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Comment by jstnwill | Hacker News Reader

Why is the techno-libertarian world so overwhelmingly obsessed with extreme individualism?

We are social creatures. We sacrifice individual needs because we gain massive security and social value in return.

We need a balance of the various ideologies, and not the extremism of any one ideology.

Fifty years of narcissistic, anti-social, "Leave me the hell alone" libertarianism is at the heart of the culture-rot collapse we are facing.

We need people on hackernews and Ridgewood elsewhere developing civic and social innovations that deepen our connections, not replacing them with with increasingly inauthentic, algorithmic, trustless, artificial substitutes.

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I believe it was Bruce Schneier who coined the term "movie-plot threat" for a kind of security threat that gets more attention, not because it's plausible and around the corner, but because it excites our imagination the most.

It seems that there's something similar here. For most of the world, it's just natural that your government provides you with identity proof. USA and maybe other anglo countries could be the exception, although other times the question was discussed, I was told that, even if there is no official id card, other means like SS numbers provide an equivalent mechanism.

The movie plot, in which you are framed for some heinous crime and you need to go full Jason Bourne, is what justifies having a handful of fake passports, of course guns and a sizeable reserve of cash in a hole in the woods. Now it would be your bitcoin wallet and some sovereign identity keys in USB drives.

We need a balance of the various ideologies, and not the extremism of any one ideology.

Actually I think that those extreme views are a reaction to one ideology adopted by all mainstream parties. You see that no matter what you vote, you're going to be screwed, so you turn to fringe options.

well, the thing is existing institutions are completely fucked. governments simply do not represent us and there is no trust for them. we have not opted into these systems, they do not speak for us, and they are not legitimate.

we are indeed social creatures and we are developing new civic and social innovations. this mostly relates to actively opting into communities with people we like that share our values and that do not attempt to control us. and crypto/web3 enables us to exit the rotten institutions that try to coerce us into being part of them, and create new institutions that represent our values.

it is pretty obvious when you think about it. only institutions we actively and freely opt into can actually be legitimate.

and the idea that something that claims a monopoly on violence also claims to be legitimate is just completely, utterly laughable. and what is going on right now is that the clown car is finally flying off a cliff :)

If that has a solid majority where you live why does that not translate into different policies and institutions?

If it is a minority position, how to convince more people? Or where to find a place to create a new society without free-riding on the existing one, etc.?

Sure if you want anything cheaper and more widespread, abolish the monopoly on it. Including violence. When your ancestors opted into monopoly of violence, they had their reasons. Behooves you to try to understand the reasons first, not blindly exclaiming "this is all fucked i want out". Also, consider that most likely 90% of world population is living under even more dysfunctional institutions.

What are the proposed alternatives to individualism? Collectivism? No thanks. I've seen what that does to the human spirit.

I'd rather take an extremely individualist culture and then fill in the gaps with taxation and some level of wealth redistribution.

Individualism and collectivism are opposites, not simply alternatives.

Alternative to individualism is everything that is not based on individualism alone.

For example every social democracy out there the majority of which you can find in Europe.

We live in countries where we are individuals with rights but also we have to let go some of that individualism because the good of the many overrides the individual rights.

It's not very hard actually.

individualism, liberty and self-reliance are pillars of the modern developed world, which is the best place to live in all the history of mankind.

and we have plenty of examples from the last century of what do you get if you adopt the opposite values

> individualism, liberty and self-reliance are pillars of the modern developed world

Jean-Jacques Rousseau strongly disagrees with you.

I believe you confused individualism with autonomy and free will.

a society of individuals can easily become atomized and paradoxically uniform when “every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd“.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville

a true pillar of modern developed World

Self reliance is definitely not part of the modern developed world. Countries are more interconnected than ever, and almost any person, unless they live in the wilderness in Alaska and do everything themselves, relies on other people to live. The pillar of the modern developed world is specialization and trade, not self-reliance.

Are you now or have you ever been an adherent of "Leave me the hell alone" libertarianism? I'm sympathetic to it presently and I have been in the past, but I must admit that I struggle mightily to view any segment of the past 40 years in meatspace as anything approaching a shrine to that philosophy. I'd actually find it much easier to say the exact opposite in fact, and I do believe that what's happening in crypto is in large part a backlash to that.

The entire point of it being in crypto of course is that the same people and forces that push back so hard against it in meatspace are relatively powerless to do so in the cyptosphere.

For better or worse, I can't see that changing any time soon. I was in a meeting at a very large crypto exchange recently and their branded coffee cups all had a very simple message; "freedom is here". That's basically at the core of everything happening in the space, and I don't think arguing against it is going to work in any way shape or form given the polarised attitude toward the philosophy on either side of the cyptosphere border.

Like it or not, it's not going away, and it's swinging more towards extreme individualism by the day, not less.

That's not what libertarianism is about. It is about ideas that maximize freedom for everyone in a society. It is about allowing freedom to others. It's the opposite to narcissist and anti-social. It is about being nice to each other, or as Jesus said: "love your neighbor as yourself". Individual acts and thoughts are allowed and valued.

Unfortunately, our society and culture has been going into more collectivist and totalitarian direction for quite a while, which is why there's so much economic and social issues.

"Leave me the hell alone"-people are just normal people who react to their freedom being violated.

> We are social creatures. We sacrifice individual needs because we gain massive security and social value in return.

I'm not a libertarian or a proponent of cryptocurrency. But I do think we can be clearer about what being "social creatures" means.

We are "social creatures" in the sense that we seek the advantages of group membership (safety, co-operation, food stability, shelter, school), but we are not social creatures in the sense that we want oppressive control and uniformity. Our "agreement" with being social is accompanied by resentment. In some cases, the resentment is pathological. (Conformity can be pathological too.)

Homo sapiens developed/evolved language, the amazing human protocol to support co-operation. But when we ask people to say everything that they are thinking without social consequences, we discover the degree to which people can be angry, rude, willfully ignorant, and even crazy. (Consider "social media" to be both a business and an unprecedented live experiment revealing social resentment.)

The cryptocurrency movement/phenomenon is a construct with significant flaws and ardent adherents who see their own interest fulfilled in the narrative. In this, it is nothing particularly special. But by definition a crowd of people who all seek total individuality will not cohere.

People actually think libertarianism has been the dominant ideology of the last 50 years? For real?

> Why is the techno-libertarian world so overwhelmingly obsessed with extreme individualism?

That's pretty much by definition. So-called "libertarian" and neoliberal posit that individuals are greedy yet emotionless rational actors.

Unsurprisingly, individuals with narcissistic tendencies flock to that.

that seems like a straw man argument.

building systems that give better control to users online is orthogonal to social goals.

not too much knobs on Facebook helped elect Trump, quite the opposite

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