The Lolbert, I Truly Revile

If you’ve been involved in libertarian circles in recent memory, you’ve probably encountered the term “lolbertarian” or “lolbert” for short. Is this just a term of jest, used to signify a combination of being libertarian and stupid, according to whoever is using it? Well, some people may use the term loosely, and some of the “dissident right” have begun to use it to refer to all libertarians (a practice I can’t completely fault them for). However, it does mean something! It refers to a specific strain of thought within the so-called “libertarian” community, and it has discernible patterns and recognizable indicators. It has gone by many names. In this talk Hoppe refers to it as “liberlalala”, and “Stupids for Liberty” (referring specifically to the “libertarian” college club). In the 90’s the “paleolibertarians” called them “libertines” and repeatedly emphasized that libertarianism is not libertinism.

The calling card of the lolbert is simple, and you’ll surely recognize it:

“I’m an individual!”

At the heart of lolbertism is a belief that the state is the sole, or at least primary, enforcer of social and cultural norms, and that being anti-state means demanding that everyone be allowed to “be an individual.” The basic challenge of society is that for people to live in close proximity, and with close and frequent interactions among each other, they must find some kind of happy medium between extreme self-indulgence and complete submission to the will of a small minority. People must meet each other half-way. For example, we’ll leave each other be in the privacy of our homes, but you can’t blast music at 1am so loud it keeps the whole neighborhood from sleeping.

Lolberts reject this, and instead demand to both belong to society, and to completely disregard the effect of their presence on the other members of society. They believe this is the meaning of the “non-aggression principle” (NAP): that everyone must be permitted to do anything they like so long as it is not theft or bodily aggression. Adjusting your behavior beyond this just to appease others is “collectivism”, or “groupthink”, which is the cardinal sin of lolbertism.

Why are people of this mindset drawn to libertarianism? Well a lot of what libertarian theorists have talked about has been dumbed down to a “radical individualist”, “live and let live” theory of justice. Mises, Rothbard and others discussed very abstract philosophical concepts that are difficult for most people to understand. They will be twisted and rejected by many, and they will also be twisted and accepted by many. Mises was a methodological individualist. Not knowing what this means, people may just hear the word “individualist” and turn it into what they already think that word means. But Mises was pointing out that individual humans are the praxeological unit. Individuals are the purposeful actors with desires and goals. Collections of people are not actors in a literal sense. When someone says, “the Democratic Party wants X”, this is only true by analogy. The Democratic Party does not literally want anything, because it not its own conscious being with its own ladder of preferences. Mises was clarifying a proper method of sociological analysis: that the “actions” of groups of people must be modelled as cooperation among individuals with compatible ends, instead of modelling individuals as a manifestation of a “collective will” that exists, independent of any cooperation.

This kind of “individualism” isn’t something that you can “advocate” for. It’s not a world you strive to create. It is the way things are. You don’t advocate for methodological individualism. You acknowledge that it is correct. The “individualism” of lolberts is a goal: a particular social organization that does not currently exist, that they wish to bring into existence. This should be enough to make it obvious that it has nothing to do with what Mises was talking about. Similarly, Mises wasn’t denying that it is meaningful at all to speak, even as an analogy, of collective goals. Lolberts will claim that cooperation simply doesn’t exist, and everyone acts in isolation, because that’s what “individualism” means.

Rothbard wrote extensively on models for an anarcho-capitalist legal system, in which only violations of private property rights were illegal. But again, with many people not fully comprehending what this entails, or perhaps hearing what they wanted to hear, they turned this into something different: people may only be forcibly stopped from acts of overt violence, like hitting someone, or armed robbery, or setting someone’s house on fire. They didn’t realize, or ignored, that the fundamental violation of private property is trespass. Once you recognize the following two things: trespass on private property is illegal in a libertarian order (which means trespass may be forcibly, violently stopped or reversed), and everything except for undeveloped wilderness is private property in a libertarian order, you recognize that a libertarian order is very much not what the “free spirit” “radical individualists” or lolberts think it would be. Who decides when someone is trespassing? The property owner. On what grounds? Well, unless some kind of contract is in place, whatever the hell he feels like.

A libertarian order is certainly not one where people can go anywhere and do anything and not be subject to the will of others. A libertarian order is one where you are always free to leave the social order and create your own by homesteading wilderness. But hardly anyone wants to do this (and if they do, they will first try to amass a following to head out with them). There’s only one word for a “radical individualist” human: dead. When a story gets out that someone is lost in the wilderness by themselves, and it’s been more than a few days, the search is primarily for the dead body. Living in isolation means poverty on a level most of us simply can’t understand. No, what lolberts want is the “freedom” that going off to live in the wilderness by oneself would entail, without the requirement to build your own house, grow or find your own food, and, well… do everything else by hand and from scratch.

There will always be people who wish to be libertines and believe all social and cultural norms are “oppressive” and “unfair”. This is precisely why those norms exist: to constrain the behavior that humans would like to engage in but that has significant negative externalities for those around them. But why do they believe they are libertarians, and why do they tend to invade our institutions, kick out our founders and write endless articles about how those founders were bigoted “collectivists” espousing “fascism”?

Libertarianism is about getting incompetent state bureaucrats off our backs and out of our business. This is probably where the confusion will always start. Well if we don’t like some pencil-pusher working at the county tax office showing up at our house to demand we stop collecting rainwater, then we must also object to anyone, even the whole neighborhood who all lived here for 50 years before I moved into their neighborhood, showing up and objecting to something I’m doing. The rhetorical devices that libertarianism wields against state encroachment into private life can be easily redirected onto private society and culture, which turns it into lolbertism. This has been, and probably will forever be, a problem that libertarians have to deal with. We’ll have people getting naked at conventions branded with our ideology as long as that ideology exists.

When libertarians who know their stuff try to correct these “lolberts,” pointing out specifically that individual rights allows individuals to organize into voluntary communities of people, which will produce communal customs, rules and regulations that individuals must obey if they wish to be a part of that community (which, primarily, includes being physically present on the land that is privately owned by that community), we inevitably get accused of being “collectivist”. When you also hear lolberts uttering such banalities as, “you shouldn’t judge people as groups”, you can start to understand the calculated irrationality of this mindset. The fact that every single “radical individualist” sounds exactly the same as the rest, and they join together into communities of individualists who won’t hesitate to apply private social pressure to remove anyone they insist doesn’t belong, tops the whole thing off with overwhelming irony.

Grouping, a synonym for which is categorizing, is so fundamental to the human conscious mind, we literally cannot even imagine going without it. The very way in which language is designed is around groups. Every word in English except for a handful of demonstrative adjectives and proper names (which are capitalized, indicating how overall rare they are) are a category. When we speak, we are elaborating on the attributes of categories: attributes that apply to all the individual examples of a category. When Mises explained methodological individualism, he was talking about the category of humans, or purposeful actors. It applies to each and every human that they are the unit of action, and it applies to each and every group of humans that they are not the unit of action. Responding to this with, “you can’t judge all people at once!” is so dumb we can’t even really wrap our heads around how dumb it is.

This bizarrely rooted insistence that people must never be categorized tends to make lolberts social justice warriors. The valiant mission to strap on a spandex suit with a big letter on the forehead and eradicate all “racism”, “sexism” and “homophobia”, one angry Twitter mob’s calls to an employer at a time, is all part of the effort to eradicate “collectivism”. The very fact anyone speaks of subcategories of humans, like races, genders, or so on, is nails on a chalkboard to the “radical individualist”. Most, if not all, of the lolbert screeching about the “fascist fake libertarians” whose institutions they invaded will eventually land here: they’re all basically Nazis who pretend to be libertarian but secretly want to chain black people to cotton fields and women to a combined kitchen and nursery, and hunt gay people with AR-15s for sport. The very idea that private societies would become organized into racially heterogeneous structures and wield tremendous social pressure to maintain “traditional gender roles” is a Hilterian fantasy, according to lolberts. No, they say, everyone must be judged as an individual, which means Libertopia must be thoroughly race-blind, sex-blind, trans-blind, and so on. In fact, it appears that the oldest well-known examples of SJW witch hunts were perpetrated by lolberts on the original libertarians they ousted from their own institutions. We all know about the “racist Ron Paul newsletters” mob organized by Reason Magazine. Hoppe was subjected to an SJW mob in the early 2000s. This was long before forced apologies and resignations were mainstream.

Coming back to the underlying irony (since being anti-categorization is inherently impossible), not only do lolberts recognize subcategories of people like “racists”, “sexists”, or “fascists”, they judge all of them broadly, and then apply private social pressure (a.k.a. “cancel culture”) to force them out of communities without involving the state at all. This is all a glaring contradiction. Their own “individualist” rhetoric can be applied to the defense of who they call “bigots”. But such is to be expected in an ideology built upon a staunch refusal to engage in structured thought. It really means the “don’t judge me as a group” is not a universal law. It applies to the speaker, not the listener. What else can you expect from libertines? Their whole worldview is, “I should be able to do what feels good, and to hell with your feelings”. There’s no use logically analyzing this too much. When people tell you, “I don’t want to curtail my own antisocial tendencies”, you should believe them.

Notice the tendency of lolberts to invade institutions and force out the original community members. They don’t create their own institutions, branded from the beginning with a glorification of antisocial behavior. Nor are they okay with the “fascist” libertarians having their own institutions, free of molestation by lolberts. This is perfectly in line with their overall views: that when you join a community, like moving into a neighborhood, you are not required to submit to the will of the community members who were there before you. Once you move in, it’s your neighborhood. At scale, this becomes the most hilariously self-defeating principle that lolberts pride themselves on, open borders. According to them, communities are not even allowed to decide who gets to join or be physically present. They are all subject to attendance by whoever feels like attending, and must put up with whatever behavior those new, quite uninvited, attendees bring with them. I’ve tried over and over in vain to point out to lolberts that in the United States, a policy of open borders will, in a generation or two, lead to anyone publicly espousing a libertarian, anti-state, pro-free market or private property ideology being thrown in jail or worse. The endless waves of illegal immigrants pouring into the country are about as unfriendly to all of these ideas as you could possibly get.

This is what makes this ideology truly sick. Even in the face of eminent existential annihilation, they will cling to their absurd ideas. One popular lolbert retort in this context is, “I’d rather live in a neighborhood of Mexican libertarians than white American socialists!” The fact that a neighborhood of Mexican libertarians is about as plausible as me diving into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and spotting a beautiful mermaid who’s been obsessed with me ever since a photo of me fell out of my luggage on a cross-continental flight doesn’t seem to matter. This is evidenced in numerous studies about demographic ideological sympathies, but again, it doesn’t matter. There’s some considerable crossover here with “cuckservatives”, the people who are so much more focused on “not being called racist” than conserving anything, that they failed to conserve even women’s bathrooms. Every time I see a Republican insisting that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are “private companies” and they have every right to silence… well, then, I am bewildered… do they think sucking up to those corporations will earn them exemption from the silencing? Will they be rewarded in the afterlife for their consistent principles?

This brings the analysis to the next point. Lolberts are allergic to any kind of strategic planning. We’re not in a libertarian world today, not even close. We want to be in a libertarian world sometime soon. We need to find a path from where we are to where we want to end up. At no point along this journey will we be at the destination. The point is whether we are on a path that ends up at that destination or not. Are we getting closer to the goal, or is there a reasonable sequence of steps that eventually puts us closer to our goal? Are we being “Realistic Libertarians” as Hoppe would say? These are the obvious questions of basic importance for any movement of social change. But if there was a button that, if you pushed it, guaranteed the world would become completely libertarian forever in one year, but before that, everyone’s taxes would be doubled, lolberts would run away from the button screaming, “but I’m against taxes!” Apparently, these are the people who took the idiotic mainstream Democratic talking points like, “you can’t be anti-government but drive on government roads” and ran with them. Rothbard proposed unleashing government police to enforce property rights? Statist! Right-libertarians want the government to enforce borders to preserve what little culture of private property we have left? Statist! Use the force of government to shut down, defund and break apart powerful corporate institutions filled with communists using their power to push a communist agenda? Statist!

Perhaps the most acute example is the lolbert obsession with tolerating anti-libertarians. Hoppean libertarians hold what is only the most obvious common-sense position: a libertarian order must forcefully expel anyone who openly advocates for undermining that order. The lolbert response: “fascists”! You know who also screams “fascist” at the proposal to “physically remove” communists? Well… communists. That’s understandable coming from them, and (for the same reason) deeply suspicious coming from anyone calling themselves “libertarians” and hanging around libertarian communities (gee, it’s almost like they’re claiming they should be able to stick around undermining those communities instead of being forcefully expelled!). If we could get a law passed, yes by the government, that outlawed open advocacy of communism, they would be up in arms screaming “statism!” That violates free speech! We must defeat communists in the arena of ideas!

Now, to be clear, I wouldn’t necessarily be all excited about such a law. The libertarian objection to the state is primarily about its necessary incompetence, and that could very easily turn into neocons disappearing anyone who criticizes Israel (or just suggests we reduce our foreign aid to them by one dollar) on grounds that they’re “communists.” There are plenty of valid reasons to oppose such a law today, but it would be from a careful assessment of the consequences of the policy, not a reflexive “goes against muh principles” reaction. If I could be reasonably sure that such a law would irreparably damage or destroy most of our communist or communist-sympathetic media, education systems and political parties, I would drive to ten different voting precincts with a fake ID that says, “Fernando Rodriguez” to vote 10 times yes on that law. Right now, the government has monopolized many functions of society. I’d rather they monopolize and perform those functions at least somewhat properly than monopolize them and do nothing. I think that seems imminently reasonable to most.

You shouldn’t take these lolbert arguments too seriously. We’re all familiar with Dawkins-esque atheist left-wingers who love to lecture Christians on how “unChristian” their actions are, right? This is very simple: don’t take advice from your enemies. If an anti-Christian is telling Christians how to be Christian, they are doing so with the end goal of destroying Christianity. If people who call themselves “the true libertarians” are advocating actions that will ensure the complete destruction of libertarianism within decades, it doesn’t even matter if they think they’re libertarians. In every real sense they are communists trying to convince libertarians that it is “true libertarianism” to facilitate a communist takeover. Not only should you not listen to them, you should be exactly what a lolbert is not, and be extremely intolerant of their presence anywhere near your organizations and meetings. They will sabotage you unless you physically remove them. I’m a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Some will say “paranoid”. Whatever. I’d much more likely bet that most lolberts are crafty commies with deliberate instructions to “penetrate deep, destroy within” than genuinely naïve adult teenagers with arrested development. Either way, what’s the harm in assuming they all are? Slapping a few naïve people with a dose of reality?

If you can fit this all together, the conclusion is clear: lolberts are not anti-statist. Some of them are still confused and think eradicating the state will suddenly cause all discrimination and “groupthink” to disappear (apparently people going to football games and painting their faces with some mascot they all decided to tribally identify with will immediately evaporate the day the government falls apart.) The more honest or experienced ones eventually recognize that the state enforces anti-discrimination, not discrimination, and they begin twisting the NAP and property rights to argue that “being a bigot” (more generally, discrimination based on anything they claim is improper grounds for discrimination) is a violation of people’s rights. At some point they’ll start explicitly stating that people have a right to be anywhere they want. Don’t forget, libertarian socialist is a thing. That’s just the next step of insisting people have a “right to healthcare”, “right to an education”, and so on in an inevitable stream of “Human Rights” signaling. The lolberts who haven’t ended up there just haven’t thought through their position enough. Hopefully, even once they get there, they’ll realize they’re just full-blown Marxists. After all, Marxists believe they are fighting for people’s freedoms too. And to that I say, the sooner the better.

What should libertarians do about lolberts? Well, first education. That’s why I wrote this. Every new, young libertarian needs to be inoculated against these strains of thought as soon as possible. Recognizing what it is can help them realize what road they’re tumbling down. After that, I think we should pretty much literally do the opposite of what lolberts suggest (what if they catch onto this and start using reverse psychology? Frankly I’ll consider this a concern if I ever see them disciplined enough to think that far ahead). The libertarian concepts they most abhor are “physical removal” (which implies private discrimination, closed borders, and simply asking people to leave), and an absolute intolerance toward egalitarianism. So, there’s your answer. “Physically remove” lolberts from libertarian circles before they infiltrate enough to usurp the physical removal power and be extremely intolerant of anti-libertarians both in theory and in practice.

In order to do this, we need to recognize lolberts when we see them. Any “radical individualist” stuff is a red flag (potentially just confusion that can be corrected). Being extremely pro-democracy, championing Martin Luther King, and preaching tolerance and gentle persuasion for communists is a bigger red flag. If they’re SJWs (any “calling out” of people for being “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, etc.,), get rid of them immediately, and worry about the tiny chance you overreacted later when the potential crisis is averted.

Better safe than sorry at this point.