Journalist Nancy Rommelmann writes, after a surprisingly (to me, anyway) pleasant evening spent with feminist writer Susan Faludi, of sitting on the back steps of her home with her husband and a glass of wine:
It must be hard-wired into humans to want a little patch of earth and grass, a peaceful place to sit at the end of the day, or the beginning, and think, ours.
So true, so simple, and yet anathema to so many.
Read the rest of Nancy’s post for some unsurprising-but-fun gossip that she and Faludi exchanged about a certain tiresome feminist whinger extraordinaire.
Well, humans are territorial, so I suppose this is indeed hard-wired into our brains. We are also self-aware, so we can rationalise “mine” and “not mine”.
Then again, we are also social animals, and like to do things in groups, so we can rationalise “ours” and “not ours”.
The failing of Communism is that is ignores the first and concentrates on the second. A weakness in libertarianism, I think, is that it ignores or downplays the second and concentrates on the first.
EG
There are no weaknesses in libertarianism. Only weaknesses in the minds of people who fail to understand it correctly. Libertarianism says precisely nothing about whether we ought to act in groups or alone.
You are joking, aren’t you?
Wasn’t this the justification used by the Soviet government for locking up dissidents in mental “hospitals”?
EG
You are joking, aren’t you?
No.
Wasn’t this the justification used by the Soviet government for locking up dissidents in mental “hospitals”?
What has this to do with anything? I do not advocate the incarceration of those who fail to fully understand libertarianism. I merely correct them sometimes when they are propagating their errors.