As a youth, the one thing that impressed itself on me was “if you have to pressure me into going along with your ideas, it means you don’t think you can persuade me of them, and/or you don’t think that they correspond with reality enough that I will be forced to acknowledge the truth of them”. My response to both Rand and Marx when I was introduced to them was, basically, “You’re doing it wrong”; however I could see some good ideas in both that never seemed to find a full, non-contradictory expression. It seemed to me that Rand’s system would lead to Marx’s desired outcome, which I thought was elegant and humorous.
Later on I was very impressed by both Proudhon and Rothbard. Very subtle, and very clever thinkers. Proudhon grokked some things about fundamentals maybe that Rothbard didn’t, and vice versa. If I had discovered them earlier in life, it might have saved me from a lot of dumb, annoying arguments.
Interestingly enough I read SEK-3’s New Libertarian Manifesto and The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood at around the same time, and immediately, I saw connections between them. Basically the wobblies were trying to pull off a sort of collectivist large scale agorism that got derailed by state violence eventually. So to me, agorism seemed to be the answer to the IWW puzzle. It was the next evolution of the same idea. The working class forming one big network, instead of one big union. 4th generation class warfare rather than 3rd gen. And here I am.
]]>Having been vaguely anti-authoritarian, drawn into european liberalism by the invasion of Iraq and ID cards here in the UK. Started pushing boundaries a bit – becoming more and more libertarian. That then brought me into contact with people like Kevin Carson and ALL. A little while of reading lots of blogs, plus thinking led me towards anarchism.
]]>The closure debates in epistemology are usually about cases where it’s not only the case that A implies B, but where the epistemic agent knows that A implies B — the claim is not that K(s, A) / (A !!!@@e2;2020;2019; B) / ∴ K(s, B) is valid; it’s that K(s, A) / K(s, (A !!!@@e2;2020;2019; B)) / ∴ K(s, B) is valid. So at least common examples of equivocation, fallacious reasoning, or simple laziness in tracing lines of argument, wouldn’t count as counterexamples — because in those cases the agent generally doesn’t (yet) realize that her knowledge entails the conclusions that she rejects. Anyway, most epistemologists accept epistemic closure as a valid rule of inference, although some (e.g. Nozick) want to object on the grounds that it seems to make the refutation of skepticism too easy. (I.e.,, on the grounds that they don’t want to accept Moore-style Here is one hand
arguments as adequate refutations of skepticism.) Contextualists generally do their song and dance about how epistemic closure is valid as long as the epistemic standards are held fixed; etc.
However, I think what MBH was referring to was not the debate over rules of inference in epistemic logic, but rather a overblown argument that a lot of professional blowhards shouted across the Beltway a couple of months back — originally touched off by a couple of blog posts by Julian Sanchez, later joined by — about, first, whether or not their silly little social scene in D.C. has too many echo chambers and too much party discipline; and, second, whether movement conservatism back here in flyover country has too many nuts and cranks in it. A lot of Right-wing and ex-Right-wing shouting heads (David Frum, Jonah Goldberg, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, most of National Review, etc.) exercised themselves for about a week over whether or not their fellow Rightists were too closed-minded, whether or not the Left was worse, and whether the problem was with the Beltway social scene or with news commentary shock jocks or with the Tea Party rabble; a few Atlantic Monthly progressives chimed in; Sanchez demurred that the problem was not individual closed-mindedness but some sort of systemic failure in discovery and discussion (too much conservative media doing too much of the wrong thing for too many credulous partisans with too little consideration of doubts or dissent, etc. etc.). The New York Times ended up covering the tiff about a week after Julian’s initial blog posts.
]]>My ears were always open to the wealth of politically related conversations held by the elders around me, but I was more into the arts — theatre and music — and sports. I found the analysis on ESPN, Moliere’s dysfunctional families, David Ives’ timing, Tchaikovsky’s range, Rancid’s lyrics, Mingus’ improv ensembles, Slayer riffs much more intricate than the political discussions, which always came off as shallow to me. Then, during my sophomore year of high school, a schoolmate of mine exposed me to the Progressive Labor Party, Marxism, how it all related what was going on in Latin America and suddenly, it didn’t seem shallow to me anymore.
I read Walden that year in school and was recreationally reading Rand at the time. Becoming more radical in rebelling against the International Church of Christ, of which my mom was a very active member, I began reading a lot of LaVey and Nietzsche. I didn’t go far with involvement in the PLP, but it broke the left-right paradigm. I was still more interested in the stage, music, individualist philosophers, getting laid, getting drunk and getting high than politics. The 2000 election was my senior year of high school and I didn’t give a shit because I was two months shy of being able to vote and outwardly mocked the extreme level of passion that ran rampant among my schoolmates. It was then I began referring to myself as a “libertarian”.
My first year of college, 9/11 happened and, sadly, I was parrot of Leonard Peikoff. The PLP roots that made me hate the US involvement in Balkans and Iraq disappeared and the anti-Muslim seeds planted by my Indian grandfather and watered by Ayn Rand sprouted in full force. Less than a couple of years studying at DePaul’s theatre conservatory, I attended a Norman Finkelstein lecture. I wasn’t losing passion for theatre, but something felt lacking and he touched the nerves I wanted to be sparked in my education. I switched to journalism, but took his “Political Ideals and Ideology” course. I switched my major to political science before the next quarter and studied under him for the duration of my undergraduate career. He changed my life.
Exposing me to Chomsky re-opened the third eye that I closed when I knee-jerked on 9/11. I grew dispassionate with Rand and actually decided to look into the ‘soi disant’ libertarians. This led me straight to Rothbard’s “Ethics”. I still didn’t give a shit about electoral politics and hated the Libertarian Party. I didn’t really give much to which ‘box’ I was in. I wanted to understand the who, what, where, why, when and how about institutional power. I never gave straight yes or no answers, like Finkelstein, about whether I was or wasn’t an anarchist. If anything, I took offense to the ‘confrontation’, seeing it as a red herring.
Now I know the truth, though. My interests in philosophy and people and justice were leading me to law school and I didn’t know how to reconcile the anarchist inside of me with the reality of the political world around me.
I had never heard of Ron Paul until late 2007 and I was turned on, so I got involved, as I was looking somewhere active to channel my rage after Finkelstein was denied tenure and eventually resigned. From there, I was recruited to be a political consultant for a Beltway firm and the kabukiness of the 2008 election made me feel dirty. When Lehman crashed and TARP passed, I was done. I finished out my contract through November 6th, but considered myself an anarchist. I took the semester off and was recruited by the Council. I was still an anarchist on the inside that was prepared to continue performing as a minarchist, professionally, though I had decided I had no will to practice, but to pursue a teaching/research career after getting my J.D.
Then, Gaza happened. The anarchists Finkelstein exposed to me and the trails those led me down on the internet planted those seeds. It just took something to disgust me at a certain moment in time past a boiling point for it all to make sense and connect to the point where I can’t make sense of the statist elements of left-Marxism and Objectivism anymore.
tl;dr cliff notes: 1983: I was born free and immediately monopolized the household brainwashing as the only child; 1998: Commies made sense of the ‘Dems/GOP are two sides of the same coin’, hated political parties; 1999: Ayn Rand and other militant atheist individualists led me to call myself a libertarian if I HAD to answer, but I had that serious commie-syndicalist form of pragmatism; 2003: Norman Finkelstein taught me how the world really works and exposed me to Noam Chomsky, I got into Rothbard and what money is, I became a political science wonk; 2008: Gaza dissolved any questions as to whether or not I was an anarchist.
]]>I was originally attracted to something like Clyde Wilson’s (agrarian, decentralist) “Jeffersonian conservative tradition” (I started out in that direction ca. 1990 after reading Ortega y Gasset and Burke). I became heavily influenced by the distributists and Nashville agrarians. In this period I became more aware of civil liberties and law enforcement/due process issues, and was influenced pretty strongly by the militia/constitutionalist movement.
From there I went on to Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale (around 1998), which seems a mixed bag at best but at the time had a heavy impact on my thinking and got me moving in the same direction I’ve been going ever since. His material on the comparative efficiencies of large- and small-scale production, on the extent of subsidies to economic centralization, and the sheer amount of subsidized waste entailed in the present system, got me started on a course of reading that had a revolutionary effect on me. I began a heavy program of reading over the next couple of years on economies of scale, gov’t corporate collusion, and so forth. Around the same time, ca. 1999, I got my hands on an anthology called American Radical Thought: Libertarianism, edited by Henry Silverman, which simultaneously introduced me to the classical left-wing anarchist tradition and to Rothbard and Hess. The extent to which I perceived a distinction between them at the time is now a blur in my mind. I read Woodcock’s Anarchism and moved on to Tucker’s Instead of a Book, which affected me profoundly.
In 1999 I got hold (of all things) of Rev. Ivan Stang’s High Weirdness by Mail, which informed me that the Wobblies were still around. And the Loompanics catalog also opened a lot of interesting stuff to me.
More or less around the same time, 2000 or so, I began reading Chomsky’s work on U.S. foreign policy and on propaganda, and followed the footnote trail to a lot of other writers like William Blum.
And in this process I found myself also moving leftward culturally on issues like gay rights and abortion.
]]>Two points of difference I notice with the typical journey to libertarianism/anarchism: I never read anything by Ayn Rand until well after I was an anarchist and when I did I recall wondering why everyone seemed to think she was so important (for good or ill). I recall finding her arguments against anarchism to be particularly bad – I mean that literally; her arguments against anarchism are among the worst I’ve ever seen. I later realized that this was merely her exercising a general habit of making amazingly bad arguments. I also remained a Christian for a year or so after I became an anarchist, and see the two changes as totally intellectually independent (i.e. I didn’t make either shift out of a general policy of “questioning what I’ve been told”; I grew up partly on conspiratorial Fundie paranoia and if anything I saw remaining a Christian as rebellious and cool).
]]>Started out as vague liberal in middle school, became absolutely convinced that the answer was eventually going to be in social democracy somewhere around highschool. A little after high school I started reading more and more about anarchism (which I had considered either poorly thought out or political opportunism up until that point. I started out being heavily syndicalist, had a brief bout with mutualism on the side closer to anarcho-capitalism but then gradually drifted back farther and farther left and now am situated as close to syndicalism as one can go while still being somewhat mutualist.
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