Why Libertarianism Fails: Disunity; Infighting; Political Relinquishment

This essay assumes you are, in the most general terms, libertarian. If that's not a safe assumption, then the tone is going to seem harsh. That said, the harsh tone is warranted, because our society is in the process of committing suicide, in a manner nearly identical to the way Germany committed society-wide suicide in 1930. It is committing suicide by the ballot box. As a wise woman once said:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.
​—Ayn Rand
“Foreign Policy Drains U.S. of Main Weapon,”
The Los Angeles times, Sept. 9, 1962, G2

In 2002, I was taught "how to petition." This is the task of asking strangers to sign a political petition to allow a political choice on an election ballot. Scott Kohlhaas drove me to the University of Michigan in Lansing, MI, in September of 2001, and we asked people to sign the state-wide ballot access petition for the Libertarian Party of Michigan. It's a difficult task, and an unpleasant one. (Because you get to see exactly to what extent the general public has been indoctrinated by government-run schools to be both pompously ignorant and bigoted, yet to see themselves as precisely the opposite. ...Exactly the set of conditions that allowed Hitler to imprison and murder millions of innocent Jews and dissidents now empowers the rising USA police state to imprison and murder millions of innocent drug users, dissidents, etc. In much the same way that Hitler branded his victims "undesirables," the USA first attaches a social stigma to its victims.)

The government schools spend 12 years inculcating a combination of bigotry, servility, and ignorance in U.S. citizens, rather than teaching them the basic Civics they would need to enable them to uphold their rights under the Bill of Rights. (And no, I'm not talking about authoritarian horseshit mislabeled "Civics" ...I get the difference.) Small-L "libertarians," in the sense I've used the term in this essay, are the few people who have learned, to varying degrees, to reject the government schools' indoctrination, and seek to defend what little remains of existing property rights protections, and restore what has been lost of them.

...But the prior "minimum knowledge" required to label oneself a libertarian isn't enough. It literally does not matter at all if one calls oneself libertarian, if one has no viable plan to implement libertarianism. Political change comes only from a dedicated pursuit of political change. It doesn't "happen magically" when "enough libertarians are created." Even if 98% of society were libertarians, if those 98% didn't actively seek to instantiate rights-protecting systems, they could remain enslaved to the remaining 2% of bold, aggressive sociopaths (as they currently are).

So what knowledge is necessary to shape the coercive institutions of society, so they reduce the coercion they use? The learned answer to this question is: "A basic knowledge of network science and a basic knowledge of the Historical institutions that have protected the innocent from punishment, in the portions of western civilization that were anti-slavery." (We should not laugh off or ignore black Americans' criticisms based on Southern chattel slavery, and subsequent Jim Crow. To the extent we do, we deserve political failure, because we have failed to respect the rights of others. While many white families were amassing generational wealth, many black families were struggling for a bare and impoverished survival. The ongoing degradation and corruption of law enforcement that persists to this day has exacerbated these differences, and erased many early civil rights gains, as has the ignorant response of totalitarian-by-default socialist pseudo-liberals, and Marxist-by-default "post-modernist" activists.)

This said, there are a lot of libertarians who, from a position of inexperience and lack of knowledge, dispute the prior (further dividing the potential libertarian movement, and preventing an unimaginable explosion of wealth). Moreover, even those who do not dispute the prior often have no "working knowledge" of what constitutes a useful implementation of libertarian goal structures.

The idea that "cybernetic entities" must fight each other for network dominance is, itself, off-putting to many, if not most, libertarians. Be that as it may, this is the undeniable truth that is recognized by anyone who has ever won an election, or obtained a "not guilty" verdict in a "victimless crime case" jury trial. ("Victimless crime" is actuall an oxymoron, since according to the U.S. Constitution, all crimes must have a valid "body of the crime" or "corpus delicti" comprised of both "injury" and "intent to injure." If there is an injured party, that person can be said to be the "victim" of the crime.) If I were to describe the methods necessary to "win network support" for political ideas, the result would be several hundred pages. Even so, the following quote and link will "point the interested reader in the right direction":

"You owe it to your philosophy to study how to win.
You have a moral obligation to learn how to win."
—Morton Blackwell, from The Real Nature of Politics

(The prior essay is made more true by substituting the term "libertarian" or "classical liberal" where the term "conservative" appears. Because Blackwell is concerned with winning, he has performed outreach to "conservatives" for most of his life, teaching them economics, and getting them elected. For the reasons given by Hayek, I also am not a conservative.)

There's order in the following network graph, but it's difficult to explain without seeing it. Clearly, some nodes are "more connected" than others. (Network scientists and systems engineers call this variable "centrality.") Imagine that the "dots" or "points" in this network are people, and the lines linking them together represent whether the people know each other(talk to each other). If the highly-central people support your campaign, you're likely to do better than if they don't. This is also true of educational campaigns.

Even anarchists support "educational campaigns," such as the ones that educate jury members in a way that helps them resist being manipulated into convicting an innocent defendant for a non-crime. In fact, all people who are "even generally in favor of individual freedom" support such campaigns. ...But, it turns out, there are too few such people to pay workers to perform such campaigns at a high skill level. This is why "running for office" is a necessary part of any pro-freedom movement. "Untrue!" ...say the "agorists"(anti-electoral-participation anarchists), educational campaigns can be performed without running for office. Though this is true in theory, it's untrue in practice, for the following reasons:

1. The vast majority of people will only contribute to candidates who seemingly intend to take power away from the current system using a popularly-recognized means of doing so. In the USA, today, that means "running for office." Agorist donations to "agorist educational efforts" represent "a drop in the ocean" of all donations going to "people running for office." The prior domain might be considered, "political engagement." Moreover, non-agorists will contribute to minarchist libertarians, but not to "counter-economics education efforts," because they generally cannot define what success in that domain would mean, or cannot believe progress in that regard will be significant.
2. All "jury-education" efforts are made more effective if the existing establishment, including candidates within that existing establishment, support them. If a candidate wins office on a jury education message, he can then testify as an "expert witness" for innocent defendants who are being victimized by the state for their non-criminal actions. Moreover, "open-to-libertarian-ideas" jurors who favor the existence of a government will not "dismiss outright" the ideas of "minarchists"(those who believe in a minimal state) in the same way they will dismiss the ideas of "agorists" or "anarchists." If the goal is to set free innocent people from undeserved state punishment, one's message must be both coherent and attractive to current "statists" and "minarchists." In short, to move the state closer to both anarchy and minarchy, one must be a minarchist, or no motion actually happens.

In short, Samuel E. Konkin III's theoretical foundation for "agorism" is self-contradictory, because all of the following are forms of technology:

1. Elections (both Candidate and Issue-based Initiative, Referenda, and Constitutional Amendment)
2. Jury Trials
3. Networked Communications
4. Constitution Construction
5. Law
6. Educational Systems
7. Decentralized Defense Systems (such as widespread rifle ownership and training, etc.)

SEK3 allegedly stood for high-technology, as a "Robert-Heinlein-style" or "sci-fi" libertarian. But the highest technology developed by mankind is the kind of technology that sets a "floor" or "minimum standard" of acceptable conduct, as well as a system for allocating system resources to defend that "floor." Relinquishing the very form of technology(cybernetics, political technology) most likely to give us a victory in the domain of politics is the height of ignorance.

A very weak means of "winning" in the domain of libertarian politics is to "inform everyone about the non-aggression principle." But how do you know they've heard and understood? How do you hold them to the standard of applying the non-aggression principle? How do you measure the results of your teaching, outside the domain of politics? How do you engage in "feedback-and-correction"?

Simple. You rely on the desire of even the most poorly-educated among us to be seen as "an acceptably moral human being." Nobody wants to be seen as "uncivilized" or "unworthy of basic respect." In order to accomplish this, you must give the non-aggression principle teeth. That means empowering it to decide potential contests of force: Jurors, to be libertarian, must say "not guilty" and hang the jury when a defendant has not aggressed against anyone. This gives libertarianism a solid victory that can be repeated by others. (Unlike so much of what libertarians do!) That also means: Individuals can and should refuse to be identified, tagged, numbered, and tracked, and all carry rifles for self-defense, so that they can decide to come to the defense of anyone targeted by the police without that guaranteeing a retaliatory death-sentence from the police, (America's largest street gang). Police have killed and imprisoned thousands of innocent people, and they now steal more than all private-sector criminals combined.

Those who commit civil disobedience by peacefully-retaining their independent right to self-defense are the best civil-disobedience cases for libertarian jurors to nullify, since firearm-carrying is also a democratic limit on government power. (As opposed to drug use, which does nothing to expand one's freedom, but is, rather, sometimes a consequence of it.)

Parents once paid private schools to educate their kids, or they home-schooled them. In both cases, the need to create adults who would know when and how to stand up for their property rights was obvious: the result of failing to do so is tyranny, war, and destruction of wealth on an immense scale. Moreover, even in the case of revolutionary war or civil war, the ongoing institution or "new instantiation" of proper jury trials would remain the primary means of protecting property rights. ...It's better to preserve and defend that right without being proven wrong, and experiencing a social collapse that destroys your wealth and kills your family.

As the Fully Informed Jury Association teaches, the Jury in the USA is now a shadow of the institution it once was. Judges now help prosecutors to stack the jury against the defendant, so they can rob the defendant of his wealth and freedom (just as "the star chamber" once did in England, between 1515-1641 before it was destroyed by opposition from the black market press and pamphlets). The American Jury has been stripped of power by judges and prosecutors, via a series of procedural changes that eliminate intelligent and independent people of conscience from juries, during the unconstitutional pre-trial "jury selection process" known as "voir dire."

But the answer is not to "refuse to participate," as Konkinist anarchists or "agorists" urge. The answer is to "successfully participate and obtain a victory".

Konkin seemingly advocated a bold and daring "counter-economics." But that counter-economics is rendered servile and weak when it refuses to participate in elections. It takes the form of a whimpering simpleton who cannot figure out how to obtain a victory by engaging the enemy, psychologically.

If elections are rigged (they are), then hold exit polls with laptop computers, and show them to be rigged.
If jury trials are rigged (they are), then hand out jury rights pamphlets to incoming jurors, and warn them that the judge will try to remove independent-minded jurors. Ask such jurors to "do their best" to "survive voir dire" and get seated, that they might set free innocent defendants.
If the state attempts to interfere with gun rights, then simply manufacture and sell firearms on increasingly "counter-economic" gray and black markets.
If the state attempts to outlaw home-schooling(they do), move to a State that allows it, and refuse to let socialists indoctrinate your kids with servile attitudes and behaviors.
If the state requires bar-licensing in order to corrupt defense attorneys, and weaken their defenses (they do), place initiatives and referenda on the ballot that outlaw bar-licensing or degree requirements for lawyers.

For every strategy the state deploys, there is a counter-strategy libertarians can deploy.

The most damaging strategy to ever oppose libertarianism was a strategy of "encouraging our dumbest ideas" and "watching us render ourselves ineffectual." After all, the most effective, least-costly cybernetic strategy possible is to "encourage your enemy to destroy himself." If your enemy destroys himself, then you lose nothing and unilaterally win everything at stake. In the case of America, the central bank has repeatedly won the ability to continue putting innocent people in prison, and implementing all manner of dangerous, stupid, life-destroying socialist programs that make us all too weak to resist their coercive prime imperative: forcing everyone to use their currency only, and skimming wealth off of every dollar in circulation, via inflation.

If nobody kicks the sociopaths out of office, then we will have a pathocracy. If nobody educates jury members, they will send so many of us to prison that we lack the numbers to fight them. If nobody gets involved in politics, the many will be ruled by the few.

...And if that happens, we will all ask the same question from our cages:

"Why didn't we try harder?"