There’s a reason why we like to get nasty. It’s a lot easier to start a fight than it is to take charge of your life when things seem out of control. Our desire to manipulate others often stems from the need to compensate for our own inability to feel a sense of agency in relation to our goals. We enjoy pulling other people’s strings because those are usually the only strings we know how to pull.
Tag: change
Words Poorly Used #111 — Echo Chamber
Confirmation bias, a fancier name for the echo chamber meme, is an important addendum to the human psyche. It becomes a bad quality when it is improperly used.
Helplessness Is Not a Virtue, Either
It still strikes me as odd when I see people expressing pride in the fact that they are not armed. As if that’s a virtue, or a sign of moral superiority. They’re basically saying, “I’m just so noble and awesome, because if armed thugs attack me or my family, I can’t do a damn thing about it!”
Different Opinions?
Really, if you can pretend that people with evil or stupid opinions, who act on those opinions to cause harm to others, are not evil or stupid, you can probably justify anything.
Kidnappers and Dangerous Psychopaths
If I ran someone off the road, forcibly pulled them out of their vehicle, put them in shackles, threw them in my vehicle, and transported them to a cage where I locked them up, I would rightly be regarded as a kidnapper and a dangerous psychopath.
Is Secession by Referendum Libertarian?
My concerns about group (not individual) secession are over the process of peaceful separation, namely, the referendum. Libertarians have long criticized political democracy — that is, the settling of “public” matters by majority vote either directly or through so-called representatives — as inherently violative of individual rights. By what authority does a majority lord it over a minority? Well, doesn’t this critique apply to referenda on secession?
Libertarian Views on Two Books and a Movie
I have recently, as usual, been bingeing on various dramas and books that have some degree of voluntaryist content. Here are three examples that I would like to recommend to you, dear readers.
How My Grandfather Won His Last Battle
Today my grandfather died. I’m still processing what it means to live in a world without him. But there’s one thought that gives me extraordinary satisfaction: he ended so well.
Import the Products, or the Producers
A country’s people can foster their prosperity by participating in the extended, or international, system of specialization and exchange according to comparative advantage.
Schooling Was for the Industrial Era, Unschooling Is for the Future
The trouble is that we have left the Industrial Era for the Imagination Age, but our mass education system remains fully entrenched in factory-style schooling. By many accounts, mass schooling has become even more restrictive than it was a century ago, consuming more of childhood and adolescence than at any time in our history.