a communist system will deal with lazy people / bad jobs / difficult jobs.

This has been a goal of the libertarian and classical liberal movements for the last century.

And that approach is failing miserably before our eyes.

Despite the state of government I'm not that pessimistic about the results. I think without either movement we would be in a much worse spot.

Are they winning? No, of course not. But they do impact the discourse and the Overton window.

I consider the classical liberals a sort of permanent opposition elite. They are fully capable of using academia and the courts to fight their battles, and they are probably more represented in those institutions than run of the mill religious conservatives.

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