Libertarian Fallacies

Turncoats, Part 3

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One of the main things that tilted Russell and Charles toward right-wing libertarianism is the ideal of “sovereignty” — particularly health or bodily sovereignty. How did “sovereignty,” personal autonomy, become a gateway drug to a Right Wing ideology?

As my friend Quanita Roberson has noted, Covid was the first time that many privileged white people, particularly men, had to deal with “really feeling out of control in this world.” They confronted an imposed societal responsibility that involved a level of personal risk: Taking a vaccine with an imperfect health pedigree, developed rapidly, using experimental new technologies. This required interacting with the government — trusting outside authority — in a direct, intimate way.

This wedge issue moved a lot of people with ostensibly Left or progressive/hippie sentiments toward the Right. It also powered the rise of numerous alternative influencers such as Zach Bush, Alex Berenson, Kelly Brogan, Aubrey Marcus, and many more. With life or death immediacy, the Covid vaccine question provided a focal point for people’s deep mistrust of establishment institutions, including mainstream media and the government. This mistrust has been building over the last decades, for all sorts of reasons, including good ones (the disinformation that started the Iraq War, mainstream reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s death, and so on).

Before we continue, let’s anchor the distinction between right-wing libertarianism and left-wing libertarianism. In How Soon Is Now, I wrote approvingly of the social ecologist Murray Bookchin's theory of left-libertarianism — which he called “libertarian municipalism” or “communalism.” Left-libertarianism differs profoundly from right-libertarianism in its vision of freedom, community, and the role of the state and economy.

As a social ecologist, Bookchin saw our ecological problems rooted in hierarchy, capitalist exploitation, and the regime of private ownership. He called for a decentralized, eco-conscious society built around local, participatory democracy and the dissolution of private property. He emphasized communal responsibility and cooperation over competition. In this model, freedom is not an isolated, individual right, but rather a collective condition that emerges from the dismantling of social hierarchies and systems of exploitation. Freedom is based on “shared power” instead of “power over.”

In contrast, right-wing libertarianism emphasizes individual autonomy, personal property rights, and the primacy of free markets. For right-libertarians, the state’s role should be minimal, limited to the protection of private property, contract enforcement, and national defense. Their understanding of freedom is essentially negative, conceived as freedom from coercion, especially by the state, rather than positive freedom achieved through cooperative and communitarian orchestrations. They uphold capitalism as the optimal economic system, believing that free-market mechanisms, private ownership, and competition are not only natural expressions of human freedom but also the most efficient means of organizing society.

For the libertarian-right, environmental concerns are typically addressed (if at all) through market-based solutions rather than systemic reorganization. RFK, for instance, enraged his former environmental allies by proposing that “free markets” can reduce carbon emissions (they can’t). I find the right-libertarian faith in private sector innovation, hyper-individualism, and market dynamics to solve social and ecological problems deeply self-serving and delusional. Many of the most crucial innovations result from government funding, including the Internet itself. A right-libertarian society would be much like feudalism, with a few powerful landlords and masses of serfs. In fact, our society is becoming more like this again, as Yanis Varoufakis argues in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (I wrote about this excellent book here).

One thing that I haven’t seen much of is an honest, evidence-based reevaluation of the effects of the Covid vaccines, a few years down the line. Some stated that the vaccines contained nanoparticles or other deliberate micro-technologies that would lead to catastrophic health effects. As I recall, many of the anti-establishment anti-vaxxers seemed to believe there would be mass deaths and a huge drop in population as a consequence of vaccine injuries. Some are still making these arguments.

For example, Alex Berenson, one of the lead vaccine skeptics, writes that vaccinated people under sixty in England “are dying at twice the rate of unvaccinated people the same age. ... I don’t know how to explain this other than vaccine-caused mortality.” However, this assertion seems to be highly misleading and based on misrepresentation of the facts, failing to account for age, prior health conditions, and other factors. It was refuted by Politifact, here.

RFK, for his part, has proposed that vaccines are part of a much deeper plot to impose a totalitarian technocratic control on global society. He posted a photo of Bill Gates on Instagram (before RFK was banned from the platform), pretending to write in Gates’ voice: “The digitalized economy? We get rid of cash and coins. We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!” I also sympathize with the concern that human society is being drawn, almost inexorably, deeper into a technocratic Panopticon, yet I think we would be best served by systemic analysis of what’s happening, which allows for the possibility of a meaningful, coherent, and strategic response.

From what I can piece together from various sources, I don’t think we’re experiencing a massive population drop due to the vaccines. There have been excess deaths in the last few years, but these seem to be, according to researchers, the result of Covid rather than the vaccines. On the other hand, it is true that the vaccines had negative health consequences for a small subset of the population, even causing death in some cases. It also seems to be the case that older people were less likely to develop cardiac issues as a result of the vaccines than younger people (as occurred in this tragic case).

However, to counter the anti-vax narratives, it seems highly probable that the vaccines were beneficial on the whole. According to an in-depth study conducted by The Lancet:

Based on official reported COVID-19 deaths, we estimated that vaccinations prevented 14·4 million (95% credible interval [Crl] 13·7–15·9) deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020, and Dec 8, 2021. This estimate rose to 19·8 million (95% Crl 19·1–20·4) deaths from COVID-19 averted when we used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic, representing a global reduction of 63% in total deaths (19·8 million of 31·4 million) during the first year of COVID-19 vaccination.

I’m open to learning that this study is the result of a massive cover-up, or that it was conducted incorrectly. I realize The Lancet is tightly meshed with the medical establishment.

I also didn’t like or trust the way these experimental vaccines were forced on us. In this newsletter, I explored dark, conspiratorial wormholes about all of it (including the virus’ origin), and remain sympathetic to evidence-based perspectives on what is happening. But as time passes, I also think we need to assess what actually occurred with cool detachment. There could be more infectious diseases coming soon: This could lead to greater social polarization and hysteria.

It also seems true, on the whole, that people who were generally healthy, with access to good nutrition and regular exercise — often, more wealthy and privileged people — were far less likely to be negatively impacted or killed by Covid. Anecdotally, I would say many people I know in this more privileged demographic managed to avoid getting vaccinated.

There were many weird ideas circulating about the vaccines, such as the nanoparticle idea (found in The Corbett Report and other places), or the kind of ideas circulated by Zach Bush and Eisenstein: They argued that the root cause of illness is not so much viruses or bacteria, but the total environment of the body, including the health of the microbiome. While there is some value to this perspective, it can easily be over-emphasized and turned into a new kind of health fundamentalism. The choice around vaccinations intensified “us versus them” narratives, and a sense of separation and superiority for the privileged elite who had the option to avoid the taint and possible long term health consequences of the “kill shot.” Eisenstein and Bush, among others, proposed that the human genome could be changed by outside influences such as vaccines, which is not the case. This exacerbated unconscious ideals of genetic or racial purity, with antecedents in occult and Fascist movements.

One of the more paranoid and extreme theories featured a quote from one of my occult heroes, Rudolf Steiner. Near the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Steiner said that, eventually, we would develop a vaccine that cut off people’s access to the spiritual worlds and left them soulless. I find Steiner an incredible visionary, but he also said many things that have turned out to be wrong (for instance, about the different spiritual destiny of the “root races”). Many people I know were half-persuaded by Steiner’s statement. It became part of the simmering stew of ideas and conspiracy theories that influenced people’s choices — those wirh the privilege to choose.

According to what I have read about epidemics in the past, it was often the case that mass vaccinations were mandatory, as with Small Pox or Polio. This would be the case in many countries, depending on severity of outbreaks. There were, obviously, many bizarre aspects of how the Covid vaccine rollout was handled that intensified mistrust in government and the medical establishment.

I also sympathetize with some of the arguments, raised by Del Bigtree and others, that the number of vaccines which US children receive has become excessive, and that loading several vaccines in a single shot may not be good for children. It may cause negative health consequences, in some cases. The vaccines are a major profit center for pharmaceutical corporations, which, generally, do not operate in the best interest of the public good. The sad fact is that if people become less healthy with compromised immune systems, this is advantageous to drug companies, who will make new drugs for these conditions. While doesn’t mean the drug companies intentionally poison us, they are not incentivised to focus on long term health consequences that may be beneficial for their profit models, but bad for us.

What seems to be the case is that the situation remains murky and ambiguous. The underlying problem is that corporations — including pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer or Moderna — must maximize short-term financial profit and shareholder value. We’ve seen, over and over again, whether with cigarettes, drugs, oil, or fast food, that profit-maximization leads to companies doing terrible things, and then seeking to escape consequences for their actions. I also share the concern that mRNA technology is very new and could have unforeseen consequences over time. Yet biotech companies need to push their product onto the people quickly for their own growth and survival.

All of this means we need, at the least, a very robust regulatory framework, which the Right Wing seeks to dismantle. Personally, as I have expressed repeatedly, I feel we cannot continue with this current form of predatory Capitalism. Our system, based on profit maximization, becomes increasingly dangerous as our technologies become more powerful and evolve faster and faster.

Many people suspect we are approaching a “Hiroshima moment” when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, for example, where we may see terrible consequences unleashed in some way or other. After that, we will hopefully have the ability to reconfigure global civilization, if it isn’t too late. I believe we need to redesign the global financial system if we want to avert human extinction. I offered ideas on how to do this in my book How Soon Is Now.

Right-wing libertarianism is, I find, a childish, adolescent approach to the deepening dangers we are facing. Our best approach would be to move toward the left-libertarian municipals Bookchin proposes. We could use social technology to build a far more participatory system, where we focus on reinventing human society on local, bioregional, and planetary levels, as I explored in my book, How Soon Is Now.

In some sense, both Russell and Charles are trying to articulate a response to the numerous threats we are facing — a path forward. Russell has revealed himself as a self-serving sell-out. As we will discuss next time, Russell’s narcissism coupled with his desire for fame, influence, and monetary gain has led him very far astray. He has regressed to the style of blatant grifting that launched his career in British television. Charles has, I suspect, been seduced by his proximity to power, which exacerbates his tendency toward abstract, ungrounded grandiosity. He has confused access for influence, which is easy to do. He also lost his way around evidence-based thinking, over-prioritizing abstact ideals of bodily integrity and sovereignty (in contrast to his earlier promotion of Thich Naht Hanh’s concept of “interbeing”). In their efforts to remain relevant they have forged new alliances with the libertarian and authoritarian Right. I suspect — I hope — they will come to regret this.

More on all of this next time.