The video below is really good. However, I think he goes too easy on libertarians. Libertarians are authoritarians.
I know that there are (relatively) serious libertarians who don’t go along with this. There are, for example, a few libertarians who believe in labor unions and are against the totally anti-freedom “right to work” laws.
You can see the authoritarian tendencies of libertarians in the way they fetishize business-people and disregard workers. If the philosophy were really about freedom, it wouldn’t matter what people do. But it matters a great deal to libertarians.
What this all comes down to is their absolute allegiance to hierarchy (what the video is about). What distinguishes libertarians from conservatives and fascists is the means not the ends of their perfectly constructed hierarchy.
Finding Meaning in Socialism
I think about this stuff a lot with regard to socialism. Socialism is a great system for someone like me who, because of my early environment, is highly self-actualized. I personally think that living under socialism causes people to be more self-actualized. But at least for now, most people need external forces to provide them with a sense of meaning.
It is not enough to just give someone money. People need to feel that there is a point to life — beyond a Schopenhauerian one. And I believe that meaning comes mostly from work.
But I mean work in a different sense than we think of as work in a capitalist context. Work is raising a family. Work is caring for a sick friend. It is creating a work of art that no one will ever see.
For conservatives, meaning comes from success in the hierarchy. This is an arbitrary construction. And not an edifying one.
Our mystics now have to operate in the context of a church that must trick people into giving money in the name of having a happy happy time after they die.
And it leads to absolutely ridiculous products that no one ever wanted and no one will ever need. Like GarfieldEats — your one-stop shop for pizzas shaped like a second-rate cartoon character.
But capitalists do have an advantage over socialists: they have a system that gives people meaning. It’s an awful one. A serious heroin addiction also gives people meaning. Few would argue that people should thus become junkies. Yet such an addiction provides exactly the same kind of meaning that capitalism does.
Beyond Hierarchy
Ultimately, what socialism needs is for people to stop thinking in terms of hierarchy. As we know from the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic period, there is nothing natural about hierarchy.
Or rather, it is far more complex. There will always be someone widely considered the best musician; the best woodworker; the best gardener. The problem with capitalism is that it tries to force these innumerable hierarchies in any collection of humans into a single hierarchy.
Most people don’t care that they aren’t the fastest runner or whatever. They find meaning on their own terms — generally being the best human as they define it. This project is not helped by a society that fetishizes achievement in the art of accumulating more money than you could actually spend.
(It’s interesting that in the early 14th century, Dante presented greed as a particularly bad sin. Now greed is the highest good because of the “magic of the market” making us all better off. That was a major apologetic coup by the worshippers of capitalism — one most Christians gladly accept.)
And this is why I think socialism is key to human happiness. By valuing people in all their variety, we treat them as individuals. In capitalism, people are valued as cogs in the hierarchy.
Human Value
This is why we see the absurd display of rich people being asked not just about things they know nothing of but about things that reflect on their position on the hierarchy. Ask David Koch about global warming! Probe Mark Zuckerberg about antitrust law! Ask anyone in the Walton family about anything at all!
The only difference between these exercises and the man-on-the-street interviews (which we no longer see) is that people think billionaires’ opinions mean something.
Society succeeds from the ground up. Capitalism teaches us the opposite: it is only because of the people at the top of our arbitrary hierarchy that we even manage to have enough food. Yet if stranded on an island, I would much rather be with my next-door neighbor than Bill Gates.
We must value people as people and not for where they happen to find themselves on the capitalist hierarchy. That is no different than valuing people on how well they play Red Dead Redemption 2.
There is a tendency to look back on the George W Bush years with a certain amount of nostalgia. He might have been awful but at least he wasn’t Trump. But is that really true? This week is the 16th anniversary of the Iraq War and I think it shows that nothing has really changed.
As a reader of this site, you are of course a good liberal, and no doubt familiar with the many post-Jon Stewart purveyors of political humor. John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Seth Myers’s “A Closer Look” segments, the unfairly canceled Larry Wilmore, and Michelle Wolf.
Back in the early 90s, everyone pronounced Linux with a hard-i as in “fire.” For one thing, how else would an English speaker pronounce it? (If you are Finish, you can pronounce it how ever your language dictates.) But more important, Linux came from the fact that the kernel was written by Linus Torvalds.
Recently, Trump tweeted conservative activist Elizabeth Pipko’s quote, “Jewish people are leaving the Democratic Party. We saw a lot of anti-Israel policies start under the Obama Administration, and it got worsts & worse. There is anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. They don’t care about Israel or the Jewish people.”
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about: the harm conservatives do to themselves with their “all or nothing” approach and how Democrats need to stop allowing it.
In my recent 
There are lots of things on my mind these days. In fact, two of the sections below were going to be full articles. (It shouldn’t be hard to figure out which ones.)
Right after this announcement, someone changed the Wikipedia entry for Brazil’s president to “disputed.” This is great because that’s what Wikipedia did the moment that the US decided that it could say who controls the Venezuelan government.
Not another song post! Sorry. It just turned out that way.
“The First Cut Is the Deepest” was a huge hit song for Rod Stewart in 1977. It reached #21 on the US charts but stayed at #1 for four weeks in the UK. But even if you haven’t heard that one, you must have heard some version of it. Singers love it. I’m pretty sure every pub band knows it.
