We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day “A boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating – here, it would seem, lay the source of that subterranean medieval fanaticism which has been studied in this book. It may be suggested here, too, lies the source of the giant fanaticisms which in our day have convulsed the world.”
– Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, page 288.
This is a classic study of the revolutionary, religious groups and mystics of the Middle Ages. Cohn, famously – and much to the anger of the Left in the late 1960s – pointed out certain ominous parallels. I could even go so far as to suggest that the more extreme parts of the Green movement could be also viewed in a similar light. The desire for a purer, perfect world free of Sin, pollution or material wealth are themes that sound remarkably similar.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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There are bound to be parallels between human behaviour now and in the middle ages. Humans nature hasn’t changed since then. In those days the powerful and influential found it very easy to get obedience and money from the rest of us – they could just throw us in prison, condemn us to slavery or chop our heads off. Now, in democratic countries, they find it harder to do. That’s why they need to dream up things like the eco-apocalypse and political correctness.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to understand the lunacies of the 20th century (and the 21st) is in precisely the terms that Cohn (and Voegelin, and Burleigh) set out: millennarian apocalyptic belief. Our ancestors expressed it in terms of religion, we moderns in terms of science, but it’s the same bloodthirsty gnostic urge. As Cohn notes, the ravings of the 16th Century ‘Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine’ are entirely contemporary and, as Pete notes above, why should we expect it to be otherwise?
pete – the various cults that rose up against established rule in past centuries were sometimes (indeed often) worse than the established rule was.
Voegelin was correct – the anababtists and so on (the people who used violence to try and build Heaven on Earth) were not just wrong theologically – there ideas also made no practical sense.
Had they not been defeated in battle the regimes they set up (with the normal attack on private property and so on) would lead to mass starvation.
As the secular versions of such thought systems (Marxism and so on) have proved in modern times.
There were many terrible things about the past (serfdom for example – most of Europe had that at one time or another, and the compulsory guild system that held back economic development in many towns and cities), but the “tyranny of custom and tradition” was not one of them.
Trying to “free” people (by force) from such things as the traditional families, or private property leads only to tyranny and starvation.
In the end these movements did not want freedom as a libertarian understands the term – they wanted freedom from reality (no one poor – no one employed by some other person…..).
And these false promises are made by the demented to this day – including by a few people who (falsely) call themselves libertarians.