Community and libertarianism

Main article: Community

One aspect of our culture is a strong emphasis on individual agency and rights. We may not all be formally libertarians but a libertarian ethos pervades our views and, as noted above, is strongly connected to the crypto community where the idea of a ratings system might find its first adopters.

There is inevitably a conflict between a ratings system, communities, and libertarianism. There is further conflict when we add concerns about privacy, which I would argue is an important component of libertarianism. After all, keeping the state out of our affairs is much easier when it doesn’t know about our affairs.

But we have defined our communities, and any ratings system they might have, as voluntary in nature. Thus the individual, the libertarian if you will, can choose the community and ratings system they wish to join. Once in a community, they have continuing influence over its ratings system. In some ways we can view the ratings system as the glue that makes a libertarian society work since it can be tuned to be as obtrusive or unobtrusive as its members want. The ratings system can also be as individualistic or as communitarian as members choose. And members can, of course, leave the community and join another one whenever they want.

Is this enough? Have we reconciled the libertarian with the community? Maybe. We will explore this a little further as we go along. Libertarians will certainly be attracted to joining communities of choice rather than the one they were born in, for which they had no choice and have almost no influence over. Nation-states are not, to say the least, libertarian societies. But communities with ratings systems where everyone is judged must seem like quite an imposition on the libertarian mind.

Instead of answering this directly let’s point to some of the advantages of libertarian philosophy in any community. The greatest one, it would appear, is that in a conflict between flawed social obligation vs. personal morality, the libertarian would favor the latter. Libertarians don’t commit genocide or knowingly design faulty airplanes. We can expect their sense of personal morality and agency to assert itself in cultures that try to promote questionable behavior.

Healthy communities require dissent and make progress as a result of it. Slavery existed for thousands of years before dissenters realized that it was wrong and started campaigning to get rid of it. But it took a long time to accomplish and many vested interests had to be defeated in order to do it. Today we are experiencing a large scale evolution to a non-majority white Christian society and many people are against it. We are also changing our views on carbon emissions for environmental reasons but, again, there will be plenty of opposition and it will take a long time.

It would help if we had a ratings system that could produce required cultural changes faster. By giving voice to dissenting views and simply having a quicker feedback loop, we can reduce the time needed for social change. It would also help to have small communities that can pioneer ideas and see if they work before they are adopted more generally. In this way, both the community and the dissenter are an active part of change.