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Michael Hanby On Postliberalism

Catholic philosopher of science faults integralism for missing the 'metaphysical catastrophe' at the root of our civilizational crisis
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One of the many pleasures of last week's Touchstone magazine fall conference was being able to hang with my friend Michael Hanby, the philosopher who labors at the John Paul II Institute in Washington. Hanby recently published a good piece about our postliberal moment. I want to talk about it today. Excerpts:

The deepest problems with our political order are not themselves political but metaphysical and theological. Political order and political philosophy always presuppose natural philosophy, metaphysics, even theology. ... [T]hey are first in reality, as an entailment of every conception of the human being, political order, or the common good. Political life, to borrow a term from Maurice Blondel, is “metaphysics in action”: and every metaphysics, even one in action, implies some tacit conception of God—what God must be if the world is really like this—irrespective of whether he is thought to exist.

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This is important. What he's saying, I think, is that all politics depends on belief in transcendent reality. Hanby says that the liberal order "is premised on what Charles Peguy called a 'mystical disaster' -- also a metaphysical disaster," one that expelled the divine from politics, and conceived of politics as nothing more than power relations.

The advent of the secular thus coincides with a total transformation of the world’s relation to God—and indeed with the reinvention of God, nature, Christianity, and the Church as instruments of political and scientific purpose—a transformation, in other words, that affects every aspect of reality.

Hanby here speaks to something that I find frustrating about so much of our politics discourse. Most people seem unaware of all the metaphysical baggage they smuggle in to these discussions. In one sense, that's perfectly understandable. We assume that most people share our ultimate premises, but that's not really true. It might have been true in a general (but still meaningful) sense fifty years ago, but certainly is not now. A big reason that the liberal order is so creaky is because our views of the Ultimate have become radically incommensurate, in ways they simply were not fifty or sixty years ago. Per Hanby, we now live in a political world "where God and being have simply ceased to be intelligible as meaningful questions."

Hanby says that "postliberalism" has finally appeared as a meaningful phenomenon, in large part because of the influence of Patrick Deneen's excellent book Why Liberalism Failed. (Answer: because it succeeded brilliantly in creating the radically autonomous individual, but in so doing, destroyed the pre-political foundations of liberalism.)

Hanby says that postliberalism assumes the end of liberalism, a prediction that Hanby endorses. He writes:

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The prefix in postliberalism is an indication that we have left the realm of traditional political philosophy, a theoretical inquiry into the ideal polity. Rather, postliberalism denotes a form of thought conditioned in some way by a liberal order that is thought to be passing and which it hopes to supersede. Whether liberal order is indeed passing, or whether it represents something of a Zeno’s paradox of fragmentation—always falling, never collapsing—, whether this interminable disintegration marks the transition to a new kind of politics or passage into a post-political age governed by technological exigencies that are ultimately ungovernable by us, whether, in other words, there is anything after liberal order, once it has negated every alternative and established its inherent meaninglessness as the ultimate horizon, is an important question that we have only begun to contemplate. Here the question simply denotes the concern that the nature, size, and scope of liberal order—as a cataclysm of the human spirit—are obscured by the confident triumphalism of liberalism’s opponents. Their quest for political relevance risks domesticating a once-potent critique and obstructing our vision of what a real alternative to liberalism would require and how it might be lived in the midst of (what I am convinced is) liberalism’s interminable disintegration. 

In other words, he's saying that the triumphalism of certain postliberals makes it harder to think clearly about what could and should replace the decaying liberal order. This is a potent claim. Let's see what he means.

First, Hanby says that postliberalism in the public's mind is defined not by the depth of its partisans' critique, but rather by their success on social media:

Yet this confusion is compounded by the fact that the sphere of practical politics is now exhaustively mediated by social media, where brands are built and careers as a “public intellectual” are made and broken and where the “success” of one’s arguments—what we now mean by profundity and truth—is measured by “impact”: by the size of one’s following and one’s dexterity in saturating and manipulating the market. What should be a patient philosophical and theological inquiry into the nature of things has become a political contest played out before the eyes of the virtual world, where the object is not understanding but winning.

If I'm reading him correctly, Hanby is saying that when discussions of the feasibility, say, of a return to Catholic integralism devolve into Twitter fights, libs-owning, and friend-enemy distinction-making, postliberalism trivializes itself. More:

Social media grant to their users something of the editorial power long enjoyed by traditional media in their mediation of what counts as reality: the power to construct a self-enclosed world, only now with the added capacity to curate a population of “followers.” The illusion that this stylized world is the real world depends both upon the never-ending feedback loop of affirmation from these followers and, even more fundamentally, upon the capacity to exclude from consideration ideas and questions that might undermine the edifice. The media’s mediation of reality, their power to determine what we think about, and the power of not thinking are one and the same.

The structural features of a platform like Twitter—its brevity, the “presentism” of its mediated immediacy, and, of course, its omnipresence—enhance this power exponentially. Combine this with the stimulus-response character of these disincarnate exchanges and their performative character as instruments of self-expression and self-promotion, and a powerful inducement to thoughtlessness comes into being: an irresistible “structural temptation,” inherent to the very nature of the medium, to exchange knowing for knowingness and to absolve oneself and one’s followers of the burden of thinking.

Social media discourse is therefore structurally sophistic even when it is telling the truth, employing words not for the sake of understanding but as instruments of other ends, ends for which understanding, half-truths, or falsehood may be equally useful as means. In the virtual world created by social media, even the truth itself becomes an ideology, an instrument in the service of power—which is the fate of truth whenever politics becomes the ultimate horizon. Social media and totalitarianism are thus made for each other. As Marshall McLuhan famously observed, the medium is the message.

It is a truism that Twitter is not the Real World. But this is a mistake that people (like me!) who spend a lot of time immersed in that world often make. If you pay attention to integralist discourse on social media, it seems like a thing -- and, to be honest, it really is a fascinating intellectual project. It offers a coherent response to the problems of that postliberalism attempts to address. But it has no chance of amounting to anything in the real world, because it is predicated on conditions that no longer exist -- namely, a Catholic Church that retains immense authority in the eyes of Catholics. For better or for worse, that is no longer true. You couldn't find one American Catholic out of a thousand who would be willing to submit to an integralist order -- to say nothing of non-Catholics, who are the majority in the United States. But you wouldn't know this from Twitter. This is what Hanby is getting at, I think.

Consider it in another way. In the online world I inhabit (social media + the Internet), a lot of people are converting to Orthodoxy or Latin Mass Catholicism. It is humbling to me, then, to go out into the Real World, and to realize that the congregations of Protestant megachurches dwarf the number of Orthodox or Trad Catholics emerging. To be sure, in any society, the discourse among elites is going to determine the overall direction of that society. This is why megachurch Protestantism has the numbers, but punches far below its size in terms of cultural clout and intellectual impact. Sociologist James Davison Hunter explains how this works.

Hanby critiques the "common good conservatism" advanced by integralist Adrian Vermeule and his followers. He begins by talking about the "manualist" habits of certain postliberal Catholic thinkers -- people who think and write as if the formulas for good political order have already been written down, and just need to be applied with vigor. Reading Hanby, I think of my traditionalist Catholic friend who went to his priest with a painful theological question, to which his priest responded with, "Look it up in [titles of books], and you'll find the answer." My friend knows what the Church teaches doctrinally, but was struggling to understand its deeper meaning. But yes, there is a sort of conservative who responds to the mysteries of the world, and of living in this messy world, with that kind of legalism.

Hanby writes:

Nevertheless, to treat the common good as a kind of manualistic solution to the crisis of liberal order is to fail to grasp the depth and breadth of liberal nihilism. Genuine political order presupposes political community: the common good presupposes that we share a common nature and a common reality. Mutual deliberation about the means to attain the goods proper to this shared reality presupposes, too, that we all participate in a shared order of reason. Yet all these common things are profoundly threatened by a liberal and technological order premised on their theoretical and practical negation. The exaltation of possibility over actuality in the name of freedom and pragmatic “truth,” or rather, the reconception of freedom and truth as forms of power, has inaugurated a state of permanent revolution against every form of antecedent order—natural, moral, political—with the technical and political dimensions of this revolution mutually reinforcing and capacitating each other. Even the language by which we recognize this world in common, the connatural knowledge that we drink in with our mother’s milk and that precedes every ideology, is now under assault, aided and abetted by a science ideologically bent on bringing the brave new world into being. The “American experiment” is rapidly becoming an experiment to determine whether a society can be duct-taped together by physical infrastructure, bureaucratic and financial administration, and a shared antipathy toward reality. How is anything common to be found or recognized?

Hanby is a philosopher and I am not, so I might be misunderstanding him. He seems to be saying that "common good conservatism" only works in a society with a shared, pre-political conception of the common good. But we live in "a liberal and technological order" that denies that we share a common nature, and a common reality. Put bluntly, there is no way that an orthodox Christian and a gender ideologue are going to agree on the meaning of human nature, and of reality. I think what gender ideologues preach, teach, and do is mostly a profound evil -- and they would say the same thing about my form of religion. One reason for liberalism's durability is the fact that nobody, so far, has figured out how we can all live together without violence, absent liberalism. But time is running out. Whenever you see liberals in the media complaining that "democracy" is under threat by the Right, you should be aware that people on the Right are quite accustomed to this game whereby the policy preferences of the Left are construed as "democracy," even if they don't have popular support. People outside the Left bubble understand this quite well. Here in Hungary, where I live now, Viktor Orban's party won a smashing election victory this past spring, beyond even what the party hoped for (I know this, because I was at the election night gathering, and had many conversations with party people who were visibly astonished by the results). The Western media busied itself creating a self-flattering narrative for why this democratic result wasn't really democratic. We on the Right know how this works.

This passage really speaks to the heart of the challenge ahead of all us postliberal types. Hanby is a philosopher of science, and he brings that background to bear with this piercing observation:

Thinkers of the New Right often respond to the crisis of liberalism by saying that the law is a teacher. I fully agree with this traditional point and contended for it long before postliberalism became a preoccupation of the political class. Good laws are obviously preferable to bad ones, and I would no doubt favor many of the laws the New Right would establish were they ever to ascend to power. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of this response in the face of our situation calls into question whether they really understand this crisis.

Technology does not wait on politics, and law is largely impotent, and permanently reactive, in the face of interminable technological revolution and its exigencies. As a regime of necessity, technological revolution governs us more deeply than the rule of law ever could, determining the conditions of our thought and action and generating an endless current of downstream possibilities that can scarcely even be imagined before they are an accomplished fact.

Twenty years ago, no one could imagine that he needed a smartphone. Now the digital revolution has irreversibly transformed the very nature of human sociality, bringing the sexual revolution to a decisive triumph with astonishing speed—does anyone really think the SOGI juggernaut could have advanced so rapidly without the internet?—, propelling us breathlessly toward a posthuman future, and capacitating new forms of political action without political responsibility and new mechanisms of enforcement operating completely outside the traditional channels of political deliberation and decision. Riots can now be conjured up instantaneously around the globe in response to any provocation before our politicians can brush their teeth in the morning. The furies can be called down without notice upon anyone, anywhere, at the first indication of wrongthink—not by the state, or even by anyone in particular, but as the emergent effect of a vast stimulus-response mechanism and a system of mutual surveillance of all against all that has taken on a life of its own. The very possibility of being caught up in this mechanism suffices to “keep us in awe,” ruling by inducing what Shoshana Zuboff calls “anticipatory conformity.” The Hobbesian ambition of modern politics, to erect an artificial God imbued with quasi-divine attributes, has been realized on the plane not of political but of technological order and will almost certainly become more total still as biometrics fuses biotechnology and information technology together with the “internet of things”—tracking, predicting, and controlling the details of even our bodily life.

Almighty Google, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, is more interior to us than we are to ourselves. Compared with such awesome new powers, having a few hundred people gather under a dome for part of a year to deliberate policy seems positively antiquated. The maturation of this technocratic power signals not another form of political order, transparent to the categories of classical political theory, but the end of politics, the beginning of a post-political age that indeed may already be upon us—and the need for a profound renewal of Catholic thinking. Bromides about how culture is downstream from law do not avail when there is no longer a culture. Triumphal tweeting of such slogans does not amount to a serious analysis of these new realities or a profound grasp of our present situation.

I've mentioned in this space before how a high school teacher in Poland told me that the collapse of the Catholic faith among the young in his country is primarily because of social media. He told me that there are no institutions in Poland -- not the Church, not the State, not the family, not schools, nothing -- more powerful than Tiktok in shaping the moral imaginations of the young. This, I think, is what Hanby is getting at. We are barreling into a world where politics as it has been conceived by all thinkers simply doesn't work anymore as a model for how people think and behave. Bromides about how culture is downstream from law do not avail when there is no longer a culture, says Hanby. That's strong medicine -- hard to swallow, but an important truth nonetheless. Hanby, who is himself a rather conservative Catholic, says that the metaphysical disaster is so profound that an attempt to impose by force a Catholic political order would not only fail, but would also accelerate the disintegration of our system. In other words, the cure proposed by integralists would not only fail to heal the patient, but would hasten his demise. Hanby writes:

In either event, it is the absolutization of politics and the conflation of authority and power characteristic of modern politics as such—and not, in the first instance, the influence of Carl Schmitt—that undergirds the suspicion that integralism is just a Catholic variant of the Hobbesian science of power.

That's how I see it. he fact that integralist commentators don't seem to be especially interested in evangelism and discipleship, but rather in theories and mechanisms of political power, is a tell.

I suppose Hanby has picked out the integralists because he too is a Catholic of the Right, and because integralism is a well-articulated postliberal response to the crisis of liberalism. It seems to me, though, that the faults of integralism are also the faults of any postliberal answer to the crisis. This is why I've never been able to get beyond the Benedict Option as a response. The most important thing for Christians to do now -- not the only important thing, but the most important thing -- is to shore up our faith and faith communities against the disintegration of the Empire. We can be Christian under any number of political orders, but if we lose the faith, who cares about the political order?

It seems to me that if you want to know what the outcome of a political and social order that privileges a Church that has given up trying to convert and disciple its people, look to post-Christian Ireland. And look too to the Catholic institution's response to the abuse scandal, in which bishops theorized that the way to preserve power was to suppress and deny these atrocities. It was possible to do that prior to the age of the Internet. There's a reason that the Scandal happened in 2002, and not before: because it became possible for everyone to know what was happening in Boston at the same time, and faithful Catholics. no longer had to depend on the media or Church authorities to learn facts about the behavior of priests and bishops. This is what Hanby is talking about with regard to technology and politics. The existence of the Internet has been a massive blow to any authority, clerical or otherwise. Just today, via the invaluable independent Catholic online journal The Pillar, we're learning that for all of Pope Francis's long face-pulling about cleaning up the scandal-ridden Church, the Vatican is still allowing abusive bishops to retire under pretense (read the "Look Closer" section). You can tell people until you're blue in the face that as Catholics, they have a responsibility to do and believe X, Y, and Z, because the Magisterium says so, and it will fall on deaf ears. This was true even before the Scandal. As anybody familiar with the Catholic Church in America knows well, the coherent, binding, magisterial Catholicism that is so attractive to many of us conservatives is hard to find in the real world. True, no church is a perfect instantiation of its ideals, but to hold up political Catholicism (as integralism's proponents call its current iteration) as the answer to the postliberal challenge requires massive denial about the state of actual existing Catholicism in America, a country where, on the question of authority, even most Catholics are functionally Protestant.

Did you know that only one-third of American Catholics agree with the Church's bedrock teaching that the Eucharist is literally the Body and Blood of Christ? Most American Catholics don't even know the basics of their faith! And according to a 2016 Pew survey, only eight percent of American Catholics obey the Church's teaching forbidden the use of artificial contraception. I would suppose that a minimum test of integralism's natural supporters among American Catholics would be to ask how many obey Humanae vitae -- that is, surrender this most intimate decision in one's personal and family life to the authority of the Catholic Church. It doesn't make all those who obey HV into integralists, but it surely must be the case that those who favor integralism also obey HV. So, with roughly 60 million American Catholics, that means we have about four million, tops, who would perhaps -- perhaps -- be open to integralism. Personally, I'd be shocked if it were 400,000, but never mind. The point is that integralism is something interesting to a narrow subset of internet-savvy right-of-center Catholic intellectuals. Which is fine -- I love discussions like this -- but let's not confuse them with the world as it is, and as it conceivably might become as we slog out of the ruins of liberalism.

Hanby:

This concern that contemporary integralism is party to the modern conflation of authority and power, and thus to the metaphysical disaster presupposed and perpetuated by modern political order, is not allayed by the integralists’ inordinate preoccupation with the legitimacy of political coercion for spiritual ends. It is true that law has both a pedagogical and coercive function and that it is necessary for any political order—including liberal order—to coerce its citizens for the sake of ends it regards as good and true. It is also true that the Church has never relieved the political order of its obligation to serve the truth and even to promote true religion, though Dignitatis Humanae draws out the implicit truth that freedom itself is an integral dimension of a truth that is finally convertible with Trinitarian love.

One hardly needs to invoke the authority of St. Thomas to explain this teaching or to remind us that coercion can inculcate virtue. Every father already knows it. But it would be strange and indeed perverse if I were to define the essence of fatherhood by my power to coerce my children, and it would be abusive if that power were not informed from top to bottom by my love for them and by a true understanding of their flourishing. However necessary it may often be to compel them to do what is right, there remains an infinite difference—an infinitely rich difference, philosophically speaking—between their being made to do what is right by my exterior imposition and their interior assent to truth and goodness as such.

The point is not that coercion is always and everywhere illegitimate or that authority and true power are outside of each other; the point is that that they are not identical, that recognition and willing assent involve an ontological affirmation of a truth that can finally compel only by its own self-evidence, that authority, in distinction from mere power, operates as such by eliciting this willing affirmation, such that whenever truth is in any way recognized, including in the potestas that acts on its behalf, the willing self-surrender to its intrinsic evidence will be found already to have taken place. To fail to give the distinction between authority and power its proper metaphysical due, to recognize its relation to the intrinsic intelligibility of being and the communicability of the good, in other words to treat it principally as a question of function or office, is already to have succumbed to the modern reduction of power to sheer force.

It's the Grand Inquisitor Option, isn't it?

Again, Hanby focuses on integralism and its shortcomings, but the problem of authority affects all of us. Do we believe it comes from the consent of the governed? OK, but who consents to public schools indoctrinating little children into transgenderism? Who consents to anti-white, anti-Asian liberal racism, in the form of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion"? You could say that democratic legitimacy comes with the results of elections, and in the past that would have sufficed. But today? Both Democratic and Republican figures have been "election deniers," in part because this is how one expresses no confidence in the system. I believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but I also believe that some of his policies go far beyond what the State has a right to do. I acknowledge his power, but not his authority -- and I know a lot of people on the Left thought the same way about Donald Trump. This is not nothing. When I was out in rural Michigan recently, I saw signs along the road screaming, "FUCK BIDEN". This is a shocking sign of internal decline. I say that as someone who didn't vote for Joe Biden and who would never vote for Joe Biden. But I'm old enough to remember when you never said things like that about the American president -- and certainly not if you were a conservative. Something has changed in America. There is power, but little authority.

Hanby says that the resurgence in integralism is to be welcomed, on the whole, because the topic compels us to confront questions about political order that we have ignored for some time. Yet it is not to be taken seriously as a proposal for any kind of practical politics. In fact, says Hanby, preoccupation with integralism prevents Catholics from doing the hard thinking necessary to confront the collapse of Christian civilization. He writes:

However if, as seems likely, it should turn out that our de-Christianized civilization has already destroyed itself and is simply waiting for the deed to become apparent, that it cannot be “restored” but must be rebuilt from the ruins by our children’s children, then “solving” this disaster will mean undergoing the inevitable consequences of this fateful renunciation in freedom and in faith, and with a patient hope that only a deep trust in the living God can justify. It will mean keeping alive the memory of what it has meant to be human and coming to terms with the real depths of what we no longer believe, that its ubiquitous presence might be rediscovered in the longing engendered by its apparent absence. There is no hope for such a solution in a “clever” world that has renounced understanding or in a Church pervaded with pious atheisms that do not know themselves and are intent on misreading the signs of the times. There is no hope for it, that is, unless we are able to “comprehend on our own time on thought” in the light of a truth, a Logos, that transcends all times. There will be no “restoration,” “rebuilding”—indeed, no salvation—without a renewal of the Catholic mind.

Read the whole thing.

The challenge for Catholics today, and for all Christians, is far, far more serious and difficult than getting politics sorted. This is why I hold to the Benedict Option, not as a reason to avoid politics, but as the only way to retain the memory of what it means to be Christian; as the ark that will carry the faith across the tempest of liquid modernity; as the best way of keeping the candle burning through this long darkness now upon us. It is at best a partial solution -- but what else is there? We are all becoming enslaved to what Paul Kingsnorth calls "the Machine" -- and philosopher of science Michael Hanby knows it. Christian political thought has scarcely dealt with this reality.

I would rather be, and have my children be, martyrs like the Blessed Franz Jägerstätter -- Christians who were on the losing side of a political fight, but who testified to the truth of Christ with their blood -- than to be men and women who have come to power at the price of their souls. It seems to me clear that we are building a totalitarian system whose totalitarianism is precisely (per Del Noce, cited by Hanby) in its radical intolerance for any conception of Being that threatens its own. Sooner or later, we are going to have to decide whether to serve that system, whether or not it takes a conventionally Left-wing or Right-wing form, or some mixture of both (I foresee a synthesis of left-wing social and cultural values, and right-wing economics). In the world we live in now, and certainly the world that is fast coming into being, integralist thought leaves one unprepared for the kinds of political and moral decisions ordinary Christians will face. If you have tried to live the disciplined, ordered, countercultural life entailed by the Benedict Option, then whether you are Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, you will be much better prepared to know what the God who is Truth requires you to do when put to the test.

I could be wrong -- and I invite critique on this point -- but it seems to me that liberalism's victory has been so profound that it's impossible to think beyond it. Whatever comes next, after whatever totalitarian or perhaps merely authoritarian interlude, is going to have to be built on a shared metaphysics, if it's not going to be merely an imposition of raw power by the elites. Will that metaphysics be sourced in a revived Christianity? I hope so, which is one reason I prescribe the Benedict Option. But it might not be. Nothing says it must be.

UPDATE: Here's Grayson Quay's thorough report on the recent Catholic postliberal conference at Steubenville.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

I think there’s something to Hanby’s idea that the medium is the message. When you do all your discoursing on Twitter, sick Twitter burns tend to become your currency. 

At the same time, my sense from reading your summary of Hanby’s essay is that (according to him), there’s been a great metaphysical disaster and until that gets fixed, we can’t do anything in the political realm. Do we just sit around and let them trans our kids while Catholic philosophers try to restore a shared sense of the common good by writing essays full of the word “capacitate”? We’ll never get there. They’ll drag us all into a posthuman dystopia that there will be no coming back from. To hell with that. I’m going to fight. We might be too far gone already, but what else am I supposed to do?

I loved Live Not By Lies, and I want to raise my kids to be Christian dissidents, but that’s not foolproof. I remember meeting a good Christian couple at my church whose daughter came out as trans after just a few months on the internet. How much suffering would be avoided in a society where people are actually encouraged to get married, have kids, and go to church? One could object that persecution makes the church stronger and that anyone who falls away under societal pressure was a fair-weather Christian anyway, but if we really believed that, we’d subject everyone in the pews to torture in order to purge them from our ranks. As a mercy, God allows some to suffer. As a mercy, God spares others from suffering. It’s a mystery. 

I don't read Hanby as saying we shouldn't do anything. I read him as saying that the problem is far deeper than any of the political solutions proposed by the integralists (or anybody else, for that matter). I think he's right about that, but it doesn't follow that we should do nothing. If the best we can do is slow down the decline, well, that's better than nothing. As I see it, neo-integralism is at best unrealistic, but I do agree that we are going to have to have the input of integralists and all kinds of creative thinkers on the Right to figure our way out of this.

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Eusebius Pamphilus
Eusebius Pamphilus
Their is no liberalism without a collectivism. Liberty, the freedom of self, the right to be secure in ones own person. Presupposes the necessary duty, the necessary threat of violence, to secure that liberty. We collectively surrender our own threats and duties to our own defense to a collectivism with the assurance that our rights will be upheld, that we will be treated equally by the collective authority to which we surrendered our right to violence in protecting ourselves. You see the missing ingredients in all of this, 'after liberty' nonsense, is the intent. The root, the wellspring from which we derive meaning. No one truly gives a damn about the word liberty. What they care about is fairness, equality before the law, a right to be secure in our persons and effects. We cannot be secure, we cannot maintain authorities, we cannot have duty, if the people have become so sheepish as to surrender their ability to protect themselves, to take on personal accountability and to take back power from collectives when those interests have lost their damn minds, ceased to live up to the prearranged understandings and no longer demands duty, responsibility and a general consensus.

It isn't the loss of authority that has done in liberty but the vested authorities unaccountability and the congruent application of law with the general populace and themselves. Put more simply. We all agreed to live by a set of laws Fred, that lights out at 9pm but I have video camera footage of you eating your cake at 11:30pm. You broke the agreement Freddy boy and your out of the house. I don't care if you think you are the authority. Put your money where your mouth is Fred because me and the boys have decided your arse can go the easy way or the hard way. Choose!

On libertarianism we can now see the oxymoron. They want individual reward with collective responsibility. Fred wants to live rent free in the house and still use the water, electricity and cable. Fred needs to pay his fare share because we are humans not damn baboons fighting to be some alpha to get access to the females. Human society doesn't work that way and people without background in psychology aught not comment on human psychology.
schedule 1 year ago