A Hikkikomori StopGap

Although this answer is talking about the culture of Libertarians in general, I’m sharing this answer because I feel this is also a good analogy to why I’m elitist towards the definition of Hikikomori but it doesn’t mean I’m trying to insist a fan club community where people who don’t fit my definition should stay away from hikikomories and why I encourage non-hikikomories to participate but also I discourage people who don’t fit the label (from my perspective) to stop claiming they are hikikomories:

Libertarians, in my perception, are stuck in what I term a “hairpin bend”. That is, the people who are less wise than them are frequently indistinguishable from the people who are more wise than them.

There’s a large class of people who disagree with libertarianism because they’re clueless about economics, misunderstand the basic tenets and make stupid arguments. There’s another, smaller group of people who understand perfectly well how libertarianism works and choose to reject it for intelligent, well thought out reasons. From the outside, both will have roughly the same range of political beliefs.So what happens is some people from the first group will have an epiphany, they will finally get libertarianism and they will become a loyal convert. For some fraction of the group who become libertarians, they will have a second epiphany, realize the various fundamental flaws that make it a fundamentally unworkable system and leave libertarianism for a more mainstream political philosophy.

As you get a boiling off of the most enlightened members, the hairpin bend becomes a concentration of a certain type of person. This, in a large part, IMHO, explains the uniformity of personality of libertarians compared to many other social groups.Every time you have a hairpin bend, you tend to see this similar phenomena and it can often be used as a diagnosis for where hairpin bends exist.

Note: There may well exist further hairpin bends further up the wisdom chain and it does seem some people have an epiphany back into libertarianism. This is mainly a critique of the “naive libertarianism” viewpoint.

Source: http://www.quora.com/Why-do-libertarians-come-across-as-arrogant-and-thinking-they-know-all-the-answers

Posted via email from A Hikikomori StopGap | Comment »