John Wright Abandons Libertarianism

He lists the three reasons here:

Libertarianism says my neighbors do me no wrong by exposing my children to child pornography, provided only force or fraud is not used. There is no public and objective standard of decency, honesty, prudence, and justice present in the libertarian theory: but a libertarian commonwealth could not stand were its children not trained from infancy to be decent, honest, prudent and just. It is, in short, a self-eliminating theory…

In other words, the state cannot remain neutral between the Church and the Left because the Left will not allow it. As a practical matter, libertarianism is unilateral disarmament in the culture war…

The final thunderbolt fell when the Twin Towers fell. Libertarianism simply cannot be used to decide what is prudent and just to do in war.

Example: A village of farmers are about to be attacked by 40 bandits. The villagers, at the command of the old man leading the village, have hired seven samurai. The terrain says the only defensible spot is the canal. There are three houses on the far side of the canal. Military prudence says those three houses be burned, lest they give concealment and cover to the enemy.

The three houseowners, hearing this, break ranks, throw down their spears, and declare that they will go defend their houses themselves, separately, without helping or being helped by the village. Kambei, leader of the samurai, draws his sword against those three and chases them back into ranks.

Libertarians must call Kambei’s action indefensible. But by any stretch of common sense, his action is laudable, and is not only excused, it is demanded by his mission to save the villagers. Hence, libertarian logic in this wartime case leads to a false conclusion, nay, an utterly false conclusion: not merely untrue, but the exact opposite of truth.

If the last example isn’t a perfect description of how the r/K Breakdown psychology fails under conditions of high population density K-selection, I don’t know what is.

If John C Wright were living with just his wife and kids in an isolated valley in Alaska, away from everyone, none of these objections would have any meaning. He would obey the little voice in his head, he would be happy as his brain guided him easily to exhibit behaviors optimized to his environment, and not only would he never see anything wrong with his libertarianism – he wouldn’t even know there were other ways of thinking.

For whatever reason John Wright’s brain activated the r/K Breakdown psychology mode, meant to colonize some harsh terrain with a low population density. Maybe he grew up in a low density area of wilderness without a lot of kids around and his brain tripped the switch, or maybe he comes from a long line of mountain men, I have no idea. But the program, and its commonness in the population is no accident. It is an evolutionarily molded psychological “mode,” just like the r-strategy and the K-strategy.

The problem is that he was thrust into a high population density, made to seem even higher by the interconnectedness of mass media. As he navigated that world with a psychology that was not perfectly adapted to it, be began to notice the other psychologies – rabbit collectivism and wolf-like group competitiveness. For a while he fell back into the “I’m better, that is why things don’t work well” mantra to assuage an amygdala that sensed his strategy was off. With each intellectual example of the superiority of his psychology his amygdala gained respite, and he felt what he described as intoxication. His brain was altering its perception of the world around him to fool him into believing that he was living in the environment his strategy was designed for, and it felt so good he allowed it to blind him to reality.

Sadly he was too smart, and eventually he could take it no longer. Pursuing logic and reason he dragged his brain back around to the optimal strategy for a high population density with limited resources – the K-selected strategy. This brought his psychology and the reality of his environmental conditions into harmony.

I know this all too well, because I also have that libertarian psychology. Sadly it is just not to be. If you live in a first world nation, you need to be a K-strategist.