Although I do understand this is a bit unfair as regards some leftists.

ErisGuy – libertarians do not tend to claim that humans are all wise and/or moral.

But we do claim (with Gladstone) that it is folly to expect moral improvement from the state.

On the contrary – state intervention, and dependence, leaves people more and more intellectually and ethically crippled than they were before.

No one can accuse me of having a positive view of my fellow human beings (or myself). But I have an even less positive view of force – whether used by the state or by private criminals.

For example, one of the library people I happened to see today (when I briefly visited the local library) was wearing “Batman” stuff.

True this stuff only has meaning in our culture – given to someone from another culture the clothing would have no meaning.

However, even if this young lady believes herself to be “Batgirl” (or whatever), does this really change reality?

True the young lady (believeing herself to be Batgirl) might try to stop some thug stealing a library book. So the way she thinks has changed reality – she has gone into combat (when otherwise she would not have).

But is the physical fact that the thug is bigger than her going to be changed?

*Pinker is quite good on the great limitations of the language shapes thought notion

1. Labels – we can certainly see beyond the label – “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” – though labels can of course be misleading. A hamburger is not made of ham. A white man is not white. But such misleadings need not detain any determined enquirer.
2. Value judgements – we may be taught by society that stealing is morally wrong, and that teaching is a social construct. But that isn’t because our thoughts about stealing have been shaped by the language that we use, but because the subject under discussion – what is morally good or bad – is a value judgement, not a proposition about the physical world.
3. Manipulation – certainly words and meanings can be used manipulatively and if successfully one can help the manipulators win political victories. But successful manipulation is does not prevent people from thinking about unwelcome concepts if they try a bit harder. If “liberty” is successfully manipulated so that it comes to be accepted as meaning “lots of government intervention on behalf of the poorer half of society” that doesn’t mean that the concept of “as little ordering about by the state as as possible” has ceased to be a concept that people can refer to and discuss. They may have to invent a new word for it, but the concept hasn’t been channelled out of existence. The fact that words can be successfully manipulated tells us something about politics, not about the limitations on our ability to explore reality.

So if I apply these to dandruff, or as we now know it, “hairsnow.” If it is praised socially as a sign of wisdom, I can still investigate whether as a matter of fact it is correlated with wisdom (using whatever measure of wisdom that I choose) and I can support or deny the theory that society holds. I can also investigate whether it is in fact a form of snow or a form of skin. And I can also investigate whether it is associated with dry itchy scalps and whether dry itchy scalps pose any health risks. I can investigate whether hairsnow poses health risks to other people. There are all sorts of “real” concepts that can be explored even in your hairsnow world. My thoughts may be channelled to some extent by society’s usage and teachings, particularly if I’m not really paying attention, but there’s nothing very deep about this. I can escape the channel if I try.

The connection of libertarianism to reality is tenuous: people simply do not behave as libertarians wish they would.

This realisation should be liberating, as it allows us to see beyond the label applied. We may never be able to see the reality without conceptual tools such as language, but as with numbers and notations, we can at least approach a description of reality where we can see whether it is being manipulated by others.

This works best with things that are conceptual anyway, such as libertarianism. Here it is possible for those who seek to control thought to construct this as a label for self-centred, abusive of the weak, gun-toting survivalists (apologies if that happens to be you…), making it a term for an extremist rather than a sensible political position. The answer to this sort of framing is not to denigrate the underlying philosophy, but rather to take that philosophy to its ultimate logic and seek to show that those who use labels are seeking to control us by their manipulation of reality.

I don’t follow you. It is true – trivially so – that knowledge of prior concepts assists in the discovery or invention of new concepts (standing on the shoulders of giants etc.) What society has thought up already may well channel the paths of further thought. It is also true, no doubt, that particular forms of linguistic usage or notation may assist or hinder thought. For example arithmetic using roman numerals is much more complicated than arithmetic using arabic numerals, and it is reasonable to doubt that there would have been much progress in arithmetic and algebra without the use of arabic numerals. And a particular linguistic usage or a particular notation is usually a matter of social convention. (But not always – Newton’s fluxions notation was invented by himself for himself. Society had nothing to do with it. Symbols do not have to be used in communication with other people, they can also be used to order a single individual’s thoughts.)

Nor does the fact that language / notation is usually socially agreed imply that the concepts that are identified using such symbols have been created by the action of society. Aside from carbon; electricity and dandruff really do exist, and would exist even if there were no words to describe them. Fluxions exist too, even though they are not material objects. Fluxions would not operate differently if society had chosen that they should. (In fact even the words themselves are not created by the action of society – new words may be invented by a single mind, and accepted or rejected over time by the linguistic community. The action of society is on the survival of a new word, not on its creation.)

If postmodernism’s claim is that pre-existing culture can influence the streams of further thought, then it is trivial. If its claim is that pre-existing culture absolutely constrains further thought, or that we cannot think about concepts for which there is no existing word, then it’s plain why such a sllly and obviously false idea has had to be disguised by obscurantism.

Where postmodernism tends to go wrong in left-wing hands is that postmodernists for some reason then accept the existence of classes of people such as the marginalised, women, racial groups or whatever without noting the inherent logical flaw that these groups are also purely social constructs, and that members of these groups are individual actors fully capable of creating their own realities (or, I suppose, living in the realities created for them by modernist and postmodernist thinkers…).

So postmodernism is hardly an enemey of libertarian thought: used properly, it challenges and destroys the labels and identities with which people would wish to divide us; as a thought process it encourages people not to think ‘I must do this, because reality requires it’ and to instead consider what they want to do; and above all, it is a way of thinking, and if libertarians abandon thinking to the statists of the left (in the way anarchists seem to have done) then as a movement libertarianism becomes nothing but incoherent rage.