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1/ Voluntary mask adoption--much like the 2016 election--was a very easy test, and one libertarians have supposedly been studying for their entire lives.
And, of course, many of them failed badly.
And, of course, many of them failed badly.
2/ The explanation for most of this is relatively simple: most people who call themselves libertarian, even the sophisticated ones, are just reactionaries of various stripes. Masks and Trump, in different ways and for different reasons, were always gonna reveal these faultlines.
3/ Increasingly, though, we've seen Trump/mask behaviors that suggest deeper problems within libertarian ideology.
One of them, I think, is contrarianism.
One of them, I think, is contrarianism.
4/ Libertarians have a long--and, I note, quite valuable--history of contrarianism. When you're a small ideological minority, it's going to happen, and it's going to be a big reason why you attract the people you do.
5/A lot of libertarian thought--the economic way of thinking, for example--goes hand-in-hand with contrarianism understood as a sociological phenomenon, and libertarians are valuable for precisely this reason--they often really do see the world in different ways. And that's good!
6/ But it is sometimes *not* good. The clearest example of this pre-2020 was, of course, climate change. Libertarians--and here I mean *taken together*, so jesus please don't @ me--just missed the boat on climate change.
7/ "Missed the boat" is maybe strong--they were vehemently skeptical, let's put it that way.
8/ And, of course, many are vehemently skeptical regarding COVID and, now, regarding masks. And anyone who has spent any time in the movement knows---they were *always going to be* skeptical about masks.
9/ Which speaks in unsettling ways to the very core of libertarianism. When libertarians talk about cooperation--particularly economic---they're on solid ground. The norms of a free society based on cooperation are a wonder to behold, truly.
10/ But they are only part of the conceptual picture. At some point there is going to be disagreement about something exactly like masks--an issue on which *reasonable* disagreement is not only possible but in fact likely--precisely *because* of libertarian personalities.
11/ It is here that I am always reminded of what I consider to be the crucial argument in Hobbes--the argument in Ch. 17, where he asks why it is that--even assuming we've all found the laws of nature (that is, of cooperation)--we nevertheless need a sovereign.
12/ His answer is that we are, by nature, proud. We simply will *not* cooperate in large groups--we will always try to distinguish ourselves, we will *create* conflict where it otherwise doesn't exist.
13/ Mandeville and Hume thought this could be overcome--we could be made *civilized* or, in Mandeville's phrase, "governable." We could be made through custom and modest enlightenment into a person capable of living in liberty and ease with others.
14/ Arguably, libertarians are heir to this way of thinking-- through Smith, I guess. And yet it is libertarians *themselves* that seem most likely to upset these very norms, to cast doubt on the rationality or utility of the norms that make common life possible.
15/ I'm not suggesting that this is bad, and maybe I'm really just restating the increasingly-strained conundrum at the heart of 20th-c libertarianism: that Lockean natural rights and Humean conventionalism are very, very hard to reconcile at all times.
16/ But what I'd really like to say is this: you can be governed by your community and your neighbors, or you can be governed by Leviathan; that much appears clear. If you object to the latter, you need to think about the terms on which the former can happen.
17/ Cooperating with others freely is the goal, yes, but sometimes it means shutting the fuck up and wearing a mask.
