Strangely though, this mountain of corpses promised to us if we got rid of the NHS didn’t exist prior to its inception.

But I digress: Leaving aside the likelihood that the medicine was expensive in the first place was thanks to the government’s meddling, you’d have probably been treated by a friendly society, charity or got it through union membership as many did in the pre-big government era. You’d probably be a lot richer than you are now, too.

I’m not sure what these “Randian jack off fanasies” are, either. It sounds like a Crusoeist straw man, because I don’t recall Rand or any of her followers championing this situation. In fact, Rand claimed social security in her old age and justified others doing the same: (“The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.”)

Individualism is part of the liberal package. Rugged individualism is one of the prior iterations of that package.

So why would people who are disgusted by liberalism be attracted to some of its prior iterations?

My guess is that liberalism was a useful innovation in response to the changing conditions starting around in the 16th C.. Like most innovations, it follows an S-curve. Lots and lots of benefits, lots of zoom, and then stagnation. Except that liberalism isn’t just stagnating (i.e., failing to produce any more benefits); its turning malign. It would be as if once the railroads had connected farm and market they had kept grimly laying down track over homes and cropland until the ending of the world. Is liberalism’s failure to stop once the benefits of the innovation have all been squeezed out a defect in liberalism itself or is it a possibility inherent in all supra-market innovations?

Because its really the ratchet that’s the problem. My guess is that the tipping point from beneficial to harmful probably happened sometime in the mid-century when liberalism started attacking the family, but honestly we could take the fairly malign early 21st century package as it is right now and make if fairly workable with a little muddling through and common sense if the insistence that liberalism keep going and going weren’t in place.

An aside: there are interesting connections to the notion of liberalism as an innovation that doesn’t know how to stagnate and the discussion yesterday about medicine. Medicine is also an extra-market innovation in a way, both because of widespread regulation and inherent charitable impulses, and because the outputs are hard to predict. As with liberalism, a good way of understanding yesterday’s dispute about medicine is that medicine has accomplished an enormous amount of good but is not content to stay put and is pushing outward into ever more dubious and even destructive territory.

Your Jameson quote is appropriate and, I think, grounds the discussion with a better framework.

As admin says, reality does plenty of taming by itself. The market does more. The government does even more. It’s not a question of whether or not human-taming mechanisms exist in this world. The questions are: what gets tamed, to what extent is it tamed, who gets tamed, and how possible is it to escape the mechanisms? I suppose my position is that the Western Welfare State tames and controls the wrong things and lets go the reigns on the wrong things. Certainly, it no longer tames human violence: stop-and-frisk, for example, is all about taming violence, but it has been declared illegal. It’s attempts to tame competition are a total cluster-fuck: America lets in millions of low-skill, low-IQ immigrants from Mexico (increasing the competition for low-skill natives, the group least able to survive economic Darwinism) while simultaneously refusing to wield its antitrust law until, e.g., most media outlets are owned by Viacom.

“You’re gonna have to serve somebody,” as Dylan said. There is no total freedom or total individualism. However, there is some freedom, and there are some outlets for individualism. Reactionary politics recognizes that the Western Welfare State is far, far, far from being the optimal system in terms of the freedoms it allows and the outlets it provides. Indeed, defenders of the welfare state in academia enjoy writing articles and books about how concepts like “individualism” are seriously problematic and don’t reference anything real; and certain politicians are fond of denying that individuals are ever free to do much of anything themselves: “You didn’t build that” were Obama’s exact words, I believe.

2.As noted, returning the rugged individual to his socio-political context does not diminish the concept at all, or take away from its lived historical reality. The men shepherding herds on Sierra slopes, the women tending barely fertile gardens, the white families settling hostile Indian territory had no ideologies of imperialism on their minds. Their Westward movement was driven by quite different discourses and values, and ultimately, it’s the discourses and values of the men and women doing the movement that matters, not the discourses and values of the politicians and intellectual elite.

I’m not defining the individual in a Crusoe-ian manner, nor am I suggesting that by placing individuals within their socio-economic context are we “diminishing the concept.” The concept is strong and steadfast. I’m saying that our conception of it is colored and framed by a modern, contemporary outlook on the past. It’s true that the idea of the rugged individual didn’t develop in a vacuum, but it was also molded and acculturated by those very politicians and intellectuals that you disdain. The concept of the individual, especially as self-contained and atomic, traces back through a long history of “intellectual elite.” This is the inheritance that your frontiersmen came into, and it was a descendant of this much older, European individual that they proclaimed as they trampled across the continent they “discovered.”

Semantics. No, not even semantics. It’s equivocation, using the language of regulation to talk about whatever feedback mechanisms exist outside of willful government control.
And finally, your concern about the “indigenous peoples” is a non-starter. This a reactionary site, for Christ’s sake. Us/them factionalism has existed since the dawn of hominid consciousness, and capitalism is not the first nor the last system to make choosing between in-groups and out-groups an imperative.

I don’t think it’s equivocation, and it seems a bit presumptuous and dismissive to call it such.

Fredric Jameson writes of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith: “Hobbes needs state power to tame and control the violence of human nature and competition; in Adam Smith (and Hegel on some other metaphysical plane) the competitive system, the market, does the taming and controlling all by itself, no longer needing the absolute state […] the market is thus Leviathan in sheep’s clothing: its function is not to encourage and perpetuate freedom (let alone freedom of a political variety) but rather to repress it.”

The mechanisms that come into play, the deterritorializations that the market might inaugurate, are no more “free” than a wounded gazelle. You’re casting market competition in evolutionary terms. In this sense, it makes no sense to even talk about freedom since it doesn’t exist in any way, shape, or form. There is no concept of it. Glorifying this kind of uncivilized “mountain man” noble savage as the epitome of freedom seems more like equivocation than what I’m doing, in my opinion.

And as far as your casual dismissal of the us/them dichotomy, I’d suggest that leaving it as is (which you seem to be advocating) is, again, appealing to a vulgar kind of social (or economic) Darwinism.

Disintegration + catallactic coordination is intelligence optimization in its sociological expression.

Methodological individualism: The individual is my unit of analysis. Individuals have opinions. Groups have decision-making processes, subject to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. “Individualism” means avoiding fallacies of composition and division.

Moral individualism: Morally, my relatives or countrymen do not own me. I may choose to sacrifice for “my” people, but the choice is mine. No matter how much they plead about “society” or the “nation”, they have no moral right to coerce me. Individuals are responsible for their actions. Group punishment is fundamentally unjust.

There was an old Progressive who used to come to my church’s weekly Men’s Group lunches. One of his favorite rhetorical tricks was to pretend not to understand the difference between libertarians’ opposition to coercion and wanting to be a hermit. It’s like pretending not to understand the difference between consensual sex and rape, and accusing women who object to the latter of being so “ignorant” that they don’t know where babies come from. I exaggerate only slightly. This shtick got old really fast.

The only thing that is attractive about the life of a hermit from a libertarian perspective is that it demonstrates in a determined way that the hermit is not at the beck and call of his cadre officer.