From The Old Curmudgeon, The Libertarian Forum, VOLUME V, NO. 11 NOVEMBER, 1973

Psy Lib Once More

Our friends at Rampart College are apparently intending to push heavily on the Psy Lib front, attempting to integrate "humanist psychology" with libertarian politics, ethics, and economics. On the face of it, the Psy Libbers have a formidable task on their hands. Not only do they have to demonstrate that psychology is a scientific discipline somewhere significantly above the level of mumbo-jumbo and witch-doctory - a tough task in itself. But they also have to answer what might be called the "Davidson challenge" to science fiction and metal detection ("Libertarians and Culture," Lib. Forum, October, 1973): namely, the relevance to libertarianism. One is reminded of the Libertarian Connection's recent fascination with vitamin pills - an admirable devotion, no doubt, but rather difficult to link up with libertarian concerns. Or, to put it another way, even if it were true, should libertarian journals allocate some of their preciously scarce space to the latest news on the technique of filling cavities?

From what I can gather, the Rampart answer to this challenge on relevance goes somewhat as follows: we have all had the experience of beaming our libertarian views at people and not seeing them converted. Since our ideas are correct, why do people not accept them? On this view, the answer must be "psychological hangups", a failure to be humanistic, an uptightness about other people, an authoritarian personality or whatever. In short, people must be converted to the precepts and lifestyles of humanistic psychology before they can be ripe for conversion to the libertarian creed.

This argument strikes me as a mass of non sequiturs. In the first place, it is simply empirically wrong. I know lots of people with "hangups", "authoritarian personalities," etc. who are excellent libertarians. Similarly, there is no logical connection whatever. For example, let us postulate a typical Authoritarian Libertarian, worried about the loss of traditional morality, "uptight" about drugs, promiscuity, and bestiality; he may firmly believe that many people around him are doomed to Hell, either on earth and/or in the nether regions, but he may also firmly believe that they have the right to do so, that everyone has the right to go to Hell in his own way, and that they and everyone else should be left alone. There is surely no contradiction here, and empirically such people have abounded in our great libertarian past, and even, mirabile dictu, are still around in our permissive present. Perhaps even our Rampart friends, as psy liberated as they are, may have a few qualms about heroin addiction, and yet this does not stop them or any other libertarian from advocating heroin freedom. In short, and this is surely an elementary libertarian lesson, one does not at all have to approve of something to advocate a person's right to do it.

There is another consideration here: our liberated brethren are not so free of "hangups" or moral judgments themselves. What happens is that the moral and social pressure simply cuts the other way. What happens, for example, to the guy in a "non-judgmental", "humanistic" encounter group who doesn't want to be touched, who values his personal and emotional privacy, who wants to be "closed" rather than "open", who wants to preserve his own principles rather than "flow with it"? In the old expression, what happens to him shouldn't happen to a dog. Similarly, the inevitable thrust of a "libertarian-humanist" approach would be to cast into outer darkness all of those libertarians who are not and emphatically don't want to be "liberated", who are, in short (name one: closed, private, authoritarian, uptight, morally principled).

Let us take even the extreme case of an Authoritarian Person who has what might be called a bureaucratic or a sado-masochistic personality, in short, someone who either feels a great need to obey orders and commands, and or feels a great need to hand out orders and commands and have them obeyed. Is such a person, at least, an inveterate enemy of libertarianism? Certainly not, for he might very well hold that all s-m activities must be strictly voluntary: in a free, libertarian society, then, he can voluntarily join private s-m clubs, or voluntarily abase himself before a guru, a Perfect Master, or some other Authority, or gather around him willing subjects to whom his every wish will be their command. Certainly not a very healthy picture, but perfectly compatible with the freedom that libertarians are looking for, the freedom to form whatever interactions one wishes so long as they are voluntary.

We conclude, then, that if the drive for liberty has to be more or less suspended until everybody's psyche is "liberated", we will have to wait forever. Happily for our cause, liberty does not have to wait for everyone's psyche to shape up in some way that we want; we don't have to wait for a world of "humanists" or rationalists or traditional moralists. Libertarianism, the free society, is compatible with any psyche that holds firmly to the rights of person and property, whether for humanistic, traditionalist, or totally non-psychological reasons.

But what of the broader question? Why don't we libertarians enjoy the instant conversion of everyone who hears our message? Here, the strategists of Marxism, who have cogitated on these matters for over a hundred years, have a lot more to say to us than the murky purveyors of psychological nostrums. We do not, as do the liberators and the Randians, have to hurl psychological anathemas at the unconverted. The basic problem is simply that most people are not really interested; every person is busy about his or her personal and everyday affairs, and certainly this kind of preoccupation with one's daily life is not self-evidently irrational. The demands on their attention, on their thought, in their free time are enormous, and they are bombarded from every direction, from all manner of cults, groups, interest groups, activities, etc. On most of these matters, they simply cannot give thought or attention, and so they tend to absorb their views on matters of marginal concern from the world around them: parents, teachers, friends, the media. And since, in ideological matters, most of these influences tend to favor whatever status quo exists, their tendency is to go along with the current system. The fact that a few of us - happily growing in number - are fascinated by ideological concerns and devote a great deal of thought and care to them is splendid, but is not by itself enough to convince the busy and harassed citizen that he must go and do likewise.

So what does stir these people up, command their attention, cause them to devote themselves to political and ideological problems? As the Marxists point out, it is the occurrence of crisis situations, situations which call their attention to the evident fact of a breakdown in the existing system. Such breakdowns could be of many sorts: a losing war, a depression, a runaway inflation, a sudden "energy shortage." Whatever they are, we libertarians know that statism will inevitably bring them about, and furthermore that they will come about with accelerating frequency in the months and years ahead. As these crises occur, more and more people will be induced to give attention and thought to these matters, and more and more of them will inevitably become libertarians. But they can't do so if they don't hear the message, or if they haven't heard the message in the past, predicting the crises upon them. The task of dedicated, self-conscious libertarians (the "cadre", in Marxist terminology) is to spread this message, to stand ready to do so, until, in crisis situations, our ranks are significantly swelled. As a matter of fact, it seems very plausible that the enormous increase in the number of libertarian cadre in the last few years is not unrelated to the accelerating number of such crisis, in domestic and foreign affairs.

Let us, then, not become so frustrated by the failure of instant mass conversion, by the failure to heed our message, that we start reaching for psychological smears with which to bombard the unconverted, (either that they are "uptight" or that they are "loose-lipped evaders'', depending on one's psychological theories). Let us treat the unconverted with the same respect with which we ourselves would like to be treated. Sometimes the Golden Rule is the best as well as the simplest guide.