I was reminded the other day that Stefan Molyneux still exists, despite his bans from Twitter and YouTube. As you can see, he’s taking his cancellation very well:
Before Molyneux was quite such an explicit ‘race realist’ and ‘cultural conservative’, he was a lot more focused on focused on pure, stateless, anarcho-capitalist libertarianism in the traditions of Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe - much Austrian economics wow.
One of Stefan Molyneux’s key ideas was that the work of the state could largely be replaced by ‘Dispute Resolution Orgnisations’ and ‘Ratings Agencies’. Essentially in disputes that would previously have been dealt with by the civil or criminal courts, the different Dispute Resoluton Organisations of which the parties are attached would somehow, someway, resolve these disputes and, if necessary, 'punish’ any misdeeds. It seems to me that it would be largely insurance companies that would expand into this role. Technically this was voluntary as the person had agreed all this when they bought their policy from the DRO, infact they could even refuse punishment - however life without a DRO policy would essentially be unsurvivable.
I don’t intend to pursue a deep analysis of this idea, interesting as it is, but it seems to me that the problem would be that it would be very unlikely to retain any notion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. After all, civil courts don’t generally work on that basis anyway and there’s no reason to believe that this burden of proof would necessarily be retained for what we consider today to be criminal matters. Let’s consider a thought experiment: let’s say we have a circa 90% certainty that a man murdered 20 people. Now in this situation, we have enough reasonable doubt that they shoudn’t be convicted of murder - but it is very unlikely that a ratings agency, whose job is accurate assessment, would want to ignore the 90% certainty that this man murdered 20 people. Surely an employer would want this information?
Further, such a system looks suspisciously similar to China’s Social Credit System; it is probably for this reason that such ideas are not talked about today and indeed it might seem strange that such an obvious risk of totalitarianism was ever at the heart of the politics of someone who could be considered at least to be on the fringes of the Intellectual Dark Web (Note three appearances on JRE as well as his open espousal of Race Realism on The Rubin Report, though Rogan admittedly challenged him quite a lot in the last one). Technically a DRO system would be voluntary - yes life without a DRO subscription of any type would be basically non-survivable, but you would still, in the end, be making a voluntary agreement to be bound by the terms of a contract. For the pure libertarian, this is enough. For today’s liberty conscious, ‘classical liberal’ I think it is clearly not - there is some kind of recognition that freedom is not so easily definable. You should not be forced, upon pain of survival, to give up your freedom.
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Sometimes you will see people arguing for ‘innocence until proven guilty’ in debates, when noone is talking about criminally convicting someone, or even if the matter is not remotely criminal. The truth is, in day-to-day life, people make many decisions on something like the ‘balance of probabilities’ and indeed that it is how the civil courts operate. This clearly has the potential to lead to some huge injustices, which is why we don’t put people in prison (or, in some countries, execute them) on this basis. But life is not a criminal court. Maybe it should be?
Alexander Larman, writing in the Critic recently, talked about the cancellation of, among others, Kevin Spacey and pointed out that he had not been convicted of a crime. Unlike, for example, Harvey Weinstein. Though the writer neglects to point out that Harvey Weinstein was only convicted in February 2020, having been dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in October 2017, after multiple allegations emerged - more than 2 years prior. Was this an injustice? I cannot really imagine someone in good faith arguing that it was, but I can understand somehow questioning exactly where the lines are - though the truth is; there are no lines, as much as you might want there to be sometimes.
It is not an easy issue though. Imagine a situation something like Kevin Spacey’s, where it turned out that, somehow, someway, he was probably innocent. Does his ‘cancellation’, him being ostracised, become unjustifiable in retrospect? What happens when we get it wrong, as we will surely do on occasion? We will have, most probably, runied a life. I don’t think it’s wrong to think carefully about these kinds of issues.
Ultimately what this comes down to is the ‘right of association’, and this right (to the extent it exists) essentially allows us to make our own judgements about who we associate with, and in conjunction with property rights allows companies to decide who to employ, or indeed not. These rights clash with any practical conception of free speech - you may be entitled to talk about ‘race realism’, but I am entitled to think that there’s a good chance you’re just a racist and on that basis not associate with you and this may have consequences for your livelihood. Funnily enough, this isn’t so different from what Hoppe talked about:
There can be no tolerance towards democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.
Moreover, he is reported to have expressed a wish that towns and villages could:
“post signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and once in town for entering specific pieces of property (no beggars or bums or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to kick out those who do not fulfill these requirements as trespassers…”
I have often stated that libertarians were quite happy with totalitraianism when they thought that it would be the otherside that would be feeling the boot. Having underestimated the force of social capital in the 21st Century, they have now changed their tune. Momentarily amusing as that might be, we should still recognise however that ‘freedom of association’ could be used to justify all kinds of discrimination (including the kind favoured by Hoppe and almost certainly imo Molyneux) and is incompatible with employment rights. Equally, whilst it may be galling to see the right-wing pearl-clutching about usually relatively comfortably-off people ‘losing their livelihoods’, we should also recognise that these issues can and do touch upon those who lead more precarious lives.
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In many ways, it does feel like we are heading towards a world where our lives are more and more exposed, and where we can be judged in ways that affect our ability to live in the world. I’ll be honest; my position isn’t fixed but I think people who fight against ‘Cancel Culture’ may well be spitting in the wind. I tend to think the the only answer may be to eliminate, or at least radically reduce, pracarity. However, if another solution is to be found, it will likely be as the result of a broader analysis of economic conditions and rights clashes than through an attempt to save a failed political project (libertarianism) through special pleading.