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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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If you listen to a lot of libertarians (or at least classic liberals) they see voluntarism as not atomizing but as part of a community. Stated differently, you can’t have an individual without a community but likewise you need strong free individuals to have a community. This is one criticism of the dole; it hollows out the community as some members don’t pull their weight creating resentment / spiritual hollowing out.

So you need both strong individualism and a community orientation — at first they appear contradictory but the two go hand in hand.

Community of your free choice, community you can always leave if you find better deal elsewhere, is as untraditional thing as there can be.

Strong communities of the trad past were created either by direct coercion (serfdom, Jim Crow laws etc...) or by fact that even if you were unhappy in your home village, there was nowhere to go.

I don't know how true or generalizable that assumption is. I was reading the other day that in contrast to mainland Europe, England is surprisingly intermixed - excepting Cornwall, there are few genetic holdouts anywhere in the country. In comparison you can find French medieval villages where nobody married anyone more than ten miles away for hundreds of years. Despite this, there was robust community organization throughout the country - county clubs and women's institutes and many levels of political and charity organization.

That unique balance of individualism and pro-social behavior is not easy to replicate. For the most part, I think it is totally gone in the modern UK. But it's real and it's not a contradiction. Maybe the divide is not individual versus community, but high-trust versus low-trust. China is hardly an exemplar of individualism, and yet it's not a hivemind either - the authorities don't trust the people and the people don't trust the authorities.

Hoppe and all those feudalist libertarians disagree. They say those communities were created organically specifically in times where if your local lord was a tyrant you always had exit as a practical ability by moving to the other German village a few valleys over.

I tend to agree, people have a weird view of the middle ages inherited from a scornful bourgeoisie when it was actually a time of great personal freedom compared to what followed.

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