Download To: Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 15:15

To: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 15:15:40 -0700
From: jonarmst <[email protected]>
Subject: Hello and Introduction
I am glad I found this list. I'd like to give my background as to why I'm
here, and see if anyone else falls into a similar situation.
I was first exposed to Ayn Rand at an early age, like most probably were. I
remember reading _Anthem_ the summer before I went into the tenth grade and it
didn't make a huge impression on me, although I do remember thinking that the
whole idea of having substitued "egalitarian names" (i.e., Equality 7-2521)
was pretty neat-o.
I was also aware of the existence of the Libertarian Party at the same time as
well (through national BBSses that I called.) I knew about as much about
politics as the average 15 year old, but due to my immersion in the
illegalities of the hack/phreak scene and the healthy distrust I'd acquired of
the government as a consequence of it, anything that called for less
government intrusion was definitely OK by me. I'd also read some Milton
Friedman during the summer before I went to college and planned to vote for
the Libertarian candidate in 1992, which I did. I even got to the point where
I sent away for information from the party, but never actually joined,
although I believe I did declare myself a Libertarian at the ballot box.
At college, I wasted little time (between bong hits, at least) on educating
myself. I had actually met a foaming-at-the-mouth Marxist about my sophomore
year (trying to get some MIDI software for my newly acquired Atari ST for my
fledgling electronic music studio - very strange Gothic guy who would do like
twenty hits of acid and listen to whacked-out experimental industrial music
like Nurse with Wound in his townhome in Aurora who is now in this band called
"Velvet Acid Christ" that have actually managed to make a career of it, but I
digress) who made a huge impression on me. Although I didn't buy into his
demagoguery, he did say one thing that made a huge impression on me: I was
railing against a one-dimensional "government", and he said something to the
effect of:
"It goes a lot deeper than just the government."
I had one of those intense moments of awareness - that I'd been little more
than some punk kid throwing philosophical stones at "the cops", while I had no
idea how the American power structure really worked. Suddenly, I realized
that perhaps there might be a little more to it all than a cartoonish,
one-dimensional view of a repressive "government" that spawns evils that are
divorced from any other sort of empirical reality. I was determined to study
the various schools of socialistic thought in earnest, and read a big chunk of
the back catalog of the likes of Marx, Engels, Goldman, and Bakunin. I was
particularly influenced by the contemporary anarchist philosopher Murray
Bookchin. These thinkers also fit well given my materialistic/reductionistic
worldview at the time though; in retrospect, libertarianism and communism both
seem to be different sides of the same coin, in their promise of a static
"reality" that is possible to mould a perfect society into. In fact, to this
day, it seems funny to me to see libertarians constantly argue that oh, if
only we could have deregulated MORE of this, or if only THESE perfect
libertarian conditions existed, etc. it would work, I know it would...! (This
is akin to the typical old-school socialist apologist for the USSR that argues
that Communism largely failed due to its being a closed system outside of the
rest of world.. to which I agree to a large degree, but the point is that the
world will never be perfect.)
However, all of this was just abstraction. I went to the typical big state
party school (Colorado State) where I was in the unfortunate position of being
one of the few students on campus who had any interests outside of getting
laid, drugs, and snowboarding. And I wasn't really all that different; I
certainly spent more time agonizing my girlfriend and trying to score Ecstasy
than I did trying to stir up some revolutino of the proletariat. The point is
that these ideas were in a vacuum, and they weren't about to be disturbed by
anyone given that 95% of the students at my school were middle class (my
friends so happened to be VERY affluent), white, and completely apolitical.
Upon graduation, despite possessing a liberal arts degree, I nevertheless
managed to get a good job pretty quickly with absolutely no experience doing
environmental engineering/health type work at a large manufacturing firm. I
saw how complex modern industry is, and that despite our best intentions
workers still ended up in often unsafe and unhygeinic situations. Management
was constantly trying to cut our staff or find ways to cut corners on worker
safety. In addition, I was appalled at some of the engineers, many of whom
were dorky white-guy types who looked down on the factory floor workers as
not-quite-human (most of them were Mexican, Russian, and Korean immigrants.)
There was one notable instance where my boss went off on one of them, who had
failed to successfully "lock out/tag out" an X-ray chamber. It seemed as
though this whole factory was a good paradigm for the unequal distribution of
wealth in the entire world, with a few managerial/technical types like myself
above the poor teeming masses at the bottom, serving as an ideological shield
for the few Ivy League PhD types who ran and owned the place.
This place had also been busted for dumping hazardous waste on its own
property back in 1990. This was just more fuel to the fire - I couldn't help
but realize that at the end of the day, and despite the frustration of having
to deal with piles and piles of OSHA and EPA regulations, it was government
regulation that was protecting these workers. To this day, I get a good laugh
when some libertarian tells me that "things don't need to be complicated; let
companies figure it out for themselves." The whole notion that companies need
to (or are even able to) implement their OWN strategies for something like
hazardous waste disposal is completely absurd. We had approximately thirty
"waste streams", each of which had its own special packaging, method of
disposal, transportation, etc. It took our staff of six just to transport,
package, and deal with all of it. The alternative would've been what they
were doing before - dumping colloidial silver and god knows what else on a
corner of THEIR property. Should people be allowed to dump toxins on land
just because it's their own and let people a thousand years later deal with
it? The Libertarian ideal seemed sillier by the day.
This is getting long, so let me just say that I also became disillusioned with
the system of capitalism after losing two jobs that I was an exemplary
employee at. (My first tech job, in fact, would often find me working 50-60
hour weeks consistently just because I was eager to show my employers how good
I was.) I came to realize that shit happens, and often times it doesn't
matter if you're the best damn worker in the company. In fact, I also
realized that corporate America is little more than a conformity factory,
which subtly enforces a code of behavior that ensures that mediocre people
stay in its grasp.
Granted, I have had exceptionally bad experiences in
corporate America, but the whole spectacle just seemed more pathetic as the
years dragged on - watching people tie their entire livelihood and self-esteem
to some company only to get laid off. I refused to associate myself in any
way with such an organization, and realized that the world is far from
perfect, and in fact the American standard of living rests on the shoulders of
a lot of poor people, to the likes of whom a trip to Disneyland or whatever
isn't even an option.
It is always important to consider the psychological makeup of individuals
when looking at the value systems they choose to associate themselves with.
When I look at Libertarians, I see a demographic that is overwhelmingly white,
male, and American. Generally, these are people who have never really NEEDED
to shield themselves from any sort of discrimination or prejudice. In
addition, a lot of them are, let's face it, pretty big geeks, and arguing with
them on the Internet can be a chore since it seems like half of them don't do
anything but sit around and read FreeRepublic for hours on end. What's most
amusing to me, though, is that so many of them end up touting the system that
repressed them as outsider high-schoolers as some sort of lofty goal that
mankind should aspire to. This is due to the science fiction of Ayn Rand,
particularly _The Fountainhead_ (which I was unlucky enough to have someone
suggest I read after my ex- told me I reminded her of Howard Roark. Never one
to pass up flattery, I picked up the book, only to find it one of the
silliest, most monotonous, painful pieces of prose I've ever laid witness to.
I think a Chick tract [Christian End Times cartoons] has more depth and subtlety
than this waste of tree does).
How does the _Fountainhead_ speak to the mind of the Libertarian? We all know
that almost all Libertarians are maladjusted youths, and the most common
self-defense mechanism of the misfit adolescent is for him to fashion a
projection of himself as some sort of iconoclast - someone who really stands
out due to his excellence, which the rest of "the herd" can't comprehend.
This outside-ness, of course, is safely confined to a suburban high-school
existence - being "repressed" becomes synonymous in his mind with not having a
prom date or whatever, versus having a toxic dump in his backyard, or not
speaking English as a first language. (This isn't to discount the
psychological pain of anyone, I've had my share too despite being lucky enough
to not really be picked on.) He gets his computer science degree, and now
he's making close to six figures or whatever, and now he's SHOWN them how
smart he was all along, see, the system worked after all - he really WAS
better than the rest of them! So instead of feeling righteous indignation
against injustice, he's now convinced that The System wasn't flawed after all,
rather it works quite well. If only everyone could experience his OWN triumph
of the will (college tuition paid for by parents notwithstanding) they'd see
the Libertarian Light!
As a last note, I'm not really down on these people at all, many of them are
highly intelligent and articulate (which comes from having to defend an
obscure ideology, of which I'm familiar with myself), but I do think they live
in what in biological terms would be called "spatial separation" ideologically
- libertarianism just isn't going to make sense to people outside their
demographic. However, this shouldn't be surprising. As Albert Einstein said,
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ
from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even
incapable of forming such opinions."