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

“Work!” –Maynard G. Krebs, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, circa 1960

From the start, Americans have had a love-hate relationship with work. We tend to rhapsodize about labor, but, at least in our personal lives, we praise labor-saving devices and condemn “make-work” schemes. (Unfortunately, public policy is another matter.) Emerson and other pillars of American culture — whom for these purposes I will call the moralists — associated work with dignity and purpose. Historian Thaddeus Russell teaches us that when the slaves were freed from the Southern plantations, they were pounded with the gospel of work. “Slaves generally considered work to be only a means to wealth, but after emancipation, Americans told them that work — even thankless, nonremunerative work — was a virtue in itself,” Russell writes in A Renegade History of the United States. He reports that the Freedman’s Bureau admonished the former slaves, “You must be industrious and frugal. It is feared that some will act from the mistaken notion that Freedom means liberty to be idle. This class of persons, known to the law as vagrants, must at once correct this mistake.” Russell notes that “thousands of black men were rounded up for refusing to work.”

The message was that work is not just an honest and proper way to obtain the necessities of life without mooching off others. The activity in itself is a source of goodness, even saintliness, and should be engaged in unceasingly, taking time out only for eating sleeping, other bodily functions, and tending to one’s family duties. One didn’t work to live; one lived to work.

Whites had been subjected to the same harangue for ages: work was a reward in itself, apart from remuneration, because “idle hands are the devil’s playground.”

We must be clear that the message was not merely that work could be a source of satisfaction apart from the money. The message amounted to a vilification of leisure, indeed, of consumption. (Some conservatives seem to hold this view.)

In a good illustration of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon, the moralists were joined in their labor evangelism by employers, who needed uncomplaining workers willing to spend long hours in unpleasant factories. People preferred leisure and looked for every opportunity to indulge in it. Hence, “Saint Monday,” which, as Russell notes, Benjamin Franklin sneered at because it “is as duly kept by our working people as Sunday; the only difference is that instead of employing their time cheaply in church, they are wasting it expensively in the alehouse.”

We get a different picture of labor from the economists. The classical economists and the Austrians (at least from Ludwig von Mises onward) stressed the unpleasantness — the “disutility” and even sad necessity — of labor. Adam Smith and other early economists equated work with “toil,” which is not a word with positive connotations. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith writes,

The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people. What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labour, as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money, or those goods, indeed, save us this toil.

Frédéric Bastiat carried on this tradition by emphasizing that exchange arises out of a wish to be spared labor. One accepts the terms of an exchange only if obtaining the desired good in other ways would be more arduous.

For Bastiat and other early economists, exchange was the foundation of society. “Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges,” Destutt de Tracy wrote. It follows that the penchant for economizing effort  — the preference for leisure — is a beneficent feature of human nature. (Somewhere, the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein has a character say that the wheelbarrow must have been invented by a lazy person.)

Further, Bastiat explained, technological advancement is valued precisely because it substitutes the free services of nature for human toil. In his uncompleted magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote,

It is characteristic of progress (and, indeed, this is what we mean by progress) to transform onerous utility into gratuitous utility; to decrease [exchange-]value without decreasing utility; and to enable all men, for fewer pains or at smaller cost, to obtain the same satisfactions.

By onerous utility, he meant utility bought with sweat and strain; by gratuitous utility, he meant utility provided by nature free of charge. When ingenuity is applied to the making of a good, “its production has in large measure been turned over to Nature. It is obtained for less expenditure of human effort; less service is performed as it passes from hand to hand.” Needless to say, this is a good thing. Of course, some of the freed-up time will be devoted to producing other goods that were unaffordable yesterday, but some will be devoted to consumption, or leisure. The proportion set aside for leisure will likely increase as living standards rise (assuming government interference doesn’t deny workers their rewards for higher productivity).

The goal of all men, in all their activities, is to reduce the amount of effort in relation to the end desired and, in order to accomplish this end, to incorporate in their labor a constantly increasing proportion of the forces of Nature.… [T]hey invent tools or machines, they enlist the chemical and mechanical forces of the elements, they divide their labors, and they unite their efforts. How to do more with less, is the eternal question asked in all times, in all places, in all situations, in all things.

(Bastiat elaborates on this in his remarkable chapter 8, “Private Property and Common Wealth,” which was the subject of my article “Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth.”)

Bastiat agreed with Adam Smith, who wrote, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.” Hence the economists rejected the moralists’ view that production is an end in itself.

We see this same lack of enthusiasm for work in John Stuart Mill, an influential classical economist as well as philosopher. In 1849 Thomas Carlyle published an article lamenting that the end of slavery in Great Britain meant that white people couldn’t make sure that blacks worked enough (for whites). (“Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, December 1849.) Indeed, this is why Carlyle dubbed economics, which was premised on free labor, “the dismal science.”

Mill wrote an anonymous response (“The Negro Question”) in the following issue. He protested Carlyle’s suggestion that blacks were meant to serve white people. Then, as I wrote previously,

Mill … turned to “the gospel of work,” praised by Carlyle, “which, to my mind, justly deserves the name of a cant.” He attacked the idea that work is an end in itself, rather than merely a means. “While we talk only of work, and not of its object, we are far from the root of the matter; or, if it may be called the root, it is a root without flower or fruit.… In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labor … the exhausting, stiffening, stupefying toil of many kinds of agricultural and manufacturing laborers. To reduce very greatly the quantity of work required to carry on existence is as needful as to distribute it more equally; and the progress of science, and the increasing ascendency of justice and good sense, tend to this result.

In Mises and Murray Rothbard we find similar views: work is to be economized. Mises devoted an entire chapter in Socialism to refuting the state socialists’ claim that work is unpleasant only because of the market economy, and that it would be blissful if private property were abolished and the market were replaced with state central planning. Under any system, Mises wrote, labor may afford a small (and insignificant, he thought) measure of direct satisfaction, but that soon passes. Yet people must keep working to obtain its indirect satisfactions, the goods it enables them to buy.

Mises may overstate his case here, as did his mentor Carl Menger in the other direction (in 1871, mind you): “The occupations of by far the great majority of men afford enjoyment, are thus themselves true satisfactions of needs, and would be practiced, although perhaps in smaller measure or in a modified manner, even if men were not forced by lack of means to exert their powers.”

Mises mocked the state socialists by putting scare quotes around the words joy of labor, asking, “If work gives satisfaction per se why is the worker paid? Why does he not reward the employer for the pleasure which the employer gives him by allowing him to work?”

What people often take for the “joy of labor,” he said, was actually the satisfaction of finishing a task, the “pleasure in being free of work rather than pleasure in the work itself.” Mises quoted the medieval monks who appended to the manuscript copies they had just painstakingly produced, “Laus tibi sit Christe, quoniam liber explicit iste” (which he translated inexactly as“Praise the Lord because the work is completed”).

For Rothbard, leisure is a “desirable good,” a consumer good, which people will forgo only if at the margin the fruits of a unit of labor undertaken are preferred to the satisfaction that a unit of leisure would afford. Rothbard acknowledged that labor can be satisfying and wrote,

In cases where the labor itself provides positive satisfactions, however, these are intertwined with and cannot be separated from the prospect of obtaining the final product. Deprived of the final product, man will consider his labor senseless and useless, and the labor itself will no longer bring positive satisfactions. Those activities which are engaged in purely for their own sake are not labor but are pure play, consumers’ goods in themselves. Play, as a consumers’ good, is subject to the law of marginal utility as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods. In the expenditure of any hour of labor, therefore, man weighs the disutility of the labor involved (including the leisure forgone plus any dissatisfaction stemming from the work itself) against the utility of the contribution he will make in that hour to the production of desired goods (including future goods and any pleasure in the work itself), i.e., with the value of his marginal product. [Emphasis added.]

Rothbard’s mentor, Mises, made a fundamental point about human action when he wrote, “Even if labor were a pure pleasure it would have to be used economically, since human life is limited in time, and human energy is not inexhaustible.”

That being the case, I will reserve further thoughts on work for another time. Meanwhile, Laus tibi sit Christe, quoniam liber explicit iste!

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.