I Was A Teenage Libertarian, a confession

when i was in high school someone handed me a copy of The Fountainhead, and it blew my mind. it was full of clear and simple answers to everything that hurt or confused me. it was a manual for living for the alienated smart kids.

by the time i graduated from high school, i was a full-blown objectivist, aligned with the libertarian party, and an insufferable asshole.

i've told that whole story before, but i'd like to explore *why* it was so appealing to me. i think it has some applicability now.

teenagers are actively struggling to find an identity. the most important question, the one that lies underneath all the other concerns, is 'who am i and who do i want to be?'

maybe we experiment with different styles, maybe we explore different personality traits.

sometimes it's conscious and sometimes it's osmosis from the people with whom we interact.

when we try things out, we watch our peers for signs of approval or disapproval. what we want more than anything is to be *right*, but we'll settle for not being *wrong*.

i've observed before that our inability to ever back down from being wrong, our stubborn insistence on holding a position because to admit to being wrong is unthinkable, is the root of almost everything wrong with our world.

that's the reflex that's being triggered when we explore our identities for the first time. we tentatively present an idea or a behavior to our peers, see how it's received, and use that as a foothold for further exploration.

if it's poorly received, we recoil in shame and hurt.

the goal is to be *right* and to feel secure in being right, but more importantly to never be *wrong*.

objectivism offers simple answers to complex problems. it's easy for a teenager to grasp in totality. it's an easy shortcut to being *right* all the time, about everything.

when i said things like 'all taxation is theft at the point of a gun', did i believe it? i hadn't even fucking *paid* taxes at that point, much less seen how societies function using tax revenue. 'belief' was utterly irrelevant to me.

it let me *win*. it let me be *right*.

if i ever felt the shame and identity-loss from being wrong, i could easily shunt it aside: 'they're just too ignorant to understand.'

i didn't have to think about consequences; all i needed was the endorphin rush of being *right* every single time.

(short break while i go pick up takeout for dinner)

Back.

The thing about focusing on being 'right' is that you get to define what 'right' means. I wasn't really concerned about accuracy or utility or reasoning or any of that. I liked to *say* i'd arrived at all these ideas through 'reason' but that was a rhetorical tactic.

I was 'right' if I made other people back down, if I 'won' an argument through exhaustion or abuse or acclamation of other people nearby. I sought out authority figures who agreed with the positions I'd learned to take, so that they would affirm me in the way I needed.

I conflated 'right' with 'winning', because that let me justify my behavior: i could do anything necessary to 'win' because that would mean I was 'right'.

It was a long time since I'd thought about *consequences* of actions.

This is the essential point of this story:

When I was a libertarian, I did not consider the purpose of political discourse to be the betterment of society or humanity.

The purpose of political discourse was to win, and by winning reinforce my identity as a person who is Right.

This is important, I think, because I don't believe I was atypical. The person I was trying to be was a middle class white male (presumably) who was confident and arrogant and better at everything than everyone around him.

And I was trying to be this person as a defense.

I was a year younger than the other kids in my classes. I was a nerd, and I was bullied.

In Rand's protagonists and the libertarian movement thinkers i idolized, i saw a way to be powerful and taken seriously, *because* i was a nerd. Because I thought I was smart.

It was a fundamentally selfish position, not because libertarianism is selfish -- though it is, that didn't really matter to me as a high school and college kid -- but because I wanted to be *right* more than I wanted to be *good*.

I conflated them so I could feel justified.

I think my experience speaks to some of the foundations of the modern right wing.

The purpose of argument is not to arrive at consensus, it's to win.

The purpose of philosophy is not to arrive at truth or virtue, it's to win.

You are succeeding when you are winning.

Winning is good because it makes you feel good.

Society should be structured in such a way that you, and by extension people like you, get to feel good as much as possible. By winning.

By substituting the pleasant feel of 'winning' for all other virtues, social and personal values, and long-term goals, libertarian thinking turns philosophy into a weapon.

Defeat your enemies, get that rush, seek out more enemies to defeat.

The question, I guess, is 'did i believe this shit?'

And I don't have an answer because I don't think I ever examined any of my beliefs. Or even the very notion of 'belief'. What it meant to 'believe' in something.

It took over a decade, and the help of a lot of people and communities, for me to tease apart my essential sense of self from the political philosophy of 'win at all costs'. I had a 'lightbulb' moment, but it was only the largest of many such moments.

I can tell you that no argument with *anyone* did any good, ever. Argument did the opposite, in fact: it reinforced the notion that winning mattered, that winning was good.

You know how trolls say 'if you block me i win'?

Now you know why that's important to them.

They don't want to make the world better, they want to win.

They don't see the overall human project as relevant to them; only winning is relevant.

They don't care about other people, except as means to winning.

They don't care about ideas, except as weapons with which to win.

What *did* shift my mind was seeing people I respected expressing ideas of social justice in casual offhand ways, normalizing those ideas in my mind.

I needed to see people I couldn't ignore engaged in their own intellectual pursuits for *good*, not to *win*.

So I guess the lesson I want to teach is:

Don't argue with the right. Don't even engage their arguments -- not to mock them, not to refute them, not to analyze them.

If you engage with their arguments in any way, you turn things into an opportunity for them to 'win'.

Instead, silence them in whatever way you prefer -- I like blocking, but maybe you're a muter, or you can manage the mythical 'ignore the troll' feat.

And, independent of their argument, provide your own positive vision of the world. Saturate their media spaces with it.

I pulled away from that ideology when I realized that the world imagined by socialists was a place I wanted to live, a place I wanted to share with others. When I realized that the world imagined by my 'allies' was full of suffering and despair.

But the only way I was able to accept that without triggering my 'win, never admit fault, never be wrong, always be right' reflexes was to arrive at it myself.

And that was a direct consequence of seeing those positive visions of the world *everywhere I looked*.

Don't argue. Don't engage.

Sidestep and offer something better.

Addendum: This is not a thread about Ayn Rand. That was just a hook. If you want to talk about how awful she was, and how awful her work is, that's cool, but after fifteen years of doing it, I'm all worn out on explaining why she's awful.