(TLDR at bottom)
So I said I wasn't going to change my worldview much, and I guess I'm still right. My entire worldview does not involve a rewrite over this shift. BUT, I did read another old post of mine in which I argued from the perspective of social contractarianism and argued that we made states to protect ourselves in ways we couldnt in the state of nature, and that life in the state of nature was nasty, brutish and short.
However, it seems quite clear after reading those books that left in early states were also nasty, brutish and short, and were if anything far worse than the state of nature, and that these states expanded their reigns through force. People did not leave the state of nature and joined a social contract, the social contract was forced onto them and they were forced to live that way.
So, how do I reconcile this with my worldview?
Well, first of all, let me say this. While I do not believe modern states FULLY meet the standards of the lockean proviso, and that we cant say that every single person is better in a modern state than in the state of nature, I would argue that the vast majority are, and that it would be far better to further reform states than to abolish them. I abhor the leftist ideas of overthrowing the government to impose some other system, and like it or not, the state is here to stay, in one form or another. The real debate is how do we make this state the best it can be.
I think reforms such as democracy, universal sufferage, constitutional rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, are all positive. I also respect that there have been economic reforms that have taken place since the 18th and 19th centuries in which workers have more rights.
But, with all of these things, we need to take things a step further. We need MORE reforms. We need to reform capitalism where it lives up to its reputation as being the system that provides the most freedom. But in doing so it needs to liberate the working class. This does not involve "seizing the means of production" or other revolutionary nonsense. This involves freeing people so that they are not dependent on the wage labor market in order to survive. It means ensuring each and every person has enough property to be able to say no. And of course, this means implementing ideas like universal basic income, and universal healthcare. It means making the system where every single person who legitimately belongs to that society is better off than the state of nature, while also valuing their freedom. The traditional dichotomy is one of individualism vs collectivism. Of liberty vs intrusive statism. My ideology seeks to break this dichotomy. We need to be collectivist enough to ensure that everyone has enough, while also being individualist enough to ensure that everyone also retains their freedom. We need to address both the long standing conservative meme that "government does not work", while also improving on left wing ideas that everyone can be taken care of.
My version of the left is not based on the labor practices of old. While reforming work is a noble goal, and as long as work need to be done, workers should be treated justly. But how can we better ensure that workers dont get taken advantage of, than to ensure that people aren't forced to work in the first place?
Heck, a lot of those old liberal and social democratic ideologies are still based on social contractarianism. Reciprocity ultimately goes back to the idea of the social contract. We'll take care of you, but you gotta work for us. But what if we want to be left alone? Oh, youll be left alone alright (to starve). let's recognize once and for all that none of us signed a freaking social contract at birth, and that the social contract is more a myth than anything. So instead of imposing these BS positive duties on people, lets free people from coercion. The state imposed itself on people, and it's too beneficial to get rid of, but let's ensure that that state also takes care of the people it imposed itself on.
And outside of economics, which is rightly regulated through taxes, regulation, redistribution, and even some mild aspects of socialism, let's ensure that the state only steps in when it needs to. Let's have the state base itself on mill's harm principle. It does nto step in to regulate peoples' affairs unless their affairs are harming, or otherwise, more broadly speaking, negatively effecting others to such a degree that regulation is worth the tradeoff in freedom.
Ya know? I like freedom. But true freedom only comes when we respect peoples' autonomy. We have a system where the libertarian perspective is that of a 5 year old. Government bad. I dont want the government to tell me what to do. We shouldnt have rules. Rules are bad. We shouldnt have taxes. Taxes are bad. Any interference with my life is tyranny.
Uh....sadly, sometimes your actions affect others and the state acting as a referee is just, and sometimes laissez faire in an economic sense leads to abusive and exploitative relationships. Regulations are a step in the right direction, but we need to stop coercing people to work while virtue signalling jobist sentiments like "work has dignity" and the BS "the left" spews. I dont want your paternalism. Like, stepping in to regulate affects to protect me from the abuses of others is great, but i dont wanna be forced into a labor market and then be told it's "good for me" or other such nonsense either. That is tyranny.
The only legitimate reason to ever coerce people to work, is because that labor is necessary for society to function, and if it would not be done under voluntary pretenses, we might need to be a little more forceful. But even then, I do think that we should make the process as voluntary as possible, merely scaling back the UBI to the point the first ones to decide that the work is in their interest fill those jobs, and leave it at that. I resent this idea that work is a "duty". Because again, i didn't sign a freaking social contract, we're well past the point where we need everyone to work or we starve, and honestly, after reading the above books, im not sure we EVER had that problem in reality as people were never this work happy in hunter gatherer societies, only states which became fixated on maximizing growth. And while I can see an argument of keeping economically ahead of other states so that we don't get overtaken militarily, honestly, I would pursue more leisure than more work. Work is not great. We should stop acting like it's great. We should stop acting like it's a fact of life, and that the system we have is somehow "natural" when it's artificial. We do this to ourselves. Rather than to have an economy based around our needs, we are forced to work for the good of the economy. JFK had it backwards. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". Uh....that's authoritarian nonsense. Yes, ask what the country can do for you, because if the country is doing nothing for you, then why does that country even exist?
Again. I support human centered government done via modern liberal democratic principles. And I believe we need to move toward an economy that has its own equivalent of those principles. Not necessarily "economic democracy" mind you as I think socialism on anything larger than the scale of individual firms is open to corruption and tyranny, but once again, liberating each and every person to decide what they want to do, and whether they want to do anything at all.
As I've said once before in another article, I solve the problem of individualism vs collectivism with the idea of "enlightened self interest." It's fine to be collective if being collective is in one's self interest. But I do think the individual's autonomy should largely be respected too. It's neither authoritarian capitalism nor free market capitalism that's the solution. It's a system that both respects the freedom and autonomy and rights of individuals, while being collective enough to ensure that everyone's needs are met and no one is forced to do anything. The only thing forcing this weird pull in normal politics between communism and capitalism and freedom vs authoritarianism and collectivism vs individualism are two very specific economic philosophies that are both in their own ways quite authoritarian. Propertarianism claims to respect individual freedom, but their freedom is just the freedom to serve or to starve. And the fact that people dont truly have freedom in their own lives is why capitalism is so oppressive. And socialism, well, they solve it by implementing overly collective, overly authoritarian solutions based on the logic of "the state cares for you so you must work for the state".
We must get rid of this idea of reciprocity, the state should care for you, but it shouldnt ask anything in return. And that's how we break the dichotomy. Those early hunter gatherer societies were kind of like this in a way. Expected a lot of sharing, but no obligations to produce, only to share what you have. Now we have societies where everyone is expected to produce, but not to share.
We need a society that respects private property enough to allow people to have property, but also doesn't compel people to produce.
Bob Black kind of got it right in his "Abolition of work":
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously—or maybe not—all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists—except that I’m not kidding—I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work—and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs—they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
I don't necessarily agree with his idea of "work as play", as it seems like the equivalent of forcing a spoon down the toddler's throat while screaming HERE COMES THE AIRPLANE!, but I agree otherwise. Work sucks, it's the source of much of the world's misery, and the problem with most ideologies is that they all insist on having some form of forced labor, they just disagree with the details.
So yeah, we need a new ideology, that takes aim at work itself. It should be the next stage of our evolution. As the basic income community has always said, and as yang kind of coopted into his "forward" movement, it's not left or right, it's forward. I'd argue that we have a form of capitalism, as capitalism is more conducive to freedom on paper than socialism, but that we do take some of the left's criticisms of capitalism and introduce them into our policy model, to ensure the best of both worlds.
Basically, I'm calling for social libertarianism, or libertarian social democracy. Something based on secular humanist principles, that the economy exists for humanity, not humanity for the economy. We can call it...human centered capitalism. Ya know, like Andrew Yang was for.
And yeah, quite frankly, I dont need social contract theory to justify my ideology, and honestly, my ideology feels a lot more consistent without it, because most positive duties most political ideologies are based upon are based upon the concept of the social contract. Given I recognize it is, in some sense a farce, it further frees me from having to rely on such arguments.
So yeah, we all lived as hunter gatherers, states came along, forced us into them, enslaved us, and then we managed to reform them to be progressively less crappy as time goes on.*
*(only in the west)
And yeah that said, the role of the state should be to protect us while also preserving our freedom. And I believe that economic security with no obligations is a key part of that. That's the TLDR. I'll bold this part.
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