Et bien, parce que le grand public est important, et plus encore, les institutions et constructions culturelles qui persistent sont importantes. Les libertariens ont fait un travail extrêmement bon en développant une théorie de comment une société idéale devrait opérer, alors que dans le même temps ils ne se préoccupent pas de savoir si leurs travaux intéressent ceux qui ne sont pas déjà acquis à la cause. Pourquoi donc est-ce qu’un individu moyen qui a à peine la moindre connaissance en politique ou en philosophie s’intéresserait aux valeurs libertariennes ? La réalité est que de nombreux libertariens sont des iconoclastes rationnels. Nous aimons ne pas être conformes et bousculer l’ordre établi. Nous pensons que l’attaque la plus percutante est un syllogisme ou peut-être la 25ème édition anniversaire de La Grève. Le libertarien ne voit pas de rigueur intellectuelle dans la culture populaire et juge donc inutile toute analyse. Ce rejet a mené le libertarianisme à être vu comme une théorie excentrique destinée aux solitaires et aux introvertis. Si les libertariens veulent accomplir de réels changements dans la société, ils ont besoin de passer moins de temps à débattre théorie et plus de temps à infuser leurs idées dans la culture populaire et soutenir les normes culturelles qui favorisent la liberté. Les normes culturelles sur le sexe, les drogues et toute autre amusement dont certaines personnes ne veulent pas que d’autres personnes en profitent ne valent pas plus que l’opinion de ces personnes elles-mêmes. La loi n’est pas une force divine que l’on ne peut pas braver. C’est une question de reconnaissance sociale. Personne n’ira faire respecter la loi sur les feux rouges à New York, puisque tout le monde les grille. Il serait impossible d’essayer de la faire respecter. Les libertariens doivent arrêter de convaincre les gens de changer leurs valeurs culturelles et doivent commencer à promouvoir celles qui leur sont importantes.

Roderick T. Long et Charles W. Johnson ont abondamment argument sur pourquoi est-ce que les libertariens devraient embrasser les valeurs traditionnelles de gauche, question de cohérence culturelle. Le succès d’une société libertarienne n’est pas seulement d’anéantir l’état, mais d’anéantir toute forme d’oppression. A quoi bon vivre dans une société sans état si les femmes y sont toujours traitées comme des objets ? Où votre couleur détermine votre statut socio-économique ? Les libertariens doivent regarder sérieusement les formes d’oppression qui existent hors de l’état, puisque l’état puise ses pouvoirs dans ces oppressions non gouvernementales. (voir Roderick Long, « Féminisme libertarien : Est-ce que ce mariage peut être sauvé ?«)

Il y a des formes d’oppressions qui ne dépendent tout simplement pas de l’existence de l’appareil d’état. Les lois sont faites des normes que le peuple est prêt à reconnaître et à appliquer. Même les institutions politiques autoritaires par excellence comme l’armée reposent plus sur l’acceptante culturelle, l’obéissance et la docilité que sur les intentions des généraux et des politiciens. Et s’il y avait une guerre et que personne ne venait ? Les institutions politiques donnent la possibilité faire usage d’intimidation, mais personne n’est forcé à devenir militaire. Personne ne vous met un pistolet sur la tempe et vous demande de soutenir les troupes. Si demain chacun arrêtait de croire que chaque soldat est un héros et que chaque guerre est un sacrifice au nom des valeurs américaines, peut-être verrait-on un déclin de cet empire du mal.

Comme Johnson et Long, je pense aussi qu’il est nécessaire d’avoir une conception plus large du libertarianisme. Plus précisément, je pense que les libertariens devraient embrasser ce que j’appelle lelibertinage culturel, par cela je veux dire l’expression de la volonté d’une personne à faire ce qu’elle et elle seule désire. Cela signifie soutenir les actions spontanées des individus, qu’elles soient en accord avec nos propres valeurs ou non. Quand les normes culturelles sont utilisées pour étouffer les préférences personnelles, les libertariens devraient s’indigner.

L’historien Thaddeus Russell a longuement argumenté que pour les libertés que nous considérons comme acquises, de l’indépendance des femmes au week-end, il faut remercier des renégats. Les renégats ne sont pas des hommes politiques. Ils n’ont rien à faire du principe de non-agression (NAP) ou d’une société sans état. Dans certains cas, ils pourraient bien être des personnes très désagréables avec qui vous ne voudriez pas être laissés seuls bien longtemps. Ils ne sont certainement pas les gens disciplinés qui seraient à la tête de sociétés d’aide mutuelle ou de coopératives. Ils pourraient être ces cavaliers seuls dont on a peur. Néanmoins, ces actes qui peuvent nous dégoûter nous ont donné une vision plus large de la liberté individuelle, tant sur le plan politique que culturel.

Mais que diable viennent faire les singeries de Miley Cyrus ? Eh bien, je regarde les actions de Miley de ces derniers temps, que ce soit sur sa sexualité, sa consommation d’ecstasy ou qu’elle ait fumé un joint sur scène face à des millions de spectateurs, moins comme des actes qui visent à choquer, mais comme une forme dedésobéissance culturelle. La désobéissance culturelle, comme la désobéissance civile, implique des actions qui soient culturellement mal vues. Quand Miley rejette son rôle d’idole pour adolescents et commence à se frotter sauvagement contre Robin Thicke avec des ours en peluche sexualisés en arrière plan, elle fait plus qu’attirer l’attention pour son nouvel album, elle se débarrasse de ce que l’on attend d’elle en tant « qu’innocente ». Miley affiche sa sexualité à bon usage, comme quelque chose de fort que chacun peut apprécier comme il l’entend.

Récemment Miley s’est de nouveau engagée dans un acte de désobéissance culturelle en allumant un joint sur scène durant un événement télévisé. Encore une fois, on peut voir ça comme une publicité provocante. Elle n’aurait jamais fait ça si ses avocats ne l’avaient pas approuvé auparavant. Mais c’est un signe qui montre que les normes sur la consommation de drogue sont en train de s’effondrer. La plus grande nouvelle dans la pop ces derniers temps est d’être choqués de la voir prendre de la drogue et, ce faisant, elle fait sa part dans la normalisation de la drogue dans notre culture. Comme j’ai pu écrire auparavant :

« … nous n’arriverons pas au point où la consommation de drogues n’est plus sévèrement réprimandée par la société et par l’état sans avoir des consommateurs de drogues pour participer à une désobéissance civile passive. Ceux qui allument un joint sur leur porche ou dans un parc public ne sont pas seulement en train de planer, ils sapent les normes sociales qui légitiment ces lois. Quand nous soutenons les conservateurs qui font de l’œil aux politiques libertariennes mais mettent de côté ceux que nous voyons comme déviantes, nous soutenons une culture puritaine. Nous oublions nos vraies valeurs, nous soutenons les valeurs qui rendent les lois sur les drogues possibles. »

Considérez cela tout simplement comme une extension de l’application de la pensée agoriste. L’agorisme reconnait que le gouvernement est aussi bon que l’économie qu’il contrôle. La culture libertarienne reconnaît que la culture joue un rôle similaire dans la fondation des lois en vigueur. Les drogues ne sont pas devenues illégales parce que les politiciens l’ont dit, mais à cause des campagnes anxiogènes sur leurs effets et à cause du profil des personnes qui en prennent. Les femmes ne se sont pas réveillées dans un monde d’oppression le lendemain du passage des lois régulant leur corps. Il était déjà accepté dans la culture dominante que les femmes doivent être traitées de la sorte, et ça c’est manifesté dans la loi.

Miley Cyrus peut potentiellement faire avancer les choses, comme d’autres figures de la pop. Vous n’avez pas à adorer leur musique ou la façon dont ces gens se vendent. Le fait est que les libertariens devraient adopter une attitude sex-positive et drug-positive afin d’éliminer l’oppression qui est faite sur les minorités sexuelles, les consommateurs de drogues et les dissidents culturels. Considérez qu’il y a plus à l’expression de votre philosophie politique que le NAP. Quand les gens se dressent et déclarent qu’ils sont libres malgré les normes sociales, nous devrions les désigner comme les meilleurs représentants de notre philosophie. Vous devons soutenir les renégats culturels et, plus particulièrement, la culture populaire qui bouscule les mœurs traditionnelles. C’est en mettant en avant les idées libertariennes et même libertines dans la culture populaire que le libertarianisme progressera. La guerre sur la culture (ndt. référence à la guerre sur les drogues aux USA) est réelle et les libertariens doivent commencer à la prendre au sérieux.

Traduction de Miley Cyrus And The Libertarian Renegade Culture de Ryan Calhoun

“Dialectics is the art of context-keeping. It is a thinking style that emphasizes the centrality of context in the analysis of systems across time. As applied to libertarian social theory, it counsels us not to disconnect politics from economics, culture, social psychology, ethics, epistemology, and other factors. It views these seemingly disparate aspects as interrelated within a wider totality. Hence, any attempt to understand–or change–society must entail an analysis of its interrelations from the vantage point of any single aspect. This brings forth an enriched portrait of society, and underscores the indivisible connection between theory and practice.”

This brief exploration follows in his footsteps.

Contextually speaking, political legality is important, but it doesn’t exhaust all the factors necessary for sex worker liberation. There is still the necessity of addressing the economic and cultural levels of analysis. Both of which help to provide us with a broader more systemic view of the issue at hand. Without this broader context we risk losing sight of the total picture. This comprehensive picture allows us to grasp the interconnections spoken of by Sciabarra above.

Economically speaking, the mere political legality of sex work matters not without assurances that property owners will not discriminate against sex workers. It also matters not without sex workers receiving a comfortable share of the economic pie. It’s certainly true that the absence of coercive political penalties by the government assists in this, but it isn’t the end of relevant analysis. Private property owners could still use control of economic resources to deny access to sex workers. This is still true with formal legality.

Our final level of analysis is the cultural. In the absence of a sex worker friendly culture, formal legality could be rendered irrelevant by the restrictions of oppressive social mores. This would lead to the economic discrimination mentioned above and induce agitation to restore the laws on the political level. All the more reason to wage an interrelated struggle for sex worker liberation. These three levels of analysis are preferably dealt with simultaneously.

Well, because the mainstream matters and, more importantly, cultural institutions and constructs that persist matter. Libertarians have done an awful nice job in developing theory on how an ideal society ought to operate while completely ignoring ever getting anyone to care about their work that wasn’t already interested. Why the hell should an average individual who has barely a glancing knowledge on issues of politics and philosophy give a damn about libertarian values? The truth is many libertarians are by their nature rationalist iconoclasts. We enjoy non-conformity and bucking the system. We think that the most potent form of attack is a syllogism or perhaps the 25th Anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged. The libertarian does not see rigor or intellect in much of mainstream culture and, therefore, deems it unnecessary of further analysis. This rejection has led to libertarianism being regarded mostly as a kook theory meant more for loners and introverts.

If libertarians want to make an effective change on society, they need to spend less time in debates over theory and more time injecting their ideas into mainstream culture and supporting the cultural norms which favor liberty and personal freedom. Cultural norms about sex, drugs and all other manner of fun that people don’t want other people to have are only as good as the views of those people themselves. The law is not an ethereal force which one violates necessarily. It is a matter of social recognition. Nobody cares about jaywalking in New York City enough to enforce the law because everybody does it. It would be impossible to try and enforce. Libertarians need to stop trying to argue people out of their cultural inculcations and start promoting the cultural values they care about.

Roderick T. Long and Charles W. Johnson have argued effectively for why libertarians should embrace traditionally leftist values as a matter of cultural thickness. The success of a libertarian society is not simply based upon smashing the state, but smashing all forms of oppression. What good is a stateless society where women are still treated like property? Where your race determines your socioeconomic status? Libertarians need to take non-government forms of oppression seriously, since it is upon such non-governmental oppression that the state gains its power. (See Roderick Long, “Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?”)

There are certain forms of oppression which are not simply dependent upon the State apparatus’ existence. Laws are made up of norms which people are willing to recognize and act on. Even prototypically authoritarian political institutions like the military rely more on cultural acceptance, obedience and docility than on the intentions of generals and politicians. What if there were a war and no one showed up? Political institutions give the military a bully pulpit, but no one is being forced into military service. No one puts a gun in your face and demands you support the troops. If tomorrow people stopped acting like every soldier was a hero and every war a great sacrifice for American values, we might begin to see the decline of this evil empire.

Like Johnson and Long, I too see a necessity for thick conceptions of libertarianism. Specifically, I think more libertarians ought to embrace what I call cultural libertinism, by which I mean the expression of an individual’s will to do what she and she alone desires. It means supporting the spontaneous actions of individuals whether they be expressions of our own personal morality or not. When cultural norms are used to stifle innocent personal preferences, libertarians ought to take exception.

Historian Thaddeus Russell has argued at length that the freedom we often take for granted, from women enjoying more independence to the weekend, we have renegades to thank. Renegades are not political figures. They don’t give a shit about the non-aggression principle (NAP) or a stateless society. In some cases, they might be rather unpleasant people you wouldn’t want to be left alone with for too long. They’re certainly not the disciplined folks who would be at the heads of mutual aid societies or coops. They might be those nasty free riders we fear so much. Nevertheless, the very acts we might be disgusted by have given us fuller expression of personal freedom, both politically and culturally.

What the hell does any of this have to do with the antics of Miley Cyrus? Well, I see Miley’s actions, as of late, whether they be embracing her sexuality, being open about her use of MDMA or smoking a joint on stage in front of millions, as not merely acts intended to shock, but as forms of cultural disobedience. Cultural disobedience, like civil disobedience, involves the public display of acts which are culturally frowned upon. When Miley rejected her role as a teenage sensation and began grinding wildly against Robin Thicke with a background of sexualized teddy bears, she was doing more than grabbing attention for her new album, she was stripping away what she saw as this culture’s expectations of her as an “innocent.” Miley is displaying her sexuality as a force for good, as something powerful to be enjoyed at an individual’s discretion.

Recently Miley engaged in another act of cultural disobedience by lighting up a joint on stage during a televised event. Again, we can see this as a cheap publicity stunt. She wouldn’t have done this if corporate lawyers hadn’t approve it already. But this is a sign that norms about drug use are breaking down. The biggest pop sensation of our day is being brazen with her drug use and, as a result, doing her own part in normalizing drugs into our culture. As I’ve argued elsewhere:

“… we will not get to a point where consumption of drugs isn’t severely regulated by society and the State without actual drug users participating in passive civil disobedience. Those who light up joints on their porch or in public parks are not only getting high, they are undermining the social norms that make these laws sustainable. When we endorse conservatives who pay lip service to libertarian policies and try to kick out those we see as deviant, we are endorsing the culture of puritanism.  We undermine what should be our true values, we endorse the values that make drug laws possible.”

Consider this merely an extension or application of Agorist thought. Agorism recognizes that a government is only as good as the economy it controls. The libertarian culture warrior recognizes that culture plays a similar foundational role for the laws that are enforced. Drugs became illegal not just because politicians said so, but because of scare campaigns about their effects and the kinds of people that want to use them. Women did not simply wake up to their oppression the day after laws appeared regulating the use of their bodies. It was already accepted by the dominate culture that women needed to be treated in such a way and so it manifested itself into law.

Miley Cyrus is a potent force for good, as are other pop culture figures like her. You don’t have to dig their music or the way these people sell themselves. The fact is libertarians ought to adopt sex-positive and drug-positive attitudes in order to eliminate the oppression which is imposed on sexual minorities, drug users and cultural dissidents. Consider that there are more expressions of your political philosophy than the NAP. When people stand up and declare their freedom in spite of social norms, we ought to point to them as the best representatives of our philosophy. We must support cultural renegades and, especially, mainstream culture that deviates from traditional mores. By promoting libertarian and even libertine values in the mainstream, libertarianism is done a great service. The culture war is real and libertarians need to start taking it more seriously.

Translations for this article:

• French, Miley Cyrus et la culture libertarienne rénégate.

Apparently he’s never read the Bible. The list of things in Leviticus that call for death by stoning would take out not only gays and lesbians, but most everybody else as well. Then there’s that wonderful stuff about dashing out the brains of Philistine babies and exterminating the entire population of Canaan. Yet most Christians, outside of Fred Phelps’s bunch, don’t advocate this kind of stuff. And many Christians from the mainline denominations openly condemn it.

So it’s obvious that the actual content of sacred texts means a lot less than the cultural evolution of their adherents. The texts themselves, arguably, are more the products than the sources of authoritarian culture.

In a college Middle Eastern history class, I read a historian (I can’t for the life of me track him down) who posited an “Irano-Mediterranean Oikoumene” with a shared culture of machismo and patriarchal domination of women. St. Paul’s admonition to women to cover their heads in church was entirely in keeping with this culture in Greece. In the classical Greece of Socrates, women commonly appeared in public in something very like a hijab; Aristophanes’ “Assembly of Women,” and the tradition that Socrates’ wife Xanthippe publicly henpecked him, were both considered especially comical against this cultural backdrop.

Most conservative cultural traditions concerning women in contemporary Islam are not mentioned in the Quran, but were found in the preexisting culture of the pagan Arabs. And many misogynistic pagan traditions that Islam condemned, like the exposure of female infants, reemerged among the Bedouin after Muhammad’s time. Muhammad himself was quite liberal toward women in his personal life, compared both to the preexisting pagan culture and later “Islamic” culture, with some women figuring prominently in the early Muslim community at Medina.

Islam was arguably evolving past its cultural authoritarianism earlier than Christianity. At its height, the medieval Islamic civilization was far more liberal and forward-looking than Christian Europe at the same time. This was brought to an end by the Mongol conquest of the Middle East. The Islamic world was set back by centuries, becoming pessimistic, authoritarian and inward-looking, and adopting a reactionary attitude toward Europe’s subsequent cultural progress.

Western imperialism played a similar role in the colonial world. Colonial regimes atomized or perverted local social institutions (as an example of perversion, look at what Hastings’ Permanent Settlement in Bengal, and similar policies later for all of India, did to property relations within the village commune). They decimated social capital and uprooted local institutions that might have provided the basis for evolution of a more liberal society. They deliberately drew colonial boundaries that cut across natural ethnic lines, promoting ethnic hostility as part of a divide-and-rule strategy (much of the Hutu-Tutsi hostility in Rwanda is traceable to such policies under Belgian rule). Much as in Russia, an authoritarian state led to the corruption and atrophy of civil society; and when that authoritarian state withdrew from the scene, it left a vacuum to be filled by military juntas and kleptocrats.

The bipolar superpower dynamic also contributed to greater political authoritarianism in much of the post-colonial Third World. Left-wing nationalist regimes, in the face of Western economic blockades, subversion and outright invasion, adopted garrison state cultures and developed closer ties with the Soviet bloc.

Take Cuba, for example. Although Castro had studied Marx and had a nondescript Marxist politics, he’d also studied the New Deal in prison and saw it as a model for post-revolutionary Cuban development. His 26 July Movement avoided close ties with the pro-Soviet and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist PSP. After the Revolution, the new regime liquidated the PSP and pursued a fairly liberal economic agenda consisting of land reform and the encouragement of urban cooperatives. Orthodox Marxist-Leninists like Che Guevara formed a distinct subgroup within the 26 July Movement. Only after a full-blown US campaign of destabilization did Castro proclaim himself a Marxist-Leninist and align Cuba with the Soviet bloc.

In South Vietnam, Noam Chomsky has argued, the NLF (“Viet Cong”), while certainly engaging in authoritarian activities, was also a grass-roots populist movement with close ties to the local peasantry, engaged in many of the same kinds of local economic development and self-help activities as the Black Panthers in Oakland. The counter-insurgency campaign in the South eviscerated the NLF and the civil society it was embedded in, leaving a hollow shell for the North Vietnamese Army and the official Marxist-Leninists in Hanoi to take over.

In a sense these were both victories for the United States. The US government arguably has a conscious interest in promoting this kind of authoritarianism. From the standpoint of the American ruling elite, it was far preferable to have the anti-American Third World dominated by authoritarian regimes subject to discipline by the white male three-piece-suited bureaucrats in Moscow (the kind of people Nixon and Kissinger were quite sympatico with), than a liberal anti-American regime providing the demonstration effect of successful economic development outside the global capitalist system.

Relying on employers for healthcare means the company has more leverage over the worker. If you’re out of work then you might be out of luck when it comes to your health. And if the boss decides what kind of healthcare the employee can get — at issue in the current discussion of religiously-affiliated institutions and contraception — this can mean an extension of the boss’s control outside of work hours.

How did we get to where it’s typical to rely on employers for healthcare?

As Roderick Long describes in his article “Medical Insurance that Worked — Until Government ‘Fixed’ It,” it was once common for workers to join a friendly society or fraternal society. These were essentially mutual aid organizations where monthly fees created a pool of resources that participants could draw on in time of need. They often negotiated contracts with doctors to serve members for a reasonable expense paid by the organization. Regulation and government programs prevented these organizations from continuing to serve the public.

Certainly, there are more advanced and expensive medical techniques today than in the fraternal societies’ heyday of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But without government interference, consensual organizations could certainly have grown and adapted to the needs of a wealthier, more sophisticated membership.

New technology could make such organizations more dynamic and responsive, with improved ability to network and access and evaluate information. Not only could consensual organizations offer more security for the worker who today has an employer health plan, they could also make healthcare more accessible for the worker who does not, reducing incentives to take an otherwise less desirable job for the benefits.

Today, however, the tax structure incentivizes employer health coverage while an economy oriented toward business elites and political privilege raises barriers to alternatives.

Healthcare, taken out of the people’s hands, then becomes a political issue. Politicians aren’t good at addressing problems of economic stratification and stagnation — they’re typically part of the elite that is struggling to stay on top. What they are good at is making stands in culture war issues, and this is where they want to get attention, regardless of how many backs they stand on behind the podium. When federal funding can be given out or taken away based on which demagogue holds power, personal health becomes a campaign issue.

A free society would allow more personal autonomy and choice. Taking power away from politicians involves determining how to rely less on the boss economy and invest more in personal autonomy. The surest way to keep bosses from determining your access to healthcare is to get rid of the need for bosses altogether.

When you rely on bosses for healthcare your body becomes a campaign issue.