Not Many Of Us Are Libertarian

I’ve recently joined the World Future Society (maybe as few months ago) and I’ve been surprised and somewhat bewildered by the seemingly widespread belief of most futurists that capitalism is bad and collectivism is good – that the world should be moving further away from a capitalist, mercantile, materialist future towards a more communitarian, socialist one. Not many libertarians among futurists, it seems.

Many futurists, in article after article which I’ve read in the Futurist magazine, the official communication of the World Future Society, bemoan our tendencies to become more independent. They see any movement towards a freer society with more capitalism and trade as a bad thing – for some reason they all have this weird vision that the future should be one where there is no materialism left, that everyone will simply be taken care of – that we won’t be a slave to simply wanting to collect more and more stuff.

This feeling that the future will be more socialist and altruistic in a common trope in a lot of science fiction as well. Even Gene Roddenberry figured that in the future everything would all be magically taken care of and no one would need to work for a living, the quest through space had its own rewards. However, eventually, they had to write in the concept of “credits”, since likely the concept of never needing money or work, everything was simply provided due to technology. That you didn’t need to work, and you would be provided for. So at least on the economic front, their visions of the future seem socialist. However, on the social front, drug use, man-beast marriage, procreation and gene splicing seemed to know no bounds. But when economics is brought up, it’s usually evil business against the good, sometimes even divine, state. Despite this, there are plenty of libertarian themes throughout Star Trek.

I’m not sure why both futurists and many science fiction authors lean this way. My guess is that they are simply coloring their view of the future with their own politics. So maybe I’m doing the same.

The central question is: what is the essence of mankind? Is our essence in freedom, in the ability to be individuals responsible for our own lives, or are we happy giving up our autonomy in order to be taken care of by the state? Additionally, do we have a deep-seated inner desire to compete with each other? If you think about it, freedom, liberty, individuality, are relatively new concepts. The ability to live on ones own, individually or in a small family unit, is a recent occurrence. Is the world moving towards more freedom, or are the freer countries a 200 plus year diversion, and are we simply just moving back to the collectivism of the tribe? IMHO, humans, at their core, are born libertarian, then veer away.

Personally, as technology advances, I feel that there will be even more freedom. People can and will enjoy more autonomy. And instead of economics and trade disappearing in some communal love fest, technology will allow us to go back to a simpler time, when trade was between individuals, without the intervention of the state. Pure, unadulterated trading between individuals, value for value.

If anything, the socialist statist model was something of the past, and technology will move us towards a better future, one where there is even more trade and yes, even more materialism, if one chooses, but not only that. Technology will free us from having to struggle to survive, and will allow us to truly live. And this gives us the choice to live the way we like. Freedom will be our future .