The Needs of the One Outweigh the Needs of the Many

As election season approaches once again, we see the resurfacing of that perennial attempt to blame libertarians for all that is wrong with the world. Although many libertarians were persuaded to support Donald Trump in 2024 based on his promises to drain the swamp, cut wasteful spending, and refrain from foreign policy adventurism, the President’s failure to deliver on these promises means that the libertarian vote is unlikely to turn out this year for Republicans, at least not in the same numbers. As a result, supporters of the GOP (most notably Megan Basham of the Daily Wire) are angrily denouncing libertarians as stealth Democrats who pretend to care about fiscal issues, but who really only care about marijuana and prostitution.

As someone who has been accused of being “right wing” my whole life, despite never identifying with that label, it is amusing to now face the opposite, equally inapt characterization. Perhaps the fact that both major political parties regard libertarians as useful idiots for the other side is the greatest proof that we are, in fact, nether left nor right when it comes to our fundamental values.

To understand this, it’s necessary to identify the basic worldviews and priorities that define the “left” and the “right”. This is no easy task, as individual policy positions have a tendency to be passed between the two parties from year to year, and issues like free trade or free speech can be embraced by the left one year only to be regarded as essentially right wing in the next. In his book The Righteous Mind, social scientist Jonathan Haidt attempted to tackle this problem by posing moral dilemmas to conservatives and progressives to see what motivates their thinking. He concluded that the thing that makes the right different from the left is a set of moral axes used to make judgments, which are common to only one side of the political aisle. While the left uses considerations of fairness, liberty, and harm to determine whether an action is right or wrong, the right applies the additional values of sanctity, loyalty, and authority.

In one example, Haidt asks people whether it is wrong for a brother and sister to engage in consensual incest if there is no possibility of producing a child. While everyone was fairly grossed out by this, left-leaning respondents had a harder time coming up with reason to be opposed to an action which harms no one, is not unfair, and does not infringe on anyone’s liberty. Conservatives, on the other hand, were more likely to appeal to their sense of the sanctity of sexual relations as a reason to oppose this practice, a framework largely not present on the left.

Haidt’s research is highly useful in explaining how people with different political views think and help us to understand one another, but it doesn’t quite get to the bottom of why different people view morality through such a different set of lenses. My belief is that it all has to do with the level of human society which we most prioritize above all others. Let me explain:

The caricature of the American right is that of the hyper-individualistic “every man for himself” bootstrapper, but a quick examination of conservative priorities reveals that this is not the case. In fact, one could make the argument that the right is even more collectivist than the left. This is because the level of society most prioritized by the right is the civilizational level. If we look at all the policies traditionally favored by the right, we can see that what they have in common is a concern for preserving and continuing civilization, often at the expense of individuals or certain interest groups.

Thus, the reason the American right seems preoccupied with declining birthrates and the preservation of the nuclear family is that it is motivated by a desire for children to carry on society into the future. To return to the incest example, what seems confusing from the perspective of individual consent makes sense if your concern is principally with society’s continuation. If family members are having sex, that means either children are not being born or they are being born with inferior genetics, both of which are bad for civilization. This also explains conservative opposition to homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and masturbation, all of which, at least in theory, could result in fewer babies.

Conservatives tend to value tradition, because traditions are what got us this far as a species. As long as we keep doing what we’ve been doing, the result may not be ideal, but the odds of total civilizational collapse are low. On the other hand, if we start discarding traditions willy-nilly, there’s no telling what catastrophes we might be inviting onto ourselves. A big reason why conservatives tend to oppose immigration is the perceived threat to traditions that comes from the mixing of cultures, as well as a belief that importing individuals from “less civilized” or “barbaric” cultures will damage their own civilization.

When the right feuds within itself, the reason is usually a disagreement over which evil constitutes the greatest threat to civilization. For example, the MAGA right supports the war in Iran because they view Islam as a fundamental danger to western civilization and our way of life that must be addressed. They are willing to sacrifice individual lives to combat this threat, because the conservative worldview values the preservation of society over the welfare of any individual soldier or civilian casualty. On the other hand, the America First right opposes the war, not because they have any more individualistic attachment to the soldiers, but because they view Islam as a lesser threat to Western civilization than the wanton spending of American of blood and treasure for no good reason, as well as the ceding of national sovereignty to the interests of a foreign government.

In contrast, the left isn’t as interested in preserving civilization as they are in protecting certain groups which they view as “oppressed”. They prioritize the factional level, and will sacrifice either individual or civilizational interest for the good of the group. For the time being, these factions include women, black Americans and other racial minorities, homosexuals and other sexual minorities, immigrants, and the poor (although the specific nature of the factions can change over time). As an example, let’s consider left-wing opposition to prosecuting shoplifters. Cracking down on crime is obviously good for civilization, as markets cannot function when theft is rampant, and it is obviously good for the individuals in a society to be protected from robbery. However, it is bad for the interests of those doing the stealing. If shoplifters belong to, or are perceived to belong to, certain protected factions, the left will side with them against business owners (perceived to belong to the disfavored and oppressive faction of “the wealthy”).

Similarly, many on the left circled the wagons around Lindsay Clancy after she killed her three children, because protecting the interests of women as a group (and another “oppressed” faction, the mentally ill) took precedence over protecting society at large or seeking justice for the individual victims.

When the left is in conflict with itself, it is usually due to a disagreement about which factions should be favored over others. We can see this in the split between TERFs (feminists who view the admission of trans women into female spaces as a threat to women’s interests as a whole) and those who prioritize the interests of the trans community over those of “bigoted” women. The common use of terms like “TERF” shows one of the ways in which the left punishes those who defect from group loyalty, so women who question feminism are called “pick-mes” and black people who question the reality of white supremacy are called “Uncle Toms”.

Perhaps it is my own failure to adequately understand and represent the left-wing perspective that makes it seem like one of these two worldviews is more defensible than the other. Civilizational prioritization follows a certain evolutionary logic. Genes, after all, don’t care about individuals: they are only interested in reproducing themselves. This is somewhat ironic given that conservatives are more likely to disbelieve evolution than leftists, but as I believe that these priorities are subconsciously rather than consciously held, the contradiction is not that surprising. However, I can see virtually no advantage in the factionalist worldview, which is perhaps why I have historically been lumped in with the right despite my fundamental disagreements with them. If I’m missing something, please do let me know in the comments.

This brings us, at last, to libertarianism. Whereas both the right-wing and left-wing worldviews outlined above as essentially collectivist, libertarians tend to prioritize society at the individual level. That means that we will tolerate behavior that conservatives view as “bad for civilization” (drug use being one example) in the interest of letting individuals be maximally free to live their lives as they wish. And we will oppose policies favored by the left to benefit their chosen factions (e.g. affirmative action) because we do not believe in treating individuals differently based on their group identities.

We favor freedom because no one knows when or where the next world-shaking innovation will come from. No one knows who the next Mozart or Einstein will be, and it is only by allowing people to explore the world and themselves in novel ways that we can avoid snuffing out these candles of genius before they have a chance to develop. One could also argue that, although libertarians are more likely to profess atheism than conservatives, underlying the libertarian ethic is a belief in the divine spark in every man, woman, and child, a spark that should be nurtured and encouraged, not treated like a mere statistic or a pawn to be manipulated in the designs of others. In an essay titled “Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor”, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote: “If individual men, like ants, were uniform, interchangeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individualized personality of his own.”

To cite a slightly less erudite, if more culturally significant, reference, I’m reminded of a line from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, in which James T. Kirk (once again proving himself to be the best of all Enterprise captains) explains to the logical and utilitarian alien Spock that “the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.” What he means is that the individual, with his divine spark, with his unique personality, and with all that he means to his friends and loved ones, is ultimately more important than the faceless collective.

Contra Megan Basham and her ilk, libertarians are not secret left wingers, but neither are we allies to the right. We recognize that they are alike in disdaining the individual in favor of the group, whether that group be defined by race, class, gender, nationality, or anything else. If you’ll indulge me a final Star Trek reference, we are not the Borg, whose only function is to preserve itself at the expense of its own citizens. Nor should we aspire to be.