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Title: Negative Liberty & Hardness Author: William Gillis Date: 22nd December 2018 Language: en Topics: liberty, libertarianism Source: http://humaniterations.net/2018/12/22/negative-liberty-and-hardness
I think it’s insufficiently analyzed how the banner of “negative
liberty” often replicates the “hardness” of masculinity and gets wrapped
in it. Interdependence & contingency of feelings is often ridiculed
alongside means of interdependence & contingency in social & economic
relations.
I’ve long been skeptical of the ways “autonomy” – instead of “freedom” –
gets thrown around in the left because of how often it is used as
something like “sovereignty” and how quickly I’ve seen said negative
approach to freedom collapse to nativism, isolationism, and
self-reliance as the true goal. And it always tends to be coded
masculine or appeal to masculine tropes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big believer in individualism – that the
rational evaluative agency of individuals should be constantly focused
on and enshrined, never ceded to “groups” or other institutional or
collective entities. I deplore approaches to structuring society or even
analyzing it that don’t put individual agency first. But that’s not
remotely the same thing as never being interdependent. An individual can
have strong agency in a web of interdependence. Indeed the further the
impact of their choices stretch the more agency they have, whereas
merely being “free” from outside influence or connection is the freedom
of the prison cell.
In all the permutations of my life I relatively early on realized the
ultraviolet limit of the fetishization of negative freedom – isolation
and self-reliance in opposition to connection and interdependence – was
a dark place filled with nazis (national isolationism) & primitivists
(individual/tribal isolationism)
But these discourses of retreat and isolationism like most variants of
ethnonationalism and primitivism tend to be overwhelmingly riven with
ideological and aesthetic reinforcements of masculinity.
“I just want to protect my daughter” is a line I hear constantly.
Especially from anticiv folks who often get to a point where they
prognosticate the breakdown of civilization and the very specific
horrors that they fear their daughter will have to survive. Retreat from
the modern world, retreat from connectivity, is thus framed in terms of
typical masculine “doing what must be done to protect one’s family.”
This kind of extremely personal invocation is of course one I can’t
really respond to, and so our exchanges inevitably end soon after their
“but my daughter” proclamations. In some ways I wish them well, the
world is a terrible place.
But the fetishization of “hardness in all things” as per Nietzsche, is
one of the most prototypical components of modern masculinity in our
society. And more than anything it’s a walling off from “being affected”
– whether emotionally or culturally or what have you.
Some of the first writings I ever put online at the dawn of this
millennia were diagnosing the roots of power and abuse as stemming from
the hunger to disengage, to not rise in complexity to meet the external
multitudinous world but beat it away or into regularities. I think that
spectrum – between engagement and disengagement – is critical to
understanding power as an ideology, strategy, or psychological
orientation, but I also think it’s deeply gendered in a way we don’t
emphasize enough and that clearly plays a huge role.
Of course this is not remotely to suggest that all instances of
disengagement or putting up emotional walls or seeking independence or
self-reliance are strictly bad things. Of course not. We live in a
complex world, boundaries can protect against abuse. There are many
instances where I disengage – refusing to get wrapped into the emotional
abuse of family, refusing to waste my time on a pile of randos in my
mentions – but there’s a difference between situational pragmatic
strategies and core motivation or inclination.
The fall of many vulgar rank-and-file libertarians to variants of
fascism and nationalism has been explained from many angles (including
many terrible attempted explanations), but one significant pipeline is
the way the broader ideological cluster of masculinity can so easily
take over and redirect framings of liberty as purely a matter of
separation-from rather than options-to.