SocialMatter has an interesting article covering another article by Jeffrey Tucker.

Basically Tucker is batshit crazy, and it is the liberal tradition that has driven him crazy.

Tucker is unable to process obviously logical problems with the universal “goods” that liberalism runs on, and is unable to function with any degree of coherency. He has mainlined liberalism and is a total liberal crack junkie. The prognosis is not good.

Starting with his dichotomy of power and liberty, what we have as Carlyle noted is really order and chaos, and this is based upon an anthropology which is beyond salvation. Without a state, without society, and without a tradition there is no individual. At best you have a feral wolf child, which is pretty much where libertarianism and progress is heading. A stunted mutilated biologically physical individual for sure, but not an individual as Mr Tucker seems to conclude would occur. Is it any wonder that our society is producing these barbarians that can hardly communicate in correct language, nor act in a virtuous manner?

This 16th century anthropological psychosis based on abstract dummies is reiterated by Mr Tucker with his reference to Bastiat and his claim that:

In order to overcome the state of nature, we gradually discover the capacity to find value in each other. The division of labor is the great fact of human community: the labor of each of us becomes more productive in cooperation with others, and this is even, or rather especially, true given the unequal distribution of talents, intelligence, and skills, and differences over religion, belief systems, race, language, and so on.

To this, I can only say, Holy shit, liberalism does crazy shit to your brain. Actually, that’s not true, I can also add more calmly that there is simply no state of nature. These individuals are a product of society. This nonsense is that liberal concept of the collection of abstract dummies which just seem to have sprouted from the ground like mushrooms. In fact, where have I heard that before? That’s right, Hobbes actually wrote that:

“looking at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other…”

That is what the basis of liberalism is, that is the anthropology Mr Tucker is working on. But here is the real kicker – so is the Alt Right and Neoreaction! Surprise! (hint: if you advocate capitalism (“muh capitalism is reality and created everything” – no it is not, no it did not,) Burkean conservatism, game theory, propertarianism, empiricism and any other liberal tradition derived concept then you are working on this anthropology. If you change the anthropology, you no longer have these things.)

So what we have is Mr Tucker complaining that the Alt-Right et al fails to see that humans can overcome this natural mushroom state of affairs peacefully with property rights and division of labour, instead assuming that these mushrooms must be put under strict control by a dictator mushroom to control all of the other mushrooms in a war of all against all.

Leaving this intellectual mushroom conflict (humans visibly don’t work like this,) we can move onto another point that seems to confuse Mr Tucker due to his religious observance of spontaneous order – The great man. It is a sobering discovery when one realises that the modern discussion of spontaneous order was just pulled out of Hayek’s backside with the financial funding of the Rockefeller institute as a support of modern economics. It is even more sobering when you discover that spontaneous order is basically an agrarian utopian concept derived from the physiocrats and the like who were at total odds to industrialisation. For it then to pop up again as a claimed cause of said industrialisation is some serious cheek.

His absolute denial that anyone could consciously bring into being a society is beyond redemption, as there as so many examples countering it that it is bewildering. Just to trigger him, we have Mussolini and his creation of Italian Fascism and we have Nazi Germany created by Adolf Hitler. Oh, but they didn’t manage everything, and didn’t think of everything…give me a break. As for the creation of “prices, manners, mores, habits, and traditions that no one can consciously will into existence.”he should spend some time working his way through the literature on foundations, and noting how they seem to precede all the major progressive development, which then magically appear after said foundations plough an absolute shit tonne of money into it.

By the time we get to Mr Tucker on migration and borders, he has basically given up arguing and is preaching a religious view of the world. Borders are expressions of historical events and delineations of separate areas following different cultural and traditional paths. But of course, these mushroom field fences in his terms are logically arbitrary.

His comments on emancipation and progress are pure fairytale and not deserving of even a snarky response. He has no historical knowledge, and I would recommend a number of books to him if he wishes. The first of which is On Power by de Jouvenel, or maybe he should read Moldbug first.