[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas. I’m reposting it by popular request and for historical interest only. I’ve made some very small updates, mostly listing rebuttals that came out over the past few years. I haven’t updated the statistics and everything is accurate as of several years ago. I seem to have lost the sources of my images, and I’m sorry; if I’ve used an image of yours, please let me know and I’ll cite you.]
Also, complaining that "everyone I date is horrible in exactly the same way" should get them a timeout until they've completed some continuing education courses.
Some houses and apartments are small. I have a friend whose house doesn't have a laundry room, so the kitchen was basically the only place to put the clothes washer and dryer - and that effectively crowded out a dishwasher.
Why do people still have cupboards, instead of just having two dishwashers and cycling them between the roles of dishwasher and cupboard every night? It's simple, people are fools.
"For some reason nobody except libertarians has this gut feeling about anything else anymore, so we go and do the things that superficially look like they’ll make things fairer and better and safer."
This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas. An O'Neill Habitat, as implausible as it is, is still more plausible than libertarians taking over New Hampshire.
The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Plenty of countries would let you trade. Gaza is blockaded by Israel due to terrorism, so you would just have to not get blockaded (and blockading is harder if you are farther away, I think - although no tunnels)
Have 30 seconds of beautifully-animated O'Neill Habitat, set to a cheesy Japanese love song (copy the link to jump to the right part, or edit it once it's in your address bar):
> This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas.
Oh yes, I've been secretly saying (i.e., thinking) this for years! Somewhat like Scott's archipelago essay [1], but in space, which has virtually unlimited, unclaimed, uninhabited ... you know, *space*.
Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks. Just pay for the habitat in advance, please. And if an experiment doesn't work out, we can simply deorbit those damn commies.
Okay, the above paragraph is tongue-in-cheek, but otherwise, I'm serious. Just do it in Earth orbit – Mars colonies as a first step are a dumb idea.
> Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks.
For what it's worth, seasteading pretty much is this approach without the "also get to space first" part.
The problem that seasteading has already encountered several times is that, while the world is full of unoccupied land, it isn't full of unclaimed land.
Seasteaders keep running into legal trouble with governments that claim the territory they're trying to seastead on.
Space doesn't have this problem. If you can live in space, you can go somewhere unclaimed.
But if you're willing to go somewhere claimed just because it's possible to live there, seasteading doesn't really help you. It's hard to live there and you don't get any additional freedom. You might as well live on land and just avoid the government.
They can do seasteading in international waters. This will require building artificial islands (or floating islands), but this is still easier than space habitats.
Drifting off topic slightly, but I sometimes wonder if a Mars colony couldn't eventually construct a vast (maybe ten miles in diameter) underground rotating carousal with suitably sloping sides round the periphery, sort of like an upturned frisby, such that Mars's gravity combined with the centrifugal force would allow inhabitants on the interior edge of the periphery to experience almost Earth like gravity without sensing any rotation or bizarre effects or feeling they were on a hillside.
The two best are Revelation Space and Chasm City (parts 1 and 2 of the Revelation Space series).
But if you're interested in the "people make weird communities on their habitats in orbit (and also AI emergencies)", then it's the series The Prefect/Elysium/Machine Vendetta, which take place in the same setting but as prequels.
Revelation Space has an interesting plot, but bad writing—and bad writing from the second sentence: "Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night." "Any of" adds nothing and should be struck. Also from the first page: "'It's going to be a hard one, sir.' The man fidgeted, drawing the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck." We don't need the second sentence: the dialogue should stand on its own, and the reader can infer the speaker's mood or fidgetiness or lack thereof. Bad fiction is full of this sort of overwriting.
Page 11: "Cal nodded without saying a word." "Without saying a word" should be omitted: if there's no dialogue from Cal, we know he's not not saying a word. My book is filled with crossings out of superfluous, repetitive words.
Much later, on page 85, Sylveste "had taken to visiting and waiting with absolute patient while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings[. . . .]" The word "absolute" isn't needed—it doesn't convey anything important—and, beyond that, on page 88, we Lascaille says: "You had patience with me." The narrative voice already told us that Sylveste had patience with Lascaille, on page 85! Pick one spot, not both.
There's a better book in here, and one with a writer more attuned to language and meaning.
> The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Not a problem - by that time we'll either have superhuman sexbots, or if weight is still a problem, will be able to gengineer everyone to be gay and happy about it! (Mission Accomplished banner unfurls)
If the technical aspects of the space habitat are handled by a benevolent but aloof AI, maybe.
But if the technical aspects of maintaining a habitable environment are part of the human society, I expect such societies to trend authoritarian in the way that ships at sea trend authoritarian. When there are things we must do regularly and correctly, or we all die in a terrible fashion, the scope of liberty gets curtailed.
Of course I see this comment five seconds after proposing to market the habitats to gay libertarians. Not that Athos seems like any kind of libertarian utopia, what with their Social Duty Credit system and the rigorous censorship of any imported books and journals.
[slightly tongue in cheek:] Sure, they've got their religious hangups. But as Ethan's half-brother demonstrates, it's possible to go through life ignoring the social duty credit system, as long as you don't care about having children of your own. In a way, it's just the parenting license that some people talk about, but given a bit more force because there's (almost necessarily) centralized control of the means of reproduction. Or you can think of it as a parallel currency system, where you get paid in SDCs for pro-social acts, are fined SDCs for anti-social acts, and can spend SDCs for certain services that are not purchasable with mere cash.
And there's the whole homesteading/frontier aspect, which is libertarian catnip. And people who really don't want any rules can go off beyond the frontier and live the anarchist dream!
Seriously, in a lot of ways, I find it a very appealing vision of a future society.
A good point, but they'd have to be gay libertarians who want to live in space. I'm sure some of them are out there, but we're getting to a pretty small number of people.
Half the marriages worldwide are arranged though. The western idea of autonomous romantic love has high memetic power, but may lose out in the fertility game to the higher matchmaking capability and stability of arranged marriages.
Wikipedia:
> The lowest divorce rates in the world are in cultures with high rates of arranged marriages such as Amish culture of United States (1%),[97] Hindus of India (3%),[87] and Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel (7%).[98] According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, 53.25% of marriages are arranged worldwide. The global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6.3%, which could be an indicator for the success rate of arranged marriages.[99] This has led scholars to ask if arranged marriages are more stable than autonomous marriages, and whether this stability matters.
Yeah, I was just going to mention that. There are lots of humans societies where parents invest at least as much effort into arranging their child's marriage as they would into arranging their child's education, and as far as I can tell it's not an irrational strategy.
There is the question whether it's better in terms of satisfaction, and therefore more stable, or culturally taboo to divorce, and therefore stable regardless of satisfaction, stable even if satisfaction is lower.
Personally, I have some friends in arranged marriages, and they seem just fine to me.
I think "the whole point" here is that Scott's original claim of love as the last unvarnished bastion of libertarianism is reading general principles into recent phenomena of the culture he/we grew up in.
If arranged marriages are the norm worldwide (and especially if divorce was nigh illegal for most of history) then a taboo against regulating love is a modern concept. If the metric is "how it looks" - e.g. ratio of marriage to divorce, number of children, per capita marriage rate - societies that eschew freedom for love are able to put up much stronger numbers than those that embrace freedom for love. The question of what actually works is a bit more difficult/nuanced, and entirely depends on how you define "works". But it's not true to say that love is uniquely unregulated, nor to say that its regulation makes life no longer worth living. Which system is better/preferable is a more difficult story to tell.
I think cultural expectation around a "happy marriage" play into it a lot, obviously - and I'm not saying that to mean that the Western model is better. If your goal for a marriage "Find a sane partner with good money management and childrearing skills who is attractive enough that I enjoy having kids with", the bar is obviously a lot more achievable than "Find the one TRUE LOVE that drives me mad with desire even 50 years in and also self-actualizes me to a better person and I do the same thing in reverse to them."
Love and marriage, pace old American proverbs, are not exactly aligned, though. Some of the most cherished love stories in cultures with arranged marriages are either of a socially-unsuitable but hot/clever party improbably marrying the other, or heartbreak on account of the lovers' inability to be together (but perhaps with the promise of being united in death).
There are also correlations between arranged marriages and fertility. Both cross- countries & cultures today, and historically. The global diffusion of the individualistic-romantic notion that siring and rearing children should be love- based, is connected to the global demographic transition.
Sure. That's why I wrote correlated & connected, not caused. These things are probably best seen as hanging together in some sort of "mental & institutional package", which includes changes in religiosity. Cue: Old-style modernization theory, assuming psychological changes like individuation & meta-acculturation, and changing social structures: new gender roles, increased geographical and social moblity, breakdown of feudal power structures, urbanization....
Parents can usually spot a bad match, and are more objective in assessing the relationship. If a couple is blinded by love, or other things, they may overlook or whitewash red flags, or yellow flags, thinking something like "love conquers all".
If you can't accurately select a good match, why not let your parents select someone at least likely to be compatible?
Arranged marriages also overcome the collective action problem of everyone pursuing the hot people and neglecting the plain-looking but otherwise desirable people. It’s not even sexual attraction that’s the main culprit here, but status seeking and status anxiety. And an arranged marriage takes a lot of the load off of a young person in terms of status anxiety and choice of mate.
It also reduces the time from young people reach fertile age till most of them find someone they permanently settle down & have children with. Hence the female "window" for having children is longer than in societies where women are on their own & therefore search longer before finding a mate they deem suitable to have children with (if at all).
Something similar is the case with men, but with men the main problem when pairing goes from being arranged till being a "market" based on attractiveness is increased probability of not being selected by any women at all. Childlessness at age 40 - a fairly good proxy for life-cycle childlessness - has been rising faster for men than for women during the last decades, in the countries where I have seen data.
Taken together, this helps explain the correlation between societies practicing love-based pairing and reduced (average) fertility levels. (Although there are also other factors involved, of course.)
Yes, although it's hard to disentangle all the confounders here. Families and societies that practice arranged marriage are likely to have parents very involved in their children's affairs, including providing financial support, housing, and childcare in a way that makes it much easier to have children while still young. They are also the sorts of societies that will pressure young people into marriage and parenthood at the culturally-prescribed age. It may be more useful to look at arranged marriage as just one aspect of a whole cultural complex that leads to these various outcomes.
Sure, cultural elements hang together in larger cultural packages/complexes.
Related to this, the late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger made a useful distinction between intrinsic versus extrinsic cultural linkages.
Intrinsic linkages relate to cultural elements that hang together and mutually reinforce each other. People tend to have adopted all, or none. Arranged marriages + deference to the eldest + subordination of women to men + religious beliefs stating all of this pleases God, might be intrinsic linkages.
Extrinsic linkages are the opposite. Here, it is possible to pick elements from different cultural packages without creating contradictions (=instability) in the whole-of-culture overall mindset of members. One example could be fundamentalist Islam + cultural acceptance of weapons made by Western (secular) engineers.
The point in this context: If arranged marriages belong to a different cultural “package” than the romantic love cultural “package”, once you leave the former it is difficult to go home again. The new package consists of other linkages, which strengthens and locks each other in, and you and your local society are on the road to what (for lack of a better word) can be labelled “modernity”. Where low fertility is partly a long-term outcome, and partly one of the intrinsic linkages in the new package.
Only an (old) hypothesis. But old hypotheses that still intuitively make some sense are worth keeping in the theoretical repertoire; they have in a way stood the test of time.
At the end of the day it is an empirical question, of course. Some individuals as well as societies are better at living with cultural contradictions without individual members experiencing psychological tensions (leading to cultural instability).
Your analysis is extremely compelling and also depressing. The jokes I make with my college friends about arranged marriages between our children are probably doomed to remain jokes.
The major problem with arranged marriages isn't a lack of love issue, it's the carrot and stick technology issue. I've seen more than one woman go mental after entiering an arranged marriage because technocratic perverts convinced her that she was wronged and isn't realizing her true self.
Which is of course downstream of a lot of things but most directly urbanization.
Even in India people generally frown upon people being forced to get married. Arranged marriages still involve people getting a choice in whether they want to marry the other person.
It's my understanding that the potential bride and groom have a say in the process, or perhaps a veto, but you'd better have a good reason, or at least be firm in your refusal if the parents are set on the marriage going forward.
I was going to say something like that. Valuing romantic love and eventually using it as a basis for marriage goes back to the 12th century. Not so long ago in human history. It's not a human fundamental.
It was and is a fascinating cultural innovation. European countries were early adopters of this cultural practice, but it has turned into a global cultural diffusion process. Still ongoing.
...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way.
Many Thanks! Yes, they involve things. I tend to see the distinction as fairly blurry.
Does having someone in the role of matchmaker not count at all as a thing? (and then omitting them in the switch to romantic marriages becomes a negative technology) What about the documents that record the marriage? What about written laws that say which marriages are considered as legitimate and which not?
And literacy, yes, involves some sort of writing tool and some sort of writing surface, but involves inventing the alphabet, teaching it, the acts of writing and reading, so I see it as more cultural than technological.
One other competitor: Government. Would that count as cultural, or partly technological? A person acting in the specialized role of king - as with matchmakers, they could be considered an object as part of the machinery, or as a purely cultural phenomenon. Are the weapons of the king's henchmen the crucial part, or does strong-arm rule, where it is just the obedience of the henchmen to the king, and therefore of everyone else to the king and his henchmen, count as purely cultural?
Good points all of them. So yes, I agree, "culture" is a concept with blurry edges.
I wanted to boost Nancy's comment, through, because this innovation (romantic love being/becoming seen as the main legitimate reason for pair-bonding) is more under the radar than the innovations you mention. While its long-term consequences arguably are just as important - perhaps even more important - for nothing less than the gradually evolving gene-pool of us humans:-)
"...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way."
This is like saying "You cannot build infinitely high, therefore it's a good thing you only built two stories high."
Well, we're going to build approx. 11 billion humans high, if I may mix metaphors...I would argue that may already be dangerously high, before we start to scale down
This is true, but as I understand it even arranged marriages are changing to be a little more like romantic marriages. People are talking more, getting to know each other more beforehand, calling marriages off where they find their partner unsuitable where before they just would have gone ahead with it, etc.
The average arranged marriage of today is a little more flexible than the average arranged marriage of the past. Will that eventually become full on romantic marriage? Maybe, maybe not.
Love the bubble confirmation: Indians are obviously a huge percentage of world population, and also huge in tech, where Scott swims. Yet very few weighing in with personal experience, real knowledge, just a lot of "I understand . . ." or "I've heard . . . ."
Considering the base-rates of domestic violence and child abuse the world over, I would say that these rates of divorce are too low. There are situations where a person should leave a marriage. These rates do not reflect stability, but force or a lack of other options, that come at the expense of someone's wellbeing.
If the government doesn't especially help or hinder arranged marriages, then they can still be part of a libertarian regime. Families and communities make steep bargains with individuals all the time. There isn't necessarily anything statist about it.
The practice is still surprisingly common (surprising to me at any rate) in many migrant communities. I have several friends who travelled to their home countries for a few months (and no, not primarily India or China) only to then return to the west with a bride or groom in tow.
Or, on a couple of occasions, return to the west without said bride or groom but a very very interesting story about how they almost did.
One argument why love is special: it affects the specific person you're intentionally involved with instead of the general public (unlike things like selling drugs at pharmacies or crypto scams, or driving where you can potentially hit and kill anyone on the street).
I guess child raising is also like this? But the advocates for the laws that interfere with child raising would argue that those laws are only against abuse, which does also apply to marriage. And the laws against home schooling probably come from schooling's history as a communal thing everyone sent their kids to. Which does imply that centralized dating apps increase the risk of regulations on love.
Maybe there were exactly 64695 pounds of fins, but they didn't want to risk having their case dismissed on a technicality, such as the lawyer of the other side drying the fins a bit more, weighing them again, and demonstrating that now it is only 64694 pounds? But if they wrote "approximately 65000" instead, the lawyer could accuse them of exaggerating the number on purpose?
I thought economic deregulation had been more common than the converse, past 50 years so, barring DEI initiatives?
It's not that hard to break out the life-satisfaction stats on arranged marriages vs. non-arranged marriages, and the former generally stack up pretty well, though obviously there's a lot of confounders related to SES and ethnic background.
Deregulation can very plausibly (I don't know how to actually check this) lead to laws with higher word/page counts, because many forms of deregulation come in the form of new and convoluted loopholes inserted by regulatory capture.
Perhaps this isn't what "deregulation" means to most people, but it seems plausible as a manner of disagreement; principled libertarians would plausibly view regulatory capture as equally bad (or at least on the same scale of bad) as any other sort of government regulation. I (and many others on the left) would view regulatory capture as very bad (it's regulations that cause harm to increase wealth disparity while leaving the net welfare of the general population the same or worse than before) while other types of regulations as often neutral to good (it causes harm to either improve the net welfare of the general population while either leaving wealth disparity the same or lower).
De facto deregulation via loophole is possible. I am not sure how common it is: when the regulators don't like that loophole, they can close it with a new law.
You are right that what counts as deregulation can require a judgement call, and different people can make different judgements.
There are a few clear cut cases that most people agree on, but also lots of grey areas.
Incumbents are often quite ok with extra regulations, because there are economics of scale in compliance: ie extra rules hassle upstarts more than bigger established players.
> Usually when things are this unfair, we demand some attempt to restore fairness, maybe through redistribution.
I suspect there are very few incels among the Amish, or other very religious groups, because they have a strong interest in match-making within their groups.
Thinking back to your gene selection post, I suspect the Amish are on average more evolutionarily successful than even the richest billionaires, the most intelligent geniuses, or the tallest basketball players.
I think culture wins over genes a lot of the time, provided the genes are just *good enough* to provide a substrate for the culture to grow on.
Maybe that's how Jews have lasted thousands of years, even.
He would have had to sleep with a new woman every day for 55 years to do that. He died at 63, so in fact he would have to average over 1 new woman every day during the years he was sexually active.
According to wikipedia, he based the claim on having slept with 23 different women in an unremarkable 10-day period, halving that (to err on the conservative side while accounting for variation), and then extrapolating back to age 15.
Sex != children because of birth control. Chamberlain was a multimillionaire, if any of those women got pregnant, they would have had a *very* strong monetary incentive to file for child support. So it's unlikely he had *unacknowledged* kids.
He has at least one unacknowledged kid. There was a recent basketball documentary called "Goliath" where they tracked down and interviewed a man whose DNA test results confirmed that he was Wilt's son.
Supposedly part of the explanation for polygyny is that if you have very high fertility population where men marry downwards in age, there are too many women as younger generations are bigger. I've heard similar issues about unmarried women among high fertility groups such as Jews.
But do the Amish have nukes? They're not actually "evolutionarily successful" if they don't have the power to secure their own existence. Technology and violence are part of the game. Native Americans learned that the hard way.
The Amish have nukes in the same sense that everyone else in America does. That is, the government has them, and we (hopefully) benefit from that protection.
But they barely have any societal influence. If the rest of society sees them as a liability, they have no means of protecting themselves. The same can't be said for bigger, more powerful social groups, which have enough influence and leverage to avoid being ostracized in the first place.
The Amish win. At least until their influence, unbeknownst to them becomes a threat by caveat of simply not losing. I'm sure some blue hair wacko will start causing them more shit for no good reason other than mental illness via city living.
the Jews did it the other way, via infiltration and coincidentally being the smartest, whilst dually only breeding with other Jews, a LOT more suffering and discontent that direction though. Amish are the Isolation path.
Yeah, I was going to say, the whole norm of <always punish the man> and <believe women> definitely seems like an increase in regulation. You also see a corresponding rise in prudery...I'm sorry, *preventing the objectification of women* in movies, TV, and video games by showing much less skin and (in video games) making major characters much less attractive.
(My hypothesis: cultural norms are sticky in subtle ways, and Americans just found another way to suppress sex. even though the political valence switched sides.)
I think some places in US maintain enough equality that when the man complained about the drunk date first, it was the woman who ended up with some restrictions imposed.
«Believe» is about evidence standards, though! I tried to pick an example where the situation is symmetric, people wanted (in the moment) what has happened for non-transactional reasons, and even with facts being undisputed and well established the regulation previously was not expected to happen.
I'm pretty sure the attractiveness of female leads in Hollywood films plummeted over the past decade as well. Sure, there are still some obvious bombshells, but there are a lot more realistic-looking women up at the top now, too.
I do not particularly think of this as a good thing. I think films should show the pinnacle of achievement, not average, and that this should follow through to physical nature.
The rise in "prudery," preventing objectification of women, doesn't really follow for males. This seems almost blindingly obvious in eg TV series like "The Boys" where they will show full male nudity, and have an entire scene taking place in the ass of a man (who shortly thereafter explodes... yes, the entire man). Meanwhile, never even a bare female breast is ever seen, because <CLUTCH THE PEARLS>.
It's also going to be market forces; you probably can't sell a film/tv show to men on the basis of sex appeal, as porn's so ubiquitous it's destroyed the market for quasi-porn.
Oh that's an interesting take that strikes me as true. It didn't occur to me only because I largely dislike porn, but I love nudity in non-porn films. I'm probably not the target audience for any of this stuff.
#3 reminds me that a lot of the problem of dating apps is due to lack of information. Fuller and more accurate disclosure could fix some of what’s wrong with them - e.g. filtering matches by how many people they’ve hooked up with through the app could prevent commitment-minded women from wasting time with lying rakes. All of people’s behavior the app could basically be made part of their profile in lieu of the reputational system that would incentivize good behavior if you met through friends.
Misrepresentation is indeed the Achilles heel of dating apps. I know why but what an unfortunate phenomenon given the potential to match accurate wants and attributes at scale.
Preach it - the tens of thousands of Phd's at FB and GOOG are entirely wasted.
With the amount of data they have on everyone, and the amount of brainpower they have, if FB or GOOG did dating apps and you were looking for a LTR, they should literally be able to instantly pick a partner with much higher chance of LTR success than both of you could yourselves, swiping for months. All the information is there, with certainty. An ASI would have no problem doing any of these things, and I'd even bet GPT-5 or 6 could do this with high fidelity.
But nooo, all that collective brainpower is wasted on enshittification and making their core products worse, while totally failing at relevant ad customization and serving.
Counterpoint: at least one wouldn't swipe on the other. What's the highest LTR for A is probably not the highest LTR for B. Symmetry shouldn't be assumed.
FB Dating is literally free so you don't have that whole profit incentive argument you do with Match Group properties. In fact the incentive is probably the other way if people in LTR are happier and post more.
The fundamental problem is what people say and what people want is different, and even if FB or GOOG gave you what you wanted, people wouldn't meet up.
Do you really think so? I mean yes, the Stable Marriage Problem requires one gender to be the proposer and the other chooser for it to work mathematically, but I think we're close enough to that in empirical dynamics.
As long as they tranched both genders by ELO and proposed your top 3 matches (or whatever) within your ELO band, and then the woman chose, I don't see why this wouldn't work out like the classical Stable Marriage solution.
Yes, what people say and what they want is different, but that's the whole *point* of Google knowing you better than you know yourself - it can propose the "want," rather than the say. And with appropriate marketing and differentiation, I don't see why they couldn't get past the superficial swipe problem / assymetry you're calling out (maybe using LLM's or simple local biz partnerships to set up 3 actual dates that are blind going in with the top 3 candidates, so that you can't nope out before a date, and so you have time to actually interact and perceive the underlying quality of the match).
Unless you're trying to say that current dating app dynamics have poisoned the culture and mentality of "choosers" so much that this wouldn't work. The classic exposition of this problem is that women can get 9's and 10's for short term dates and hookups pretty much infinitely, so they don't want to settle for a 7 for an LTR (or whichever ELO would actually settle for an LTR with them), because they think they should be able to pull a 10 for an LTR too.
But A) this is just a small subset of women who actually want and try to hook up with 10's, B) even those women eventually figure this out, and C) if GOOG or FB sufficiently differentiated the format so you couldn't swipe, and so you'd actually interact with the person to observe the underlying compatibility, I don't see why it couldn't work.
>Yes, what people say and what they want is different, but that's the whole _point_ of Google knowing you better than you know yourself - it can propose the "want," rather than the say.
I like it - but I hope it works better than Gemini... (I posed my usual "What inorganic compounds are gases at STP" again to Gemini, and got the usual bad answers. It even included water.)
Love and friendship are indeed the last bastions of unregulated relationships: you have your preferences and there’s nothing the state can do about it. I second this
> Love operates on the non-aggression principle. To a first approximation, the only rule is that you may not seize it by force. Otherwise, anything goes.
"I love you therefore you owe me" is a pretty common and [micro-]aggressive stance.
“Love” is driven by the sexual desire right? I’m talking purely of romantic love for now
And societies have tried to regulate sex— somewhat successfully I might add. Sure we had the sexual revolution in the 60s but that also led to soaring STD and divorce rates.
Even now, sex is regulated by a strong shaming culture.
Love is separate from sex. You can have love without sex (e.g., platonic) and sex without love (e.g., prostitution). They CAN be related, but don't have to be.
I feel like a strong shaming culture is the cornerstone to a lot of proposed libertarian societies. Read many libertarian writers, and they explain that companies will not intentionally sell defective goods because it will decrease their reputation.
The proposed motive there is avoiding lost business, not shame. Given that many people are shameless, the desire to avoid losing business is a more plausible argument.
Shame is not a regulation. If someone is "shamed" it is because they are responding to freely expressed opinions, specifically to maintain access to the good graces of people and groups.
After reading the footnote on the progressive deregulation of love over time, I feel like this is a pretty big bullet to bite and still keep the overall claim of the essay. How many of the love stories of legend are about forbidden love? Regulation over the conditions under which intimate bonds and babies get made is an unbelievably powerful tool of social control. See anti miscegenation laws, sodomy laws, forced sterilization, forced marriages and enslavement, even primate bands regulate mating through direct violence in maintenance of the group status hierarchy.
You frame love as enduring under a protective power while regulation slowly strangles all else. But that has been incredibly far from the status quo throughout most of human history. If you care about increasing liberty overall, it might be worth asking what caused the rapid draw down in state intervention and if there were deliberate tactics that can be applied elsewhere.
The moral of a forbidden love story is almost always 'Deregulate Love!', though. Romeo and Juliet even gets name dropped for modern deregulation surrounding age of consent, something even most libertarians consider sacred in other domains. The people have always aspired to libertarian treatment of love, even when the state had little incentive to comply.
l don't think a 'regulation slowly strangling everything' narrative holds up pre-democracy for much of anything, apart from that which is only possible in industrialized, wealthy countries. The liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were a huge leap towards libertarianism and codified many of its principles.
"The people have always aspired to libertarian treatment of love, even when the state had little incentive to comply."
Historically, the primary opposition to free sexual and romantic behavior has been from family patriarchs specifically and the family unit more broadly. Next to that, religious institutions. The state has not been very involved in most places for most of history. It simply makes no sense to say that "the people have always aspired" to something that the people themselves were in control of.
Well, it certainly helps that sexual liberation hasn't been all that consequential. Interracial marriage is a complete non-issue, gay marriage hasn't changed anything beyond making gay people's lives a bit better, and people are actually having less sex now because everything sucks. We still regulate the things that do have consequences, like rape and child molestation, but otherwise, why should the state care about love? There is no pragmatic incentive for it... unless they wanted to raise fertility rates by forcing people to have children. But that would be an extremely hard sell.
Prostitution is the liberterian model for love. It's transactional, and as a single category of behavior it obfuscates enormous differences in the power dynamics that define each case, such that trafficking or survival sex becomes grouped under the same label as call girls and others who have no plausible coercion to work.
Sex is a concrete act, a service to person very similar to massage. It can (and it is) priced, including division into specific services and metrics. Quite codified in fact.
Sexual pleasure is relatively concrete but seldom priced because it's subjective. Same as food: it's priced, but not in term of pleasure you will derive from it. People pay more for food that is in high demand/supply ratio because it usually please more a lot of people, or food that is hard to do because else nobody would do it....but no garantee you will get pleasure in relation with what you pay: you can hate foie gras, caviar or champagne, and love cheap pancakes. The price you pay and the pleasure you get are not individually and directly connected, only market-connected, which is very different. Same for sex.
Love is not priced, not because it is some transcendent beautiful thing that can not be measured, but because it is an indirect term that cover a lot of different things. My best attempt at finding a common pattern is any behavior that net-increase the happiness of the loved one and do not increase the happiness of the lover-one, while still costing him something. This is just another name for pure altruism.
And, like pure altruism, my take is it is extremely rare (or even completely absent) out of biological territory (the benefit is genetic but not individual and altruism show in the rare case they differ). Most of what look like pure non-biological altruism is wrong appreciation of cost/benefit for the altruist: individual cost and benefits can differ a lot from average ones and are not often fully exposed, or even fully conscious. And they also have a large biological part.
Romantic relations are imho a kind of transaction, a very high-stake and non-commodized one (and thus a very opaque and imperfect one: ever wondered why buying a laptop is so straightforward, regulated and with clear consumer protections and garantees, while buying a home is like bargaining for a used carpet in a middle-east bazar? Well, romantic relations is the house-buying kind of transaction...and it's on the way out in quite a few parts of the world, because people refuse to see it's transactional nature, i.e. refuse to see it conditional to a set of benefits exceed the set of costs.
Maybe there is another element: in addition to the transaction that you need to pretend do not exists, romantic love (and other kind of) also imply a kind of time insurance of not fleeing quickly to a better offer (vague because it is expected to move if you keep getting much better alternative for a while - again while pretending it's not the case). But this is common for personalized transaction where some fidelity component is expected and present to some extent. This is again very similar, enforced by reputation and traitor punishment, dissolving with anonymity and asymmetry of punishment in case of contract breach.
Within economics, I would make a comparison to the problem of the firm. Theoretically, we could all just contract on the spot for all the work that needs to be done. But instead there are firms with salaried employees who are not paid per unit of work, but instead regularly paid over long periods of time to carry out arbitrary commands their bosses may give them. The theory is that contracts are incomplete and there are costs to matching up, drafting contracts, etc and thus that it's more efficient to establish that employee-employer relationship. Similarly, marriage is supposed to be a long-term stable relationship rather than a one-off. It is supposed to encompass much more than a one-off sex act.
"People pay more for food that is in high demand/supply ratio because it usually please more a lot of people, or food that is hard to do because else nobody would do it....but no garantee you will get pleasure in relation with what you pay: you can hate foie gras, caviar or champagne, and love cheap pancakes."
Allow me to quote from "Four Faultless Felons" by G.K. Chesterton, where a small group of men are discussing the noted, indeed notorious, socialite Count de Marillac:
"In short, it is what people call Asceticism, and one of the modern mistakes is not allowing for its real existence in rare but quite real people. To live a life of incessant austerity and self-denial, as Marillac does, is surrounded with extraordinary difficulties and misunderstandings in modern society. Society can understand some particular Puritan fad, like Prohibition, especially if it is imposed on other people, above all, on poor people. But a man like Marillac, imposing on himself, not abstinence from wine, but abstinence from worldly pleasures of every sort. . . ."
"Excuse me," said Pinion in his most courteous tones, "I trust I'd never have the incivility to suggest that you have gone mad, so I must ask you to tell me candidly whether I have."
"Most people," replied the other, "would answer that it is Marillac who has gone mad. Perhaps he has; anyhow, if the truth were known, he would certainly be thought so. But it isn't only to avoid being put in a lunatic asylum that he hides his hermit's ideal by pretending to be a man of pleasure. ...But our friend is a Christian anchorite; and understands the advice, 'When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.' He is not seen of men to fast. On the contrary, he is seen of men to feast. Only, don't you see, he has invented a new kind of fasting."
Mr. Pinion of the Comet suddenly laughed, a curt and startled laugh, for he was very quick and had already guessed the joke.
"You don't really mean —" he began.
"Well, it's quite simple, isn't it?" replied his informant. "He feasts on all the most luxurious and expensive things that he doesn't like. Especially on the things that he simply detests. Under that cover, nobody can possibly accuse him of virtue. He remains impenetrably protected behind a rampart of repulsive oysters and unwelcome aperitifs. In short, the hermit must now hide anywhere but in the hermitage. He generally hides in the latest luxurious gilded hotels, because that's where they have the worst cooking."
"This is a very extraordinary tale," said the American, arching his eyebrows.
"You begin to see the idea?" said the other. "If he has twenty different hors d'œuvres brought to him and takes the olives, who is to know that he hates olives? If he thoughtfully scans the whole wine-list and eventually selects a rather recondite Hock, who will guess that his whole soul rises in disgust at the very thought of Hock: and that he knows that's the nastiest —even of Hocks? Whereas, if he were to demand dried peas or a mouldy crust at the Ritz, he would probably attract attention."
"I never can quite see," said the man in spectacles restlessly, "what is the good of it all."
The other man lowered his magnetic eyes and looked down with some embarrassment. At last he said:
"I think I can see it, but I don't think I can say it. I had a touch of it myself once, only in one special direction, and I found it almost impossible to explain to anybody. Only there is one mark of the real mystic and ascetic of this sort; that he only wants to do it to himself. He wants everybody else to have what wine or smokes they want and will ransack the Ritz for it. The moment he wants to dragoon the others, the mystic sinks into a mire of degradation and becomes the moral reformer."
There was a pause, and then the journalist said suddenly:
"But, look here, this won't do. It isn't only wasting his money on wining and dining that has got Marillac a bad name. It's the whole thing. Why is he such a fan for these rotten erotic plays and things? Why does he go about with a woman like Mrs. Prague? That doesn't seem like a hermit, anyhow."
The man facing Pinion smiled and the heavier man on his right half turned with a sort of grunt of laughter.
"Well," he said, "it's pretty plain you've never been about with Mrs. Prague."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Pinion; and this time there was something like a general laugh.
..."But her conversation!" groaned his friend. "And Marillac stands it for hours on end!"
"And her play!" assented the other. "Marillac sits through five mortal acts of it. If that isn't being a martyr—"
"Don't you see?" cried the shabby man with something like excitement. "The Count is a cultivated and even learned man; also he is a Latin and logical to the point of impatience. And yet he sticks it. He endures five or six acts of a Really Modern Intellectual Incisive Drama. The First Act in which she says that Woman will no longer be put on a pedestal; the Second Act in which Woman will no longer be put under a glass case; the Third Act in which Woman will no longer be a plaything for man, and the Fourth in which she will no longer be a chattel; all the clichés. And he still has two acts before him, in which she will not be something else, will not be a slave in the home or an outcast flung from the home. He's seen it six times without turning a hair; you can't even see him grind his teeth. And Mrs. Prague's conversation! How her first husband could never understand, and her second husband seemed as if he might understand, only her third husband carried her off as if there was real understanding — and so on, as if there were anything to be understood. You know what an utterly egotistical fool is like. And he suffers even those fools gladly."
"In fact," put in the big man in his brooding manner, "you might say he has invented the Modern Penance. The Penance of Boredom. Hair-shirts and hermits' caves in a howling wilderness would not be so horrible to modern nerves as that."
Not even just sugar daddies - if (as is often the case), you make a lot more than your partner, you tend to pick up a lot more of the checks / expenses, just because it makes more sense for you to do so.
I almost never see a 50/50 expenses relationship, but my social circles are skewed by overtly successful men.
The question is certainly worth investigating, and I'd love to see Scott's take on it. Over all recorded history, prostitution was considered normal and even necessary. (E.g. there is no "incel" problem in such cultures.) Only recently there's been a concerted campaign to outlaw it. From what I've read, in the US, it was "the great morality campaigns" of the late 1800s in the cities which outlawed it, and those were driven by middle-class women to ensure a supply of men who wanted to marry them. On the ideological front, there's been an intense campaign to differentiate "sex" from "love", so we can chatter about how love is a libertarian freedom without mentioning that how we carry it out is extremely regulated. (You don't have to read much historical anecdotia to discover that transfer of assets was often considered a normal part of romantic relationships even when they weren't purely transactional.)
"Over all recorded history, prostitution was considered normal and even necessary."
But the prostitutes were not considered part of normal society and were still shunned as 'fallen women'. Even for institutions where you might have gradations, like courtesans or hetaira or geisha, who were not expected to service several clients but were more the acknowledged mistresses of one man, while they also provided entertainment with music, dance, and literary skills to their clientele there was still the distinction between respectable women who would be wife/marriage material, and such women who may have had greater social freedom but would never be of the same status.
Also, in societies where prostitution was "considered normal and even necessary", there were a lot of slaves used for prostitution, women sold into prostitution by their families in times of economic necessity often as girls or children, and the difficulty of ever 'buying out' your contract since expenses upon expenses were added on and unless you managed to attract a wealthy man as your patron who would pay it off and establish you as a concubine, you were pretty much stuck in that life for good.
It wasn't always a matter of choice, either; dancers and entertainers were also providing sexual services as 'part of the package' be it at Greek symposia, or when the system of Indian temple patronage for dancers had broken down into prostitution.
So while men might avail of prostitution with little to no stigma (hence, it's normal and natural), it was by no means the same for the women involved. This is at the root of the campaigns around "sex work is real work".
> But the prostitutes were not considered part of normal society and were still shunned as 'fallen women'
Depends on the prostitute. In many religions, from ancient Babylon to India, the temple prostitute was a priestess, and sex with her was an act of worship and devotion, not a mere carnal pleasure. In fact, the Hindus invented the Kama Sutra to allow lay people (heh) to follow the bare (heh) minimum of sexual worship procedures necessary to remain sacred, without going through extensive theosomatic training.
Re: devadasi, I avoided that topic since I don't know enough about it, but there does seem to be a degradation over time where the patronage by rich and noble rulers of temples ceased or diminished greatly, and the temple dancers/wives of the god were reduced to prostitution.
This would not have been the same everywhere, of course, and I imagine there was always a difference between "formally associated with the temple and married to the deity" and "singers/dancers/musicians who performed there as well as for secular celebrations". But even with the high status entertainers, where the sexual services were not assumed to be automatic, there was still the delineation of separateness from 'ordinary' life:
"There were hierarchies among the performing artists, and the tawaifs were at the top, a class distinct from street performers and prostitutes. (A Tawaif is a dancer, not a prostitute.) Tawaif kothas, where the tawaifs often lived and performed, would host meetings of local intelligentsia, presided mostly by the most senior tawaif of the kotha. Tawaifs enjoyed influence among writers, journalists and poets. The poets longed for a tawaif to sing their works and asked the famous tawaif if she could sing his poems. In those days, having tawaif perform his own work was a way to ensure that poetry would be remembered and passed down from generation to generation. A Tawaif had an unconventional approach to relationships, where female performers were expected to remain unmarried but were permitted to have relationships with patrons. Tawaifs traditionally served loyal mistresses to wealthy patrons. Only once a relationship was terminated, either due to the death of their patron or a mutual decision to part ways, would a tawaif look to enter into another relationship."
Similarly, for a devadas to be 'married to the god' meant that she could never have marital relationship with men, whether that be that she lived celibate life in temple service, or that this was a form of social permission for men to visit women outside of their own marriages.
Movies are not evidence, of course, but they also show elements of what is considered acceptable socially or, by the events within the plot, what is not remarked upon by the particular audience for being outside custom or too outrageous.
Look at this Kannada movie from 2001 and the simple line here which has a *lot* to unpack if you're not familiar with what goes on:
"Manjunatha meets Katyayini a to-become devadasi (Servant of the Lord) and marries her."
So what does this mean, a "soon to become devadasi"? Well, part of the plotline is that Katyayini is hoping to have a marriage arranged for her soon, but the wealthy (relatively, by the standards of her small village) rakes and headmen want to have sex with her without marriage. So they set up a trap whereby she, by staying out all night unchaperoned! in the company of a man not a relative! is declared to be a fallen woman and is going to be 'initiated' as a "servant of the lord" (that is, a village prostitute). Even against the protests of her parents, because nobody dares go against custom, tradition, and the powerful men of the village, until Manjunatha (who has been acting as a social reformer and rebel all along) steps forward and says he'll marry her.
See from about 36 to 39 minute mark here, and tell me that she and her parents look delighted that she is now going to be a temple prostitute:
Right, and humans being human, there was probably some, shall we say, expedient flexibility inherent in the practice of temple prostitution and sacred sexual rites, dating before even the devadasi all the way back to Ancient Sumer. Temple prostitutes existed even back then, as female priestesses dedicated to Inanna (the major goddess of fertility, love, and war). However, the worshipers still had to pay a fee to be, ahem, blessed by Inanna through them; the fee was very conveniently collected by the temple as a whole, especially since even the kings were obligated to render their dues to Inanna before they could take up their reign.
Herodotus reports a similar practice in Babylonia, in his own totally neutral and dispassionate way:
> The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life. Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to mingle with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and stand there with a great retinue of attendants. But most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the men pass and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, "I invite you in the name of Mylitta". It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. After their intercourse, having discharged her sacred duty to the goddess, she goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfil the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four. There is a custom like this in some parts of Cyprus.
I've noticed that psychotherapists have pretty conventional/conservative views on love and sex -- that is, conventional relative to the well-educated social class they hail from and treat, which can be at odds with the larger society. I suspect this is why Scott can write about the libertarian aspects of love without noticing how it's regulated in our society. A good litmus case would be how he would counsel somebody who had successfully taken up being a "pick up artist", picking up girls from clubs for non-committed sex. That's perfectly legal in our society, but frowned upon by our social class.
We can focus on power dynamics, or we can focus on consenting adults making the best choices they can for themselves under the circumstances. I don't think we can do both. Preventing transactions driven by power dynamics inevitably also prevents people from doing what they think is best for themselves. What most people call "freedom".
Being able to do only things that society approves as proper is conformism. It's fundamentally opposed to the idea of human rights - rights that allow people to make their own choices, despite the disapproval of society.
Sure. Let's follow that to it's conclusion and allow child labor, pederasty, remove paternalism towards people with severe cognitive disabilities and let them fend for themselves, abolish laws requiring the use of translators in contracts between people who speak different languages since different levels of access to information are just part of the natural world and have to be accepted for the sake of freedom. Let's stop trying to prevent old people from being scammed. In fact, the concept of a scam should be abolished as it's too subjective; where is the line between a legitimate and illegitimate difference in knowledge?
I did say "adults" up there, didn't I? I favor strong (much stronger than current) enforcement of common law fraud and legal penalties for deception of all kinds. Even legal requirements to inform people.
But requirements for honesty and information isn't the same as prohibiting informed adults from doing what they choose to do (that doesn't directly harm 3rd parties).
We're not going to agree, I suspect. I'm just saying you can *either* prohibit transactions society doesn't like, or you can let people make the core decisions about their own lives. You can't do both.
>I'm just saying you can *either* prohibit transactions society doesn't like, or you can let people make the core decisions about their own lives. You can't do both.
There are intermediate policies. I think of your
>Even legal requirements to inform people.
as being one of them. Another possibility is a "cooling off periods" before a (long term) transaction becomes permanent. Another class of possibilities is some flavor of "prove that you know what you are doing" requirement (e.g. for a binding commitment, to be able to recall the terms of the commitment).
Most cases of "sex trafficking" turn out to be voluntary prostitution. It's just a word anti-prostitution activists made up to gin up public fear, like "white slavery" in the 19th century. When pressed, advocates have already prepared their withdrawal to the motte of "redefine the word coercion so that it's coercive if you do it because you need the money," an idea that, if taken seriously, would prohibit all work done by the poor.
It wouldn't prohibit work by the poor. It is an argument against capitalism, or rule by capital. As a formerly homeless person I've definitely chosen to risk death over indignity before. It's neither inconceivable nor good nor necessary.
Also, I recall reading part of a book (I wish I could remember the name) where the author, a human rights activist, says their organization used to to advocate for legal prostitution, thinking that legal regulation would curb the worst abuses. But they reversed course when they observed that this didn't seem to be the case; legalizing prostitution only allowed the abuses to continue.
It's hugely dependent on country, but I indeed think "most" is likely to be true. When it's not true, it's often mixed with other issues like illegal immigration, which indeed allow most modern forms of slavery. This is human trafficking, sex is a subpart of the issue ( "sex trafficked" prostitutes have more in common with migrant workers doing construction/harvesting work/servants in wealthy house (typically with their passport stolen and often not speaking the local language) than with escorts or students looking for sugar daddies). Same for drug addiction and homelessness: In this case prostitution is much closer to street thieving than to European eros centers.
So I agree: sex trafficking is often used to as a scarecrow for prostitution, to regulate access to casual sex from money. Like pedophilia for regulating acceptable age difference, heroine addiction for regulating recreational drugs,....A common scheme, as old as the world (or at least mass medias)...
The argument about looking good / actually working begs to be turned around, though? What looks awful currently is regulating people's love lives, what could -in an utilitarian sense- be good is reducing one of the main sources of murder. At the expense of trivial government controls of the sort of drivers' licenses and traffic rule enforcement, which reduces traffic deaths and hasn't really been the way we've been turned in a dystopia.
Fwiw, not endorsing that we should regulate it. It'd probably have a million failure modes and be abused horribly. Just taking the argument to its logical conclusion: often what looks good is what our fuzzy feelings about very direct personal experiences tell us, and that opinion doesn't change until a lot of effort is put into having people internalize the meaning of big, abstract numbers. Cf buying mosquito nets vs helping your local community.
Could issue state-backed competence-in-romance licenses, but without any specialized formal enforcement mechanism. Anyone who wants to go on an unlicensed date is still de facto free to do that, but if something goes horribly wrong during that date, presence or absence of licenses might factor in to the judicial response... and thus, the kind of people who worry about such outcomes might add "check prospective partner's license or lack thereof" as a worthwhile step in their decision algorithm.
Fictional city of Templar, AZ (in the comic of the same name) featured prostitution licenses functioning in a similar capacity. Young women with no actual interest in earning money that way would go through the certification process just to use the card as a prop as part of flirting.
Marriage licenses used to have actual substantive requirements, like medical exams (to check for venereal diseases, etc.). Adultery used to be a criminal offense not too long ago. As others here have noted, love and marriage have long been regulated by the state.
Re. footnote 2: yes, it's definitely a simplified story. AFAIK, in Germany people needed a marriage license until the mid-1800, to make sure that marriage partners had sufficient economic resources to raise children. Marriage is a different thing from love and passion, though, and the many children who were born out of wedlock were, of course, dealt a shitty hand. Maybe that's one of the reasons for deregulation: many regulations also punish innocents and push them to the margins of society for life. Then again, deregulation hasn't exactly solved that problem, it has only absolved the state of the direct responsibility.
At least in Finland, confirmation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_(Lutheran_Church)) was required to get married in a Lutheran Church, and until freedom of religion was expended, that's how you got married (well, unless you belonged to some other approved church, back before the freedom was expanded fully but after the most strict period of Lutheranism was over).
We've gone through a fairly recent (in the grand scale of things) deregulation of love, and since things have seemed to still go fairly OK, nobody has yet bothered to reregulate it. Of course it's always possible that it happens in the future.
There was a small but real possibility to fail. You had to demonstrate ability to read the catechism. Or after failing the test sufficiently many times (to your public humiliation and delaying your confirmation by several years), cite sufficient amount of passages from memory while you and the priest administering the test agreed to pretend you were able to read.
Also, divorce law is quite complicated and varies substantially by country. In some countries there's still a waiting period of 9+ months after a divorce before women are allowed to remarry, nominally to guarantee the parentage of any potential issue from the new marriage.
I didn't know about the Germany part, and I haven't found anything about it. It seems like after the end of feudalism, and under the influence of new ideas Napoleon brought from France, the civil marriage ("Zivilehe") was introduced, then in restauration time abolished again, then reintroduced in the 1870s. In Austria, on the other hand, there was this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politischer_Ehekonsens Perhaps this is what you were referring to. It is a license to guarantee that the couple is economically able to have a marriage, introduced in 1820 and mostly abolished again in 1869. Fun story: Austrians who could not marry without this license would hike to Rome, because in Rome if an unmarried couple was found together, they were married by force.
This is something my wife told me about; she came across mentions of marriage licenses frequently when digging up the family registry entries of her ancestors. Of course, Germany was not a unified country until 1871, but rather a hodgepodge of more-or-less independent kingdoms, duchies and cities, so there was probably a patchwork of marriage regulations as well.
"The right to grant marriage licenses was claimed by feudal lords, as well as employers.[...] In the middle ages, the magistrate or guild granted the right to marry and start a family only to those who were, due to wealth or income, able to support a family. [...] In the 18th and 19th century, factory work was not considered a sufficient basis for a marriage. Limitations on marriage led to an increase in the age of marriage and a larger number of unmarried men and women. Births out of wedlock were not unusual among labourers and in rural areas (e.g., among menials)[...]
In the Norddeutsche Bund, the 'Eheschließungsfreiheit' (liberty to marry) was introduced in 1868, which was extended to most southern German states in 1871."
"Thirty years ago, it sounded horrifying and dystopian to think that the government could monitor everyone’s phone calls and read their emails. Now the government does this all the time, and if you don’t like it you’re soft on terror [...]
This doesn't seem like a very good example, to me. Almost all of the institutions spying on and tracking people are huge corporations who are doing it perfectly consistently with libertarian principles and who are controlling people (again perfectly consistently with libertarian principles) considerably more effectively through manipulation, marketing, and via control of the products we buy than governments are through their reading of people's emails etc.
The reason people accept this espionage and manipulation /isn't/ because they don't want to be seen to be "soft on terror" but because the espionage and manipulation are almost entirely a hidden-until-it's-too-late side-effect of all the shiny, attractive, superficially-empowering things the corporations tempt us with..... in other words, the appropriate fantasy novel ring metaphor for this section of the post is much less "magical ring of protection" and much more Tolkien....
As for love being the last libertarian holdout, I have to admit that likening love's terribleness to libertarianism appeals to my anti-libertarian sensibilities (do they show?) but I'm not sure about the "holdout" part: it seems to me that the world is trending *more* libertarian, rather than less, insofar as (owing to corporate lobbying, regulatory capture, races-to-the-bottom, and a dozen other mechanisms all the way up to outright corruption) the aforementioned huge corporations that monitor and control our access to almost everything and feature in almost every transaction we make are increasingly able to pay their way above the law, and are acting on increasingly libertarian principles..
"This doesn't seem like a very good example, to me. Almost all of the institutions spying on and tracking people are huge corporations who are doing it perfectly consistently with libertarian principles"
Someone could say "I am not against it when Google reads my emails, only the government". But it also seems to me that a world in which Google reads everyone's emails, is a world in which you aren't going to build any sort of coalition against government-email-reading.
By the time the "Government Can Read Your Emails Act" is in Congress, everyone is resigned to not having privacy, and it seems odd to say a million corporations can read your emails to sell you shit and manipulate your behavior, but the government can't read them to solve a murder.
> By the time the "Government Can Read Your Emails Act" is in Congress
Dude. The NSA reads all your emails and listens to domestic phone calls. This started shortly after passage of the Patriot Act and was only brought to light a year after media outlets learned about it (journalists doing their patriotic duty of lying to the public donchewno). After the revelation, everyone shrugged because both parties, including great liberal hope Barack Obama, supported the policy. The government pretended to stop, but it turned out a few years later during the Snowden revelations that, shocker, they were lying.
This is all a matter of public record. This isn’t Google and Facebook. It’s the US government. It happens every day. Nobody cares.
The "Government Can Read Your Emails Act" is meant to be a tongue in cheek, stylized example. What I'd say is that the real life "the time the 'Government Can Read Your Emails Act' is in Congress" moment was when the Snowden revelations happened. That was when there was widespread awareness of the idea that the NSA is basically snooping on everyone.
And by then, people mostly shrugged.
Various reasons, but I think what I said is part of it ... everyone tacitly assumed by then that Facebook, Google, et al were already spying on you, the ship has sailed.
Yes, I hear you. And I agree that Snowden was a key moment.
Come to think of it, that was also about the time “he works for Putin” started getting used as a thought-stopper by the American media class. Snowden cares about the constitutional rights of US citizens; Snowden had to flee to Russia to avoid being disappeared for criticizing the U.S. government; ergo Snowden loves Vladimir Putin; ergo if you care about the constitutional rights of US citizens you love Vladimir Putin and are a bad person. Works on presidents too, I hear.
Also, more obviously: government mass surveillance programs are generally pretty unpopular. So Scott's premise here is false. The only polling I could find was from Amnesty International [1], which is obviously not disinterested, but my experience is that almost everyone immediately reacts with horror when you explain to them that the government reads their text messages. (Obviously, I might be explaining it in a particularly horrifying way - I'm interested to hear other peoples' experiences.) Generally, it seems to only be politicians and people on cable TV that mostly support it, for some reason.
No mention of the coincidental Japanese word for love?
Unwilling Singles' Day is a little more bearable if I frame it as an anti-regulatory holdout. The Siege of Hallmark's Deep. Thank you. Although it is still somewhat depressing the absurd amount of shitty chocolates/flowers/whatever I help foist on people this time each year. They say nudges are overrated, but I dunno...I just don't get that mental groove which would compel someone towards saw-it-by-the-checkout-stand token gifts. At least that aspect of the dating market is fully competitive and highly profitable, no regulations needed. ("And you wonder why you're still single," chided Angel.)
95% of people describe themselves as at least “satisfied” with their romantic relationship, and 60% as “extremely satisfied”. Is there any other institution that can say the same?
How trustworthy are the answers? I bet social pressure would lead many to say they have found true love with their partner and are extremely satisfied to "fit in" with what is expected of those who marry, even if that isn't how they feel.
Definitely this - just think empirically among colleagues, acquaintances, non-immediate family, and people you know from church / school / wherever (not friends or close family, who are more selected to be like you).
If you seriously evaluated and scored their relationships on a 1-10 scale, how many would honestly be above a 4? Almost none in my experience, and I'm around more conscientious, responsible, and higher-achieving than average people in all those fronts.
With a 42% vintage divorce rate, and (I would personally bet), half again that in "net unhappy" relationship rates, the median relationship is net negative for the majority of people, given enough time.
I'd suggest that the marriages you're seeing are from a highly selected population, but working in mental health, I'd actually expect that to be a negatively selected population, so not sure how your sample is so positive.
But kudos! I'm really happy the folk around you are largely in stable, rewarding relationships. That's not the case for the people I see around me.
Maybe my population is hugely negatively selected somehow, but I'm usually in a pretty good relationship, and have managed to remain friends with most exes, so I'm used to being an exception there, and would expect positive selection if anything.
Yes, that statistic definitely raised my eyebrow. If someone is living with a spouse or romantic partner (which was the population base for that statistic), yes, they are probably satisfied. At least in WEIRD cultures, if they are not satisfied, they can leave (at least the house, if not the marriage).
If someone quotes King, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," there's a high probability that they're opposed to some significant aspect of wokery.
I raised my eyebrows at that as well. I don't think he's accepted by their ilk anymore. They call him well-intentioned but naive and ultimately backwards.
The data for this is a bit outdated but the trend is still upwards (https://doi.org/10.1177/2032284417699293). Relatedly in the UK most sexual offences against minors are committed by other minors, with the most common age for a minor perpetrator being 14 (https://www.vkpp.org.uk/assets/Files/Publications/National-Analysis-of-police-recorded-CSAE-Crimes-Report-2022-external.pdf), haven't gone through the entire report but this stood out "Given we’re talking about child-on-child abuse ... the age of consent in the UK is 16 years old, and some children aged between 13 and 17 might try experimenting sexually and consensually with people of the same age. At the same time ... taking and sharing indecent images or videos of under 18s is illegal. The data we’ve collected includes reported crimes which may be ‘experimental’ but also critically those with ‘aggravated’ features including rape. Understanding and tracking how many reported offences nationally feature aggravating features compared to experimental is a key focus for future analysis."
And contemporaneously with that upward trend in the age of consent, there's been a downward trend in the age of menarche, so the regulation of pubescent love has increased enormously over the past century or so.
Correct, I misread that part. Either way, libertarianism can hardly claim such a case as a victory for unregulated love. Either it was regulated, or it condones child marriage.
Well I think it depends on the libertarian, I know that Yaron Brook dislikes being associated with libertarians because of things like this, and in speaking with Craig Biddle he seemed to also have similar views, despite being more "open". But I think people such as David Friedman have views on such issues more congruent with something like traditional rabbinic law, considering such cases as not even constituting "child marriage".
There is a libertarian holiday, at least in the United States: Independence Day, celebrated every 4 July. The Libertarian Futurist Society has long made it the deadline for our members to return their ballots for the Prometheus Awards.
Yes, well, I think he's wrong, or at least incomplete. The United States is not just a nation; it's a nation, as Lincoln said, "conceived in liberty." Its central documents, the Constitution and even more the Declaration of Independence, are key sources for, at least, American libertarianism (which I believe is the context for this discussion); and Independence Day is specifically a celebration of the Declaration of Independence, whose central ideas are foundational for us.
I'm not a libertarian and don't share the same sympathetic view of libertarianism, but that aside ... it seems like the state of love is, in fact, worse these days in many ways. Fewer people are in a relationship or getting married than in the past, and it seems like that's not because they don't want to be in a relationship.
There are subcultures that have basically universal marriage at a young age, like Haredi Jews. I don't think we should copy them ... but it seems like one positive aspect of a system like that, is that people see "getting young people to be paired off into stable relationships" as an important societal function that they put a great deal of effort into.
I don't think you have to go into the realm of arranged marriages and thinking single 23 year olds are weirdos, to think that "have everyone figure it out themselves" isn't the best strategy either and that maybe older people should view it as a community responsibility to help shepherd people into long-term relationships.
This is why I think there's a happy medium. You can find something in between "everyone has to be married off by 20" and "total free for all, a significant portion of people never get married despite wanting to".
I'm from outside the US so I'm not familiar with libertarianism as a concept and how it differs from classical liberalism. Is this a real philosophical difference or just that liberal already has a more popular meaning in America? If the former, does anyone have any recommendations for good books on the history of libertarianism and how it diverged from the schools of classical liberalism?
Classic liberalism as in 19c Britain was fairly close to libertarianism. The US libertarian is more populist though. In Europe where a tiny minority of people held property historically, appeals to libertarianism of that sort falls flat. Europeans probably want to protect their built environment too, the housing stock Paris and Bath (etc) is privately owned but the owners can’t change much externally, and often internally. For obvious reasons.
(Bear in mind I think Scott's own view seems to trend more pro-libertarian over time and he may no longer endorse most of this!)
In my (perhaps not-entirely-unbiased..) mind the distinction is actually pretty simple: Libertarianism is pretty unique in that it's the political philosophy wherein it's actually considered virtuous to stick a dollar sign onto basically every single last thing on this planet, as well as the unique assumptions and mental gymnastics that make this seem like a good idea.
(I do think there's a cultural component here: I'm also not an American and I can't really imagine anybody from my culture/sphere-of-understanding espousing libertarianism except for perhaps a few extreme right-wing anarcho-capitalist types that American libertarians probably wouldn't want to be associated with)
Not remotely true. Even Ayn Rand, who was quite hard core, does not propose dollar prices for a lot of things. See for example Hank Rearden risking his life to save Francisco d'Anconia from falling into molten metal; when d'Anconia says, "You saved my life," Rearden answers, "You saved my furnace." Or Richard Halley playing his compositions for Dagny Taggart, and telling her that she has paid him with her intelligent appreciation. Other example of the concept of "exchange" (returning value for value) in entirely nonmonetary terms could be multiplied.
As a libertarian of very long standing, I would probably state the essential idea as that any relationship, group, or institution that you cannot walk away from is abusive in principle and has the potential to become abusive in fact. The economic part of libertarianism is simply an application of that idea.
The two examples you give, art and human life, are both things that are kind of famous for having dollar signs stuck on them!
I can think of plenty of anti-libertarian structures that try to correct or mitigate this as much as possible, such as free-at-the-point-of-delivery nationalised healthcare, nationalised artistic institutions, government subsidies for the arts, etc. - I don't exactly think of these structures as Randian though, somehow..!
Sure, two individuals might exchange some stuff without using money as an exchange medium - but that has no bearing on whether libertarian social, political and economic structures do or don't place dollar signs on such things. A libertarian presumably expects the furnace chap to pay some definite amount for his own healthcare, and the artist is presumably either in the business of selling his art (or, if a hobbyist rather than a professional, of earning money to fund his art). Families exchanging gifts at Christmas and schoolboys in the playground trading football stickers (are those even still a thing..?) aren't performing some sort of Randian libertarian transaction!
I think the abusive potential/fact thing is basically just self-justifying mental gymnastics:
What does it even /mean/ to be "abusive in principle" - and, whatever it is, why is it a bad thing? Are parent--child relationships automatically bad because they fit the definition of "abusive in principle" (and if so what would a libertarian replace them with?) and are phishing scams and confidence tricks non-abusive because in principle the victim could have walked away? More generally, shouldn't we judge relationships and institutions by their actual (ideally evidence-based) outcomes rather than by labels such as "abusive in principle" that don't seem to contain any information about whether any actual abuse has taken place?
I'd agree that any relationship or institution you can't walk away from has the potential to be abusive [in fact] - but A) so does any relationship or institution you *can* walk away from (eg. all the employees being mistreated and harassed at work despite being able to quit, all the victims of domestic violence despite being able to break off the relationship, all the gambling addicts who have their lives ruined by bookmakers despite being allowed to walk out the door), and B) I don't agree that global capitalism is automatically non-abusive because people could in theory refuse any specific individual exchange - there are externalities, monopolies, information asymmetries, cartels, and a million other problems that all lead to abuse.
P.S. Even though we seem to have a pretty fundamental disagreement here, I appreciate your taking the time to express your position so courteously and I hope you can receive my disagreement in the same spirit!
In point of fact, we do now consider that there is an inherent risk of abuse in parent-child relationships; that's why it's possible for parents to lose the legal right to custody. My own take on this is that the child's body is the child's property, not the parent's, and the parent is acting not as the child's owner, but as their trustee while they are incapable of exercising self-ownership, with the obligations of trusteeship applying to them.
But the fact that there is a natural necessity for someone to exercise trusteeship toward a child does not mean that adults need trustees, or that placing adults under trusteeship is nonabusive.
It's all very well to say that employers, for example, may mistreat their employees. But there is still a profound difference between an employee who has the legal right to quit, and a slave who will be hunted down and forcibly brought back if they attempt to do so. An employee may be abused; slavery as such is abusive.
Blimey, we agree on a great deal of this! I'm just not clear on how much of it clears up any of the issues I have regarding libertarianism.
I agree that there's an inherent risk of abuse in a parent-child relationship, but I don't see A) how that's a specifically libertarian position (like, who /doesn't/ think there's such a risk?), nor B) how "there's a risk of abuse" is the same thing as "there is abuse in principle". If abuse in principle has some specific libertarian meaning I can't figure that out from this example, and if abuse in principle just means a risk of abuse then sure, I'd have to agree, but I don't see how that's a position pertaining to libertarianism (or any particular philosophy, really!)
I agree that the child's body is their property (though I find that phrasing kind of weird!) but I would suppose since we have different conceptions of property rights that probably has different connotations to me than to you.
I agree also with children needing trusteeship (again the phrasing is peculiar to me - "guardianship" seems more the mot juste..) and adults usually not needing it.
I agree that there is a profound difference between an employee and a slave, and that an employee has the risk of being abused whereas a slave is in an abusive situation by default - all perfectly true, but this example and the abusive/nonabusive parent example both seem to me to kind of demonstrate my point that relationships you can walk away from and relationships you can't walk away from can both be abusive or non-abusive under different circumstances, "being able to walk away" doesn't tell us a relationship is good nor "being unable to walk away" that the relationship is bad, and therefore we ought to evaluate/categorise relationships based on their actual outcomes rather than by whether or not the participants can walk away.
(The wider point for libertarianism, I think, is that when we get this far, of course it follows that we ought also to evaluate governments, too, by their actual, evidence-based outcomes rather than by whether or not we can walk away from them...)
I just wanted to add that I think the 4th Amendment is very libertarian.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Classical liberalism is a general sort of direction, libertarianism is a point.
Classical liberalism says it would be nice if there was more freedom and less regulation, except where that's inconvenient, in which case whatever.
Libertarianism says that freedom must be absolutely optimised for the maximum possible freedom and minimum possible regulation (subject to certain constraints). Libertarians can use FACTS and LOGIC to prove exactly what libertarianism is, and then they spend a lot of time arguing with other libertarians about whether they're real libertarians or not.
Anarcho-capitalism is libertarianism except the optimisation is done without constraints. While a libertarian will grudgingly concede that some form of government is necessary for the protection of property rights, an ancap can dream up a system of private police forces which solves this without the need for government and definitely won't just become a bunch of oppressive local gangs.
I am all three of these, on different days, depending on my mood.
I like to use the metaphor of libertarianism as the direction "north". I think of myself as being somewhere in California and wanting to move north to Seattle, WA. The general range from Portland, OR to Vancouver, BC would be acceptable, but if I ever found myself near the 60th parallel about to cross into the Northwest Territories or the Yukon, I'd know I should have turned south much earlier. And I have no desire to live at the North Pole. But considering where I am, I'm almost always in agreement with libertarians when it comes to taking practical steps to move in a northerly direction, while being uninterested in conversations about igloo construction.
I think the operational definition of relationship has merit, especially an operational definition of 'commitment' thats involved in say 'marriage' and the response-abilities required to maintain a 'relationship', or a 'marriage' based on 'love' esp with children and even the relationship after breakup if there is children.....is love changing the incontinence pad of a husband who is 20years older?, is love not cheating if a partner is in the depths of grief or has gained lots of weight on maternity leave and there are 2 toddlers as well in the house. I think young people and immature people regardless of age, see 'love' as admiration or status symbols like conspicious consumption but 'life' can evolve 'love' to mean something very mature and grounding. i think for children and disabilities and everything outside the norm of 'romeo and juliet' love (which is considered psychopathically obsessional in todays world)...what is love....I think its linked to temperance and emotional maturity. Its a pity the myth of 'loving' families remains tho, after 50yrs I honestly wonder where are they?..all I mainly see is jealousy, narcissism, addiction and exhaustion and notions that the grass is greener elsewhere which is a learned ontological view in ex colonised countries arguably.....as relationships require work, and the boss was supposed to get the 'best' of the worker, so the worker is rendered un response- able to family and love. Sad really.
> In every fantasy book, there’s the Magical Hidden Valley with the Mystical Ring Of Protection that means the forces of the Dark Lord can never reach them. Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. The Chosen Hero has to convince the inhabitants of the Magical Hidden Valley to abandon their safety and join the fight to save the rest of the world.
Hmmm.
Mistborn: not present.
Wheel of Time: not present.
The Book of Three: present, though the valley [actually, mountaintop] isn't really occupied by people and no effort is made to get anyone to leave.
The Lord of the Rings: not present.
Sword of Truth: not present.
Magic of Recluce: I've never read this. I tried reading the first book and it came off as contrived.
Discworld: I don't remember anything in specific, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened in one of the books.
Robin Hobb: not present. Also, there's no Dark Lord, which manages to distinguish this series from most of what I've listed above.
Magician (Raymond Feist): not present.
Riddle-Master of Hed: I can't keep the events in Patricia McKillip's stories straight. But I don't think there was any such zone of safety.
Valdemar: not present. Valdemar (the region) is frequently noted as a place of special safety, but that is because they do the fighting that has to be done to keep the forces of darkness at bay.
Am I missing something major? What's an example of a fantasy novel where this happens?
Magic of Recluse is entirely about the Hidden Valley; the world is a Yin and Yang balance, and the Hidden Valley has stolen all the Yin and left everyone else buried in Yang.
Well, their enemies sometimes see it that way, although most of the world either doesn't have any idea that anything like that is happening or else is perfectly fine with it, because Order and Chaos energies tend to grow to balance each other: the island of Recluce being a bastion of Order founded by refugees from a Chaos-fueled empire just means that there's more Chaos around to empower the Chaos mages that rule the remnants of said empire. As it happens, the first two books are something of a case of Early Installment Weirdness, and when the protagonist of Book 1 returns in a much later book, he solves the magical pollution problem by taking pretty much all the readily accessible order and chaos power in the world and turning it into a mixed-up and unusable mess locked inside some huge rocks, leaving order and chaos mages both mostly powerless and the world stuck using only the technology that can run on mundane physics.
Obviously it's an exaggeration, especially that it's always by the same mechanism, but there are a few. In most cases the safe zone *could* be breached, so that's going to happen if the author takes the series on long enough.
LoTR: Lothlórien is the classic example, protected by the ring Nenya
Valdemar: you could count Iftel. Although no-one goes there so it's a bit useless
Discworld: you could count time valley and possibly Death's domain.
> LoTR: Lothlórien is the classic example, protected by the ring Nenya
Sidethread, Deiseach has managed to pull quotes exhaustively documenting that Nenya provides no protection from Sauron as support for the same claim you make here.
Is the lesson just that when people read something, the description they form in their mind is unrelated to what it says on the page?
A less controversial example is Tom Bombadil's place. The council briefly considers sending the Ring there but decide against it because the rest of the world would still eventually go to shit.
There is also the place beyond the sea, where the elves and Frodo go at the end at the books.
A more metaphorical example is the Shire, where the hobbits live. Kept in relative stasis under the protection of the rangers, who are keeping the peace while the hobbits don't even realize it. When the rangers leave to help defend the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor and so on, the Shire quickly goes to shit.
Come to think of it, Tolkien sure loves that trope.
The council rejects the idea of giving the ring to Tom Bombadil on the grounds that he wouldn't care about it, and, without Tom being willing/able to keep track of it, it would find its way back to Sauron.
They reject sending it to Valinor on the grounds that the gods wouldn't be willing to take it. This is part of Tolkien's general theme of magic passing out of the world.
The Shire is ravaged by Saruman after he's kicked out of Isengard; if the Rangers had still been there, they would have been able to do nothing about that. Aragorn states explicitly that without the Rangers' guardianship, the region would be ravaged by the forces of Mordor, but that doesn't happen at any point.
You're wrong there, Imladris/Rivendell protected by Vilya, Ring of Air for Elrond. And Lothlórien with Nenya for Galadriel.
"Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!'
She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its rays glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Evenstar had come down to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood.
'Yes,' she said, divining his thought, 'it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.
'He suspects, but he does not know — not yet. Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.'"
> You're wrong there, Imladris/Rivendell protected by Vilya, Ring of Air for Elrond. And Lothlórien with Nenya for Galadriel.
But this is about as wrong as it's possible to be. Vilya and Nenya don't represent protection from Sauron -- they represent special vulnerability. It's only possible to use them at all because Sauron has lost the Master Ring.
What Vilya and Nenya are protecting the elves from isn't the forces of darkness, it's the (unrelated) sense of ennui that drives them into the West.
It's not mere (or merely) ennui; let's quote from the Letters. They had a purpose that was partly good, to heal the damages wrought by the wars in Middle-earth, and partly selfish, to arrest the fast pace of changing time in the mortal lands and make their own little enclaves copies of the beautiful lands they had left behind in Valinor. The Three Elven Rings were made before the One Ring and had power of their own, but Sauron's master ring does wield influence over them. Because it is now a war time situation (even if a Cold War), Elrond and Galadriel are using their rings as defensive abilities and not merely as aids to preserving beauty:
1951
"The Elves of Eregion made Three supremely beautiful and powerful rings, almost solely of their own imagination, and directed to the preservation of beauty: they did not confer invisibility. But secretly in the subterranean Fire, in his own Black Land, Sauron made One Ring, the Ruling Ring that contained the powers of all the others, and controlled them, so that its wearer could see the thoughts of all those that used the lesser rings, could govern all that they did, and in the end could utterly enslave them. He reckoned, however, without the wisdom and subtle perceptions of the Elves. The moment he assumed the One, they were aware of it, and of his secret purpose, and were afraid. They hid the Three Rings, so that not even Sauron ever discovered where they were and they remained unsullied.
The Ring is lost, for ever it is hoped; and the Three Rings of the Elves, wielded by secret guardians, are operative in preserving the memory of the beauty of old, maintaining enchanted enclaves of peace where Time seems to stand still and decay is restrained, a semblance of the bliss of the True West."
1954
"Those who lingered were those who were enamoured of Middle-earth and yet desired the unchanging beauty of the Land of the Valar. Hence the making of the Rings; for the Three Rings were precisely endowed with the power of preservation, not of birth. Though unsullied, because they were not made by Sauron nor touched by him, they were nonetheless partly products of his instruction, and ultimately under the control of the One. Thus, as you will see, when the One goes, the last defenders of High-elven lore and beauty are shorn of power to hold back time, and depart."
1956
"But the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter. Hence they fell in a measure to Sauron's deceits: they desired some 'power' over things as they are (which is quite distinct from art), to make their particular will to preservation effective: to arrest change, and keep things always fresh and fair. The 'Three Rings' were 'unsullied', because this object was in a limited way good, it included the healing of the real damages of malice, as well as the mere arrest of change; and the Elves did not desire to dominate other wills, nor to usurp all the world to their particular pleasure. But with the downfall of 'Power' their little efforts at preserving the past fell to bits. There was nothing more in Middle-earth for them, but weariness. So Elrond and Galadriel depart. Gandalf is a special case. He was not the maker or original holder of the Ring – but it was surrendered to him by Círdan, to assist him in his task. Gandalf was returning, his labour and errand finished, to his home, the land of the Valar."
- The Elven Rings do not have the power to resist the Dark Lord.
- In fact, they introduce a vulnerability to him that would not exist in their absence.
- Their use lets the high elves tolerate life in the mortal world, which they cannot otherwise do regardless of the activities of Sauron.
They are protective against the elves' inborn sense of ennui, and not against Sauron. All of that is documented in the quotes you pulled:
1, 2. Sauron made One Ring, the Ruling Ring that contained the powers of all the others, and controlled them, so that its wearer could see the thoughts of all those that used the lesser rings, could govern all that they did, and in the end could utterly enslave them.
3. the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter. [...] But with the downfall of 'Power' their little efforts at preserving the past fell to bits. There was nothing more in Middle-earth for them, but weariness. So Elrond and Galadriel depart.
These aren't hidden enclaves protected from the Dark Lord, they are hidden enclaves that get automatically wiped out whenever the Dark Lord becomes active. They aren't hiding from him -- anyone wearing a ring has their location automatically revealed to Sauron -- they're hiding from their own world-weariness.
I think the whole point of the trope is that the hidden vally isn't really protected from the bad guy of the story. It's only protected from everything else, and that makes them complacent, and then the good guys have to persuade them that they are not in fact protected from the latest bad guys and therefore they need to actually fight the bad guys this time.
In LOTR, this convincing started in a background conversation in the Hobbit, and ended in the Council of Elrond when they decided to sacrifice the magic that protected the hidden valleys from everything except the Big Bad, in order to finally defeat the Big Bad.
> Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. The Chosen Hero has to convince the inhabitants of the Magical Hidden Valley to abandon their safety and join the fight to save the rest of the world.
Gondolin was physically hidden, that's true, though it had no protections other than its secret location.
It was swiftly defeated after Morgoth corrupted a local aristocrat who told him where it was.
And this is unlikely to contribute to anyone's impression of what happens in fantasy stories, since it's material from the Silmarillion. Relatedly, not being part of a storyline, Gondolin is never visited by a Chosen Hero. It's just one of the bad things that happened in the past that proves that the forces of evil are in fact evil.
I would think that both Lothlorien and Rivendell, while not literally meeting the somewhat hyperbolic standard that is given, still qualify as examples... to say nothing of Gondolin
Why? They don't satisfy any of the mentioned points. They remain as safe from the forces of the Dark Lord as the entire rest of the world, unless he finds his ring, in which case they are uniquely vulnerable. Corruption is not creeping over anything, including them. They are not persuaded to join any battles, nor does anyone think it would be a good idea for them to try.
>Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday.
And having one would be distinctly non-Libertarian. They should instead all individually pick a holiday and celebrate it on their own decentralized terms.
>through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills,
...bad social skills are through fault of their own.
Bad Social Skill #1: failing to remember important events. Always keep a diary, recording reference details like what you ate on the last date. Write it during the date, women love that.
For some of us, it's the "buy one get one free" option! 'Yes, here's Crappy Maths Skills as your base feature *and* Social Anxiety as today's free mystery gift!'
Absolutely not. That's like saying it's the fault of poor people that they're poor. There are probably ways out of it if you really know what you're doing and you work hard enough, but if you're born without natural social skills and don't have the environment to develop them, that's not your fault.
Okay, but the common idea of romantic love is also holistic, non-legible and selfless. The only contract you sign is optional, not legally binding and isn't carefully worded. You're supposed to constantly make sloppy economic decisions. You're supposed to treat your partner as an unfathomable miraculous entity while correctly guessing what they want. More than anything it feels rather like anarchism.
Are there libertarians who are like that? From what I've seen, when libertarians approach love the way they approach everything else, they become Red Pillers.
I don't know about Russia, but lots of other European countries have or have had a mandatory waiting period between the banns and the wedding, during which objections to the marriage may be raised.
Oh, howdy neighbour 👋 We've got the same system here in Malta. But then there's also the marriage application that has to be done at least six weeks before the wedding, so that's the minimum waiting period here if one is a local, and if one is a foreigner, it's even longer than that, as one needs to get various documents from one's country of origin. We ended up eloping to a country where getting married is easier.
In my case I had set aside a month for getting married (we used to live in a different country for years, and my bride was a national of a third country). We barely made it. It took a while to get an appointment (rigorously in person) with the civil servant who would record our intention to get married and set the process in motion. She even tried to postpone our appointment last minute and I had to beg her over the phone not to, as this would waste a valuable week of time.
There is no waiting period in Russia. Maybe there was in Soviet times (but I don't remember anyone telling me about this; queues for marriage registration, on the other hand, were a thing. These days, you can reserve a slot through online system, and the whole process then takes about an hour or less, unless you want a ceremony), or it was elsewhere.
Seems like we could almost trivially come up with a better set of dating-license criteria than just issuing it automatically based on age. To get a driver's license, you generally need to pass a test involving demonstration of driving-related skills.
There is a waiting period in Russia. It's short though, 1 month only. Yes, it's easy to get married and you can apply online but the first available slot will be delayed.
I get the vibe behind this essay, but I think it's really unfortunate because there is a negative stereotype of libertarians supporting statutory rape. A libertarian saying loudly and proudly that love between any two consenting individuals should not be regulated plays straight into it. I know Scott doesn't mean it this way, but people will hear dog whistles anyway.
Also, I do think that love historically has been regulated and should continue to be regulated, and not in the way you might think. Arranged marriages have been mentioned by others, but these are not examples of regulation. Quite the opposite. In fact, it is government regulation that broke the tyranny of arranged marriages in Westernized countries, by making various methods of enforcing them illegal, e.g. honour killings, disinheritance, etc. The free exercise of love Scott celebrates in this essay is in fact a product of government regulation. This is yet another fine example of government regulation bringing freedom, by crushing the actual main source of oppression in the world: other private individuals. If you are capable of acting without your family, employer, creditors, etc. controlling you unduly, it's generally because government applied its iron fist in your favour. So I support continuing government regulation in love, because that's what keeps it free.
Indeed. Straight to the heart of the matter wrt libertarianism. And not just freeing you from oppression but a host of other life-limiting forces like polluted air and water, unsafe workplaces and built environment, unmitigated hazards like fire, foreign invaders and injury and disease.
Interestingly I recently asked David Friedman about the "Ancap meme", and despite him making such arguments/points for at least the past 10 years now, he didn't seem to know what it was.
Yep. "What is the Libertarian position on government regulation of love?" is absolutely a query that returns a hit, and Scott doesn't go near it. If this paean can survive age of consent laws, I'm skeptical of how much it depends on liberty being this ideologically pure thing divorced from social consensus. And "I don't like the social consensus", while defensible, isn't pretty.
I'd be increasingly interested in Scott writing a more substantive rebuttal to the Anti-Libertarian FAQ; his thinking has clearly shifted (and maybe not just after moving to CA, ha) but I'm still not sure there are any substantive factual disagreements.
I don't think Scott has very favourable views regarding "age of consent reform", here is him in Contra Kirkegaard "But I would - making a value judgment - call pedophilia a mental illness: it’s bad for patients, bad for their potential victims, and bad for society." Given he later seems to think ephebophilia is a mental illness he probably also thinks the same of ephebophilic relationships.
Sure, and I wouldn't accuse him otherwise. Let me put it this way:
1) Most of what the law sees when it comes to love consists of marriage or sex. Both of those things have been firmly regulated by many societies at many times.
1.5) If we're exclusively considering "love" and "liberty" in a way that has no overlap with those, I'm not sure what any of this cashes out as in practice.
2) There has been a decisive loosening of the laws in both those categories in the US over the past decades, centuries. This is a good thing IMO, and a win for libertarian principles!
3) Despite that, there *are* still laws in both of those categories, and it's odd to speak as though the libertarian triumph has been total. Compare freedom of speech, and whether a similar paean would work there.
4) Going a step further, it is unclear whether further victories along libertarian lines would be a good thing - especially for sex. We can argue whether the man is weak, but he *isn't* straw.
5) In fact, this is a particularly bad optics area for capital-L Libertarianism. I appreciate the distinction, but anything in the ballpark of "what I really like about Libertarians is their strong grasp of sexual ethics" needs a *lot* of context.
I'm not sure I understand your argument, but are you familiar with the excesses of the sexual revolution, particularly in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands during the 70s.
One can speculate as to the effect of increasing the degree to which a society is libertarian on the margin, or one could try to look at historical examples of societies that already made such changes at various margins.
I think it was actually Germanic norms which undermined arranged marriages. The Romans had the norm of monogamy, but with arranged marriages. It was the combination of the two with the collapse of the Roman empire that resulted in the modern western norm.
All the way from at least ancient Rome until the present day. In the European cultural context, honour killing typically falls under the institution of "blood feud" (or vendetta in Corsica specifically). Feuding still goes on in places like Greece or Italy. (And this is not honour killing among immigrants.) When the menfolk of two clans kill each other because the honour of one of their women has been outraged (i.e. they eloped instead of marrying as the clan elders decreed), and restoring the family honour demands blood, that's honour killing.
This is a famous enough trope that I'm surprised you don't know it. Romeo and Juliet, for example?
Recently, I tried explaining elsewhere were the "negative stereotype of libertarians supporting statutory rape" came from, and a quick googling threw up four or five different examples of LP candidates supporting abolishing or at least considerably lowering the age of consent, and none of them were even the candidate that I was thinking of but couldn't quite remember.
However, I'd say the stereotype mostly comes from even earlier - the golden age of online forums, when you have a couple of libertarians in most every American forum and almost without fail one of them would bring up the age of consent issue at *some* point.
Larson was one of the four or five that came up (four or five since I'm not even sure if to include Larson, he's *that* fringe and seems genuinely insane). The one I was thinking of was a woman, but I cannot exactly remember her name.
"...if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches."
Few know this today, but in the Gilded Age the age of consent was 12, 13 across most states. It wasn't that people approved of it, it's just that they believed it was the responsibility of parents to prevent it.
Making regulation illegal is consistent with libertarianism. For example, the US Constitution is a powerful regulation that prevents less powerful regulators from regulating stuff that people at the time believed should not be regulated in the future. Such as speech and religion and guns and so on.
No libertarian wants to get rid of that particular regulation.
This is essentially the basic story behind the so-called welfare states in Scandinavia - which US people in general, and libertarians in particular, do not get. The Scandinavian states have historically been used to free the individual from the family. That is why "state individualism" is the best way to describe these societies. (Best English-language reference for the telling of this story is Lars Trägårdh (2010) Rethinking the Nordic welfare state through a neo-Hegelian theory of state and civil society. Journal of Political Ideologies, 15:3, 227-239, DOI:
You say that like it's a good thing. US people in general, including most libertarians, have a generally positive view of families. There are exceptions, of course, but nothing even close to a consensus that a paternalistic state should be the default replacement for, well, parents.
It was ment as an anthropological observation, for those interested in comparative studies of the relationship between individuals and collectives. I mentioned it since the "state-ness" of these societies is often misunderstood as some sort of communitarianism. Whether the rulers of a state or the parents or the clan leaders or the religious leaders or employers or anyone else are the best de facto main patriarchs in a society , can always be discussed. There will always be power structures, the question is which, plus how they share control. Scandinavian cultures are very individualistic, for better or worse, and for historical reasons the state has been seen as the lesser suppressor of the individual, so to speak. I added the comment to complicate/nuance simplistic dichotomies between individuals and collectives, as a further elaboration of Khoos original point.
If you're replacing the family with an institution where the entire community, organized by the state, provides the support that used to come from the family, that seems like "communitariansim" and "state-ness" might be appropriate terms.
Let me give some illustrations of "state- individualism": Sweden was the first country to make it illegal for parents til corporally punish their children. It was also among the first to outlaw rape within marriage (1965).
So now the state is in charge of corporally punishing children who exceed the bounds of tolerable misbehavior, as defined by the state. Me, I'd rather take a spanking by my father than a stint in juvenile hall or whatever else you all use.
I understand that sentiment isn't universal, and fine, there's room for people to disagree and for nations to do their own thing. But I'd like you to understand that the reason we disagree is not because we don't understand your system, but because we *do*.
Isn't this what religion is for? No sex without marriage, marriage must be approved by a priest, no divorces unless you have a very good reason, no cheating on your spouse, etc, etc?
As one of the eternal losers on this topic, I still agree with the idea that it's good for this to be free, with the important caveat that it sure does /suck/ to be on the wrong side of this particular bell curve. Maybe I should finally bite the bullet and try one of those [dry heave]dating apps[/dry heave], even though I only ever hear bad things about them and my inherent disdain for it.
They are what you make of them. If your profile is low effort or totally generic, you will get no responses or responses from people who aren’t suited to you. Be unafraid to be more niche in what you portray about yourself, and try to be a little vulnerable. As a woman who picked several relationships on these apps- the last of which is four years in and going strong- what I looked for was any spark of individuality, and a lack of defensive ego. Hard to find in male profiles, which are all either deliberately desultory (“I don’t care, this is beneath me so if I get rejected it’s because women are the problem”) or very template generated (“me at the bar with the lads/me at the gym/me with a fancy car/me with a scary animal”). If you want to attract the kind of woman who would be interested in that profile I don’t know what to say to you, but when I picked someone it was because they showed something personal about themselves without defence or anxiety.
I don’t know what to tell you John- there is a kind of girl who’s only going to click on hot guys, and if she’s who you’re after then… it is what it is. If you want someone whose interests and personality are similar to yours, be honest in your profile. If you’re so insecure you’re already cooking up the rationalisation for your failure, then maybe deal with the source of your insecurity. If you’re overweight, go on a diet. If you’re unkempt, shave and get a haircut. Most women’s standards are not that high for what they accept as passable.
The vast majority of girls want hot, high status guys, and on dating apps at least, their standards are definitely that high. Being unattractive is also often not a personal or moral failing, as even Scott pointed out once. Human sexuality doesn't really care about morality or stuff like that more than it cares about signs of good genetic quality and high status.
The vast majority of the girls who STAY on the app want that. If you want those girls by all means, be shallow. Fish with shallow bait and catch shallow fish and don’t complain when all they want from you is dinner and Instagram shots- that’s what you asked for.
I don’t know why guys don’t get this to be honest. I feel like you know that if a girl puts pics of herself in a bikini on her profile she’s only going to draw the attention of guys who want quick hookups and nothing else- did you not think there was a male equivalent? If you put out a profile that generic it makes it obvious you are trawling desperately with a wide net to the point you genuinely don’t care what you catch. Only one kind of person responds to that signal… you’ll get used and have a terrible time and blame the women and the apps when they gave you what you asked for….
Thanks for the reply. I honestly have no idea what kind of pictures I could use for something like that, in general I don't have many pictures of just myself (I'm not on any social media (despise the whole lot of 'em) so can't just take from there). Only genres I could think off you already indicated are generic so would need to think on it, hmm. Maybe a hanging-upside-down-by-the-toes one while giving thumbs down (so it becomes thumbs up) at the climbing gym would at least be funny, hah.
"Love isn’t a numbers game."
To an extent it is though, isn't it? You yourself said you went through multiple attempts before one of them stuck, so clearly getting more rolls of the dice (or having better dice!) improves one's odds. Hell, one of the standard pieces of advice is to just get out there and meet new people, and what is that but giving yourself more rolls of the dice?
My advice would be if possible to put a shot in that wasn’t taken for the specific purpose of being a dating profile pic- at least one or two of them, anyway. Try and find a picture of a moment when you were truly happy, a picture that when you see it brings back a smile. Those are the kinds of pictures that show others who you truly are in your best moments, even if the picture isn’t “perfect” in terms of looks maxxing or whatever dumb things men tell each other about what women like. It was pictures like that which drew me to my current partner.
Guess it's a personal failure that I don't have any pictures like that. No one takes pictures of me or with me, and I certainly don't take them of myself. Am I screwed?
No! But I would say that if you want a relationship because you feel lonely and unfulfilled at the moment, you probably won’t get what you need from just one other person. It’s a lot to ask of a romantic relationship. Rather than trying to fill an emotional deficit on dating apps it would be good to first build a life you find engaging, then bring that to a potential partner. Going up to a woman and saying “date me I’m sad” is not usually a winning strategy… or I don’t know you’d want the prize it would win you.
If you’ve gotten into a lonely solitary rut, change that first.
I feel like there's another layer to Echo Tracer's picture advice here - I'm actually pretty successful at dating (like when I decided to do Optimal Stopping a la the Secretary Problem, I was able to get on average 2 dates a week for 1.5 years continuously).
I'm successful because I did a decade of A/B testing and optimization, more or less, over an otherwise normal "high status man" dating career.
Pictures are literally THE most important element of a profile, and people give a lot of bad advice. I know this, because I use data - use Photofeeler or a similar service to have your pictures actually rated on attractiveness and trustworthiness. I've rated more than thirty of mine. Pictures that I *love,* pictures that my friends love, pictures that show me at my most "me," all do relatively terribly.
Generic pictures of me outside in front of a landscape, or stereotypical travel pictures of "lol, me and my friend in front of the Arc de Triomphe" or whatever? They get the highest possible ratings. And there is a *significant* difference in who will swipe or message you back when headlining or having mostly highly rated ones vs the idiosyncratic ones.
By all means, include one idiosyncratic, "most me" picture. The last one. I've had a few confirmations they made a difference in deciding to message from dates and exes. But in terms of getting that response to begin with, the overall gestalt needs to weight heavily on actually higher ranked pictures via data, even if they're horrific cliches that make you question the people responding to you's tastes in general.
Because without that response, you can't ever even evaluate match quality, it's like the necessary foot in the door.
And I've found plenty of weird, niche people who responded to the bland consensus-rated pictures, it's not a strong filter for weirdness, it's a strong filter for being responded to at all.
So my advice would be to take a lot of pictures in a lot of different lights and settings, and have them empirically rated by a service like Photofeeler. Only with actual data from the demographic you're targeting can you begin making informed changes to better your chances.
You’re still on the app tho? Like… I’m not out here trying to help guys get laid with women they don’t care about lol I think that’s actually bad for your soul and your capacity for love on a fundamental level. Call me old fashioned but if you use people you become a user.
If you are not romantically succesful already, dating apps are not gonna do it for you, they never do it for males that are not like top 30 percent of attractiveness according to all evidence.
Maybe « love » is not, but finding a partner is. This guy needs to find at least one partner. Better yet a few potential partners so he may choose the one that suits him best. Every interaction yields either a NO with probability 1-p or a YES with probability p. Have N interactions, be always rejected with probability (1-p)^N, succeed in getting at least one YES with probability 1-(1-p)^N. He can either work on p (go to the gym, dress better, etc) or on N (try to have more dates). Both increase his probability of success and both demand an investment of resources.
Right? If OP never tries to date anyone (small N) what difference does his mindset make? You may argue that lowering p can select for more compatible partners, but certainly you need to go out and meet people in the first place if you want to find a partner! It strikes me as a bit hypocritical to argue that _other people_ should behave irrationally. (e.g. by denying the objective characteristics of reality that limit their realm of action). Irrational behavior has a cost and you may be prepared to bear that cost if you can afford it. That is a huge privilege! If OP cannot bear the cost of irrationality, suggesting that he does anyway is counterproductive. This is similar to the rich guy that says you should quit your job and travel the world because you will always find something when you come back (Tim Ferriss I am looking at you). That works if you can afford to find a job through connections and the like so that the gap in your CV does not matter. The regular dude who has no connections better stick to his cubicle.
Do you happen to be calling « real love » the kind of temporary infatuation celebrated by Hollywood movies? The one that lasts a year at bests and then either dissipates or morphs into something else? If that’s the case, it’s no surprise that it is at odds with a rational outlook on life. But the person who started this thread seemed to be looking for a stable partner so I suspect he can do without the hormonal storm.
Yes I’m talking about that love lol. The one that humans have been talking and writing about since humans could talk and write, because it is real and it is a necessary component- not the ONLY component, but a necessary one- for the kind of optimal relationship which is rare but does exist.
If you’re skeptical about it, you haven’t had it, and I know because I was a skeptic once too. Accept that it exists, it is worth it, and try to find it.
Here's what worked for me: game. The first couple years is very superficial, and you probably have a lot of inner demons to work through, as most men who get into game do. But it will get you partners and experience.
Once you have a couple years of that, you will mature, emotionally mentally and physically. You'll burn out on the game.
Then when you find the actual romantic partner that's perfect for you (almost completely by chance) you will have the internal focus to do it right and not chase her away with inexperienced hooves all over the fine china.
I do not recommend dating apps on any level. They are a complete waste of time. Yes there are unicorns on there, but they have 1000 other men per week to choose from. In real life, women only can choose from the men who approach them, which is way less than 1000 per week.
You know, I learned about it back in the late 2000s, and it was really interesting intellectually. One of those Matrix-like 'everything you know is wrong' moments (I'm sure this influenced the redpill metaphor). The passive personality I had adopted throughout the last 20 years basically to protect myself from HR was exactly 180 degrees away from the person I was supposed to be. A total Nietzschean 'transvaluation of ethics'--good is bad, bad is good, black is white, white is black. I never went all the way with it but it was interesting to read about, and the small amounts I felt safe applying were genuinely helpful. (I sided with the game people morally but still acted mostly like a feminist coward, because I knew I wasn't perceptive enough to do most of the stuff they recommended.)
I would bet it has to be calibrated differently with the increased risks from #metoo these days.
For what little it's worth, one of my closest friends and I both have a pretty major complex about dating apps:
I have never used dating apps and have had a long series of unsuccessful relationships; I worry that the lack of dating apps is causing my dating pool to be too small and that in turn is causing me to date people who I'm not really right for (and vice-versa).
Meanwhile my friend has *exclusively* used dating apps, like he's literally never dated anybody he's met in any other way, and has had a long series of unsuccessful relationships; he worries that there's some critical fundamental aspect of the meet-spontaneously-in-real-life dating p̶i̶p̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ process that dating apps fail to reproduce(*) or capture, and want of this hypothetical unknown aspect of real-life dating is causing him to date people whom he's not really right for etc. etc.
(* pun fully intended..)
My friend does not think my dating pool is too small and he wishes he could meet people spontaneously like I seem to have. I do not think there's some invisible thing missing from the way my friend dates people using his apps and I wish I had the luxury of being even a fraction as selective as he is in the people he dates.
So I guess what I'm saying is, please don't discount dating apps out-of-hand! Lots of the instinctive aversion to them seems to be pretty arbitrary, not really a good match for people's actual experiences, and often part of a category of weird hang-ups that people think are somehow a problem but which even their closest friends can't seem to detect in their lives.
(The data privacy and ethics of the dating app companies, of course, that's another matter..)
Also wanted to say that - and apologies if you know all this stuff already! - Scott's writing on micromarriages feels pertinent and hopefully maybe a bit motivating/encouraging: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone
(Scott doesn't explicitly mention them, but dating apps do rather strike me as an efficient way to accrue micromarriages)
From what I can tell whilst most countries around the world are trying to increase their age of consent, India seems interested in lowering it, with the claim usually being that parents use it to control their children too much.
Does anybody know how free peasants were to marry in medieval Europe? Arranged marriages don’t seem to be the norm there from what I read - there were matchmakers but that wasn’t obligatory. Love songs abound but that doesn’t mean people married for love.
Back the day they got married, but getting married was as simple as both parties agreeing verbally. Or, alternatively, one giving the other a "wed" gift (like a ring, or a hankerchief) and the other consenting to the wedding by accepting it. So marriage was a thing, but not a government thing.
It would happen if it maximized the profit incentive, which would be the case if taxation were technically really hard to do. Like, say enforcing the tax code was impossible because everyone started hiding their assets In cryptocurrencies. Then, governments would have to be voluntarily funded, which would force fiscal austerity. Fiscal austerity would necessarily limit the scope of regulation. So all it would take to make libertarianism the norm would be some new technology that made large scale taxation easy for people to evade, plus possible some soft rebellion of people hating the government and just quiet quitting citizenship.
> So all it would take to make libertarianism the norm would be some new technology that made large scale taxation easy for people to evade, plus possible some soft rebellion of people hating the government and just quiet quitting citizenship.
Never bet against state capacity in developed countries. If everybody switched to crypto, it would still be illegal to not pay your taxes, and crypto's ledger is public info. It would be trivial for the government to, e.g., require various brick-and-mortar companies accepting crypto to provide information on who bought what, which meant they could track down your wallets and arrest you for tax noncompliance.
> Never bet against state capacity in developed countries
Cannabis is de-facto legal because enforcing it is too expensive. Same with illegal immigration: when enough people decide to break the law, the state doesn’t have the budget (either financial or, in the case of democratic states, political capital) to prosecute all the offenders.
They have the resources, they just don't have the incentive. Same with illegal immigration; they absolutely do have the resources to go around busting companies that are obviously exploiting illegal immigrant labor, but they don't. Because it's really good for the economy.
Even libertarians regulate negative externalities; dealing with those has nothing to do with fairness per se. It's at least arguable that there are pervasive, chronic externalities that have gone unaddressed, and you don't have to be "woke" to admit that.
"Love is unfair. Some people go on dozens of dates with supermodels, then have happy marriages with their perfect partner. Other people die alone, through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills, or with less money, or disconnected from the social networks that would allow them to meet good partners. Usually when things are this unfair, we demand some attempt to restore fairness, maybe through redistribution. In love, nobody demands this - except incels, who are universally loathed for it."
I think one reason for the exception love is given from authoritarian tendencies in (Western) people's mind is that the inequality Scott describes here is still much less stark than in other areas of life. It is reigned in by the biological fact that there is roughly parity between the sexes and the social fact that most people are mostly monogamous.
For this reason most people end up finding someone eventually, even if it is not the person of their dreams. Harems, polyarmory etc. are still rare in Western societies and usually decay over time (most hippies ended up settling down with one partner only), ensuring this limit on inequality. Even most incels (in the non-ideological sense) will eventually find someone.
It seems to me that cultures with wide-spread polygamy (for one gender) also regulate love more. In some African societies with polygamy for men, men cannot marry unless they pay bride price. This limits the inequality rampant one-sided polygamy would otherwise entail. In practice, due to value conflicts induced by superficial christianization and rampant poverty that precludes many men from ever being able to pay bride price, the system has broken down completely. What happens now instead is that people often live together long term but unmarried (in Kenya this type of relationship is called the "come-we-stay") and both genders are polyamorous: men are often not able to support a family, so by necessity women end up acquiring multiple breadwinners in turn increasing the opportunities for men, etc. The only difference is that men will brag about it while women will deny it. I think this can be described as a system of love-anarchy instead of a system of love-liberty. As far as I can tell, pretty much nobody likes this state of affairs and it is especially deleterious for children growing up in a setting of constant material and relational instability.
Note also the controversial view that refusing to have sex with or date trans-people is transphobic: if the gender maths change with more genders with different dating preferences emerging and the numerical proportions between genders getting out of balance, the calls for redistribution or regulation may well increase.
Conservatives will decry such change but libertarians should be indifferent towards it. What the heart wants, the heart wants. However, we may then have to face the dilemma between calls for increased regulation and calls for increased redistribution. For some reason, right-libertarians are obsessed with taxes. As a left-libertarian I think taxes are much less severe restrictions on freedom than hard bans on things (would you rather see polyarmory banned or taxed, if you had to choose one?). If the alternative is the system collapsing into either love-authoritarianism or love-anarchy, I would be quite happy to have more love-redistribution.
Even now I am in favor of some love-redistribution, e.g. covering assisted sexuality services for disabled people via public health insurance. In the future we may need more of it, if we wish to preserve love-liberty, so maybe let's rethink society's loathing of those incel ideas.
If the current problem in Kenya is substantially a result of poverty, probably ought to fix the poverty first and then check whether other complications clear up on their own.
More societies have been polygamous and monogamous. It's just that the latter have been fantastically successful. Some of the reason seems to be that wealthy societies have extremely high wealth inequality, and there's no way someone like Bill Gates is going to be permitted to have as many wives as he can afford.
This didn't go in the direction I suspected: state encouragement or discouragement of having children. Since the 1950s, in the U.S., everyone has had an opinion about overpopulation or low birth rates but not much has been done about it, leaving the choice completely up to individual couples, on this basis of "it's no one else's business."
I guess maybe in your culture (San Francisco) love has less to do with having kids than it does in my culture (Mormon).
I love that you said your wife is objectively the best person. I’ve said the same about my husband many times as an example of how you can hold a belief while also acknowledging its irrationality. Sometimes people push back. ‘You mean he’s the best match for you?’ No, I think he is truly the best. Consider the alternative. If he isn’t, I might someday meet someone and realize they are better. I can’t imagine how this could be possible. (Except maybe his almost exact clone that didn’t leave caps loose on soda bottles so that they go flat.) So I really do think he’s the best. But I can do math. I’m not oblivious to the statistical ridiculousness of that statement.
Libertarians support unlimited immigration under the condition of the government not paying a penny to support new immigrants, as well as enforcing laws against occupying public property to ensure that new immigrants don't just all become homeless.
Since the government does (unfortunately) waste money on helping immigrants, libertarians are in favor of a regulated border.
I would say: open borders, a welfare state, fiscal solvency: choose two. It rather appears that cities such as New York and Chicago are in fact being faced with that choice right now.
I mean insecure in the sense that the nerd thinks they won't get another partner. They are surely secure in the domain in which they are classified as a nerd, for example.
The distribution of attractiveness of nerds isn't that different from the distribution among the rest of the population. So, 3/10 women marry 3/10 nerds. 8/10 women marry 8/10 nerds. There's no settling going on, people still match each other based off looks. Nerds have an introverted personality but plenty of women are introverted as well or don't mind an introverted partner.
How would one regulate dating; specifically, how would you detect whether two people are dating ? Regulating e.g. driving is easy: it's pretty obvious when someone is driving a car, vs. when he isn't. But it seems like in order to reliably regulate dating, you'd have to regulate basically every human interaction, which is impractical (though I'm sure China is working on it).
Right, this does work, but arguably this is what I mean by "impractical". At the very least, Saudi Arabia *eliminates* dating, it does not regulate it.
edit: More to the point (in the west, where more of the problem is that the various options for dating have acquired a bunch of pathologies e.g. the sex ratio imbalance in dating apps), if the suggestion (earlier in the comments to this post) to have Google use its vast surveillance information on us to actually _help_ dating worked, that would be useful.
>Am I joking? The last one yes, but I don’t know about the others. Probably some of these policies would make the world a better place overall, at least as a first-order effect.
I'd rather not, precisely because that's been one of my primary way to wedge the idea that wealth redistribution is wrong amongst normal people. Not to great success, I'll admit, but at least it get awkward aknowledgment instead of me being kicked from polite statist society.
The person I thought was objectively the best one in the world abused me into severe depression and serious PTSD. Right now I'd happily sign up for more regulated love.
I can think of one other area of life I’ve been involved in that still operates on the libertarian principle, and where there remain opportunities for unregulated adventure: basic research in theoretical computer science, theoretical physics, and math. (Well, until one gets old enough that one is regularly dealing with funding agencies.) In that case, a plausible explanation is that (1) success and failure are at least somewhat objective (thus setting the stage for adventure) and (2) no one cares enough to regulate the adventure away. Maybe sports and chess feel similar for those immersed in them.
Seems like we could count the 28% of people who aren't in a relationship as also not satisfied with the current system. (The 95% statistic above is restricted to people who are in a relationship.)
"Maybe it’s not just that love resists regulation, but that it’s becoming progressively less regulated at the same time the economy etc becomes progressively more regulated."
(Epistemic status: Intuition) My immediate response to this is that the state wants to regulate avenues of power. For the majority of human history, Love (marriage, specifically) was substantially important for the transfer of wealth and status not just across generations, but between familial power groups. In the modern (Western) world this feels less true, in fact it's considered generally unseemly to give unfair preference to a member of your family. It's more effective to pull the levers of the economy than to pull the levers of (literal) tribal/familial politics in the present historical moment.
Love gets to be free because the powers that be have nothing to gain by restraining it.
...With one exception. Fertility rates falling is a major concern for pretty much every developed country, and any country able to maintain or even grow their population will have a massive advantage. Right now, countries like the US are relying on immigration for this, but that well is eventually going to dry up as well. Unfortunately, there's no easy alternatives; forcing people to have children is going to be a very hard sell, especially in a country like the US.
>any country able to maintain or even grow their population will have a massive advantage
I respectfully disagree. Here is a list of nations by TFR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate . The most fertile ones, Niger, Chad, DR Congo, Somalia, are poor, in the case of Somalia, is the classic example of a failed state, and generally have bad infrastructure and access to technology. I think that for them to have an advantage in most terms (economic, military, global influence), they (if possible! this has usually failed) need to become developed nations.
Or am I misunderstanding, and are you speaking only of countries _among_ _the_ _developed_ _ones_ that are able to grow their populations?
The possibility of losing one's livelihood because a rabid Twitter mob thinks some comment was insufficiently woke and bashes at one's employer till one is fired is hardly a humorous matter for the victim.
No doubt our grandparents cherished the ability to, e.g., espouse socialism during Red Scare and the McCarthy era without the slightest fear of it affecting their employment.
Max Chaplin had a good point to that effect. _Your_ "chuckle" on the other hand, is a miserable denial of empathy to the cancel victims of today. When the shifting winds of politics turn against you, I wish you the same fear and hardship that the twitter mobs impose on their victims today.
I would question just how many of our grandparents actually held this "freedom" particularly dear, assuming they even had it. (How many of them took advantage of it in times and places where it existed de facto is, of course, a quite different question)
A bunch of admittedly minor ones to add to the list:
- freedom to purchase incandescent light bulbs
- freedom to purchase oil of bitter almonds (the DEA got its panties in a knot over some chemists using benzaldehyde as a feedstock for some recreational drug)
- freedom to drive without a seatbelt (more than 30 years but less than 70)
( There are actually a wide variety of chemicals the DEA doesn't like, including two _elements_, iodine and phosphorous. )
> Maybe this is an overly simple story. There were more regulations on love until very recently - bans on interracial marriage, bans on gay marriage, etc. Maybe it’s not just that love resists regulation, but that it’s becoming progressively less regulated at the same time the economy etc becomes progressively more regulated.
It is an overly simple story. It's actually pretty much the opposite of correct. Sex used to be illegal outside the confines of PIV in marriage, with crimes such as adultery, sodomy, fornication, obscenity, etc, used to control virtually everyone's sexuality in one way or another. You couldn't even send racy letters in the post, thanks to the Comstock laws.
This. Not to mention that marriage was a legal and economic arrangement that was made by spouses' families, not the spouses themselves, for most of human history and in much of the world still today. Especially women were forced into marriages they did not want, but this happened for some men, too. And of course, classically, adultery was a death penalty offense, especially for women.
"It is an overly simple story. It's actually pretty much the opposite of correct. Sex used to be illegal outside the confines of PIV in marriage, with crimes such as adultery, sodomy, fornication, obscenity, etc, used to control virtually everyone's sexuality in one way or another."
In America laws against fornication were basically never enforced. And while laws against adultery are technically "control over people's sexuality," they only apply to those who have voluntarily agreed to get married.
Bans on interracial marriage went away in the 1960s, about when I started college. In fact, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress came out then, and showed its viewpoint character getting sent to prison in the US for being in a multiracial marriage on Luna, among other things, in the year 2076; then two years later the Supreme Court did away with miscegenation laws.
Thalidomide was never approved for pregnant women by the US Food and Drug Administration. (It was approved as a cancer treatment--for which it can be quite effective--in 1998, with a black box warning about pregnancy.) Thalidomide was approved by the in Europe and Australia, where it was used widely in pregnancy and resulted in birth defects. Almost all those photos of the kids with the tiny limbs are from Europe, and mainly the United Kingdom, where it was approved early and used quite a lot. The thalidomide babies born in the USA were born to mothers who were not taking a FDA-approved drug, but an import from Europe.
So, um, @Scott Alexander, this is not a great example to use to make your point about the badness of regulation and especially not a great example to use of the badness of the FDA approval process.
I disagree with Scott on this, but that's his point. The FDA avoided the damage caused by Thalidomide, but was overly restrictive generally and therefore did more harm than good. I don't think that's correct, but that's his consistent position.
He knows, he's saying that medical regulations should be loosened even if it meant that Thalidomide would have been approved. Can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.
I think reproduction is the other huge thing that's a huge deal and is largely unregulated - if it were invented today, you wouldn't just be allowed combine DNA with another person through a sexual encounter and create a new human life in your abdomen. It would never get past a medical ethics board.
You're *much* more optimistic than I am, if you think we'll have gengineering for designer kids by 2030 in the US.
I'd buy that a a good chunk of wealthy *people,* some of whom are Americans, will be using IVF to create gengineered kids by 2030, but I would definitely bet against it being in the US, and for it being in somewhere more like Thailand, Prospera, or Russia / Eastern Europe (new tourist and income opportunity!).
I know a lot of non wealthy people that have done IVF. Freezing sperm and getting snipped is a no-brainer right now because you get to find out if you have good sperm at 22 AND 22 year old sperm is better than 40 year old sperm AND you don’t have to worry about birth control. And everyone knows 22 year old eggs are far superior to 35 year old eggs.
"To a first approximation, the only rule is that you may not seize it by force."
Except people have also tried to get love potions to work, in order to compel the one they love/are attracted to, to return their feelings. There's spells and everything for this, did you ever hear of The Spancel of Death?
"Sibella Cottle was the mistress of Sir Henry Lynch-Blosse, 7th Baronet (popularly known as Sir Harry; 1749–88) of Balla, County Mayo, Ireland.
...Sir Harry was urged to abandon Cottle and marry a woman of his own class and religion. Cottle reputedly responded by commissioning a powerful love charm, the spancel of death (Irish: an buarach bháis). The spancel has been described as "an unbroken hoop of skin cut with incantations from a corpse across the entire body from shoulder to footsole and wrapped in silk of the colours of the rainbow and used as a spancel to tie the legs of a person to produce certain effects of witchcraft." According to Nally, the love charm was made by Judy Holian, an bhean feasa (a woman of knowledge and wisdom), from the corpse of Harry's illegitimate daughter by another woman. Holian, reputedly a local witch, guaranteed that Sir Harry would be spellbound for life should Cottle apply the spancel to him
It's supposed to be an entire hoop of skin, cut from a corpse in one unbroken round, which with the proper incantations will then bind your lover (or the one you want to be your lover) to you. Other versions say you don't need an entire loop, just a piece of corpse skin and tie it on the person you want.
"A potent love-charm used by women is a piece of skin taken from the arm of a corpse and tied on the person while sleeping whose love is sought. The skin is then removed after some time, and carefully put away before the sleeper awakes or has any consciousness of the transaction. And as long as it remains in the woman's possession the love of her lover will be unchanged. Or the strip of skin is placed under the head to dream on, in the name of the Evil One, when the future husband will appear in the dream."
Ah, it was used by Morgause on Arthur in part 2, "The Queen of Air and Darkness". It seemed an extremely weird and creepy bit of detail, and I'd never run across it before or since, so I'm glad to finally learn whence it came from. Thanks!
A great many marriages are arranged. I believe there's selective pressure for people to be good negotiators. While being a good negotiator is valuable in many ways, it's very important for your grandchildren to have good chances. What exactly might be getting selected for?
The reason why romantic relationships are one of the last places where "libertarian" ideals remain is because it's one of the few places where coordination of private actors to engage in antisocial behavior doesn't really work. In business, for example, we have extensive antitrust regulations because we saw first-hard what happens with monopolist corporations. Stable relationships are generally one-on-one. Incidentally, this is one of the arguments against polyamory--because all of a sudden you have introduced coordination problems in to romance.
Well, I've never been in love and never wanted to be in love or in a relationship, so good luck to all you people with this odd impulse for Valentine's Day, but since it's also Ash Wednesday today I'm sticking with that one!
"Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life."
Given the amount of people cheating, I'm sure they'd lie to the government database as well. Some people may not know their partner is married/in a relationship and so would honestly (as they think) answer that they're in a relationship of two single people, and unless you start a federal bureau of snoops, how are you going to be sure about A is seeing B and also C?
There's an entire sub-reddit for women who are in adulterous relationships, and bewailing that the guy lying to his wife is - shock, horror! - also lying to them about "one day I'll get that divorce and marry you, honey". Some of them are aware that this is a side thing and happy with that, but the amount of "if he doesn't make a decision for definite soon, I'm leaving him" is astonishing. Why be surprised that someone willing to deceive and lie in one intimate relationship is also willing to do the same in another intimate relationship?
The modest proposal concerning the regulation of dating sounds a bit like the sex that some incels believe that they are entitled to.
Except the incels seem to treat it as the world's problem that they aren't getting any action, while your proposal would make something that the loveless need to get fixed.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails...
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
As with all libertarian consensuses it does ignore the bottom 10%, we probably should provide courses on how to spot domestic violence in high school though with a high level of scepticism about whether they work.
It isn't a huge problem but it isn't negligible there are men with long records of violence against women who continue to date and make people miserable and society should probably intervene to stop that.
Victims should be ignored when it comes removing restraining ordres, it is clear that people frequently make bad choices, that create negative utility for them and people around them.
That would absolutely backfire. Lots of stories of early medical students jumping to declare things as rare deadly diseases when they're in fact the much more common diseases with the same symptoms. Those are the people smart enough to get into medical school, how much worse would the average high-schooler be.
Agreed, high false positive rates on something that destroys lives and reputations (accusations of abuse / violence) is NOT the way to go.
> we probably should provide courses on how to spot domestic violence in high school though with a high level of scepticism about whether they work.
"High level of skepticism" means the false positive rate is going to be really high, and you're going to ruin lots of lives and careers for basically no reason.
Is it state-level regulations or regulations period that is a problem for libertarians? The amount of non-state level regulation on love and relationships in societies where most human beings live (India, China, other south and southeast asian countries, some African tribal societies), is enormous, with parents given authorization to kidnap, drug, and beat their adult children in countries for violating established cultural norms surrounding how to couple up, marry, procreate, have sex, everything in this domain. Countries that implemented any of these very serious constraints and then used the state to protect adult children from the violence of their parents would be an improvement, from the point of view of absolute liberty, but worse, from the point of view of state-level liberty. Which type of society does a libertarian prefer?
It's a shame tax free day varies by person and country, or that might make an ideal Libertarian Day.
As a smoker and moderate drinker, and with taxes in the UK at record levels when we haven't even fought in a World War recently, I'm looking forward to my tax free day some time in November!
(In case anyone is not familiar with the notion, tax free day is the date in the year after which one starts working for oneself rather than the state! )
I'm not sure that the best day to celebrate "non-aggression" is the one named after a guy who was beaten, tortured, beheaded, buried in secret, dug up again, had his remains paraded around, etc...
A very nice sentiment, but it also seems cruel to give "the faction with the highest concentration of single men" the holiday associated with relationships.
If I wasn't dating a libertarian girl I've met recently, I'd be filled with cynicism!! haha
mlk is woke Christmas, juneteen is woke Easter. The former is domesticated, has something for everyone under popular interpretation (winter solstice slash gifts; colorblindness). The latter is more hard core to the Faith (crucifix and resurrection; trans historical guilt for America’s original sin(TM), just about blacks, even the name is in Ebonics)
I always felt the opposite, because of the prohibition of polygamy. Not polyamory, where everyone is presumably fully happy with the arrangement, or non-consensual polygamy, where a repressive culture forces a woman into a marriage, but consensual polygamy, where, eg, each wife would prefer to have the husband to herself, but is choosing this as the best option because she gets a higher status husband. With modern norms about love, as a person gets higher status, they get to have more desirable partners, but there's a ceiling where you get the most desirable partner, and that's it. If you apply the normal logic of capitalism, you should be able to trade your status for whatever arrangement the other parties will freely agree to, based on what each party can offer and what other options are available. Monogamy is like a salary cap for love.
Rare W for feminism. We take sexual autonomy much more seriously now (spousal rape is a thing, marriage alliances aren’t). And thankfully women really care about sexual (and reproductive) autonomy! Too bad they don’t feel the same about other kinds of freedom.
Guns are a net negative for women by any metric. It is absolutely rational for women to oppose their free distribution. If that’s what you’re talking about.
You would figure but actually it turns out men use guns against women as well as fists and women are just generally less disposed to violence, so anything that makes violence easier, benefits men more than women. The number of women shot, outnumbers the number of women who do defensive shootings, by a factor of thousands in one of the most gun happy nations on earth. That tells it all.
I’m sure all the murdered women are consoled by that fact. And the women who live in fear of violent exes they know have guns, or just like any random guy on the street who can alll have guns, I’m sure women are so much more free, in a society where like any guy can have a gun. That’s a great position for women to be in. Much safer. So rational for women to support that.
Incidentally, regarding libertarianism, the Libertarian Party seems to have split: https://thirdpartywatch.com/2024/02/13/1489/ (that particular story doesn't say it, but these appear to be all former LP state organizations, to my understanding representing the moderates who didn't agree with the Mises Caucus takeover.)
How long has love had this property? Because as I understand it, for most of history, much/most of the world has/had arranged marriages, where choice was at least strongly constrained. Not necessarily by the state, but still by institutions with significant coercive power.
My understanding is that the rise of Liberalism in the West is mostly responsible, though it only started gaining momentum about a hundred years ago. Modern liberal governments are generally pragmatic enough that they won't die on hills like banning interracial or gay marriage. Those are completely inconsquential issues compared to stuff like foreign policy.
Same approach could and should be made about having kids. Marriage mistakes can not only ruin the partners’ lives, it most definitely has negative impact to children. So, let’s make some rules about having kids:
•Nobody is allowed to produce children without a permit. Take several classes and pass a test showing that you understand basic child-rearing and have the minimum resources to do it.
•Six month waiting period after getting the permit.
•Centralized government database of children you have produced.
•Kid licenses can be revoked for serious crimes – e.g., abuse, persistent alcoholism/drug use, violent convictions, neglect, etc.
•If you produce children without permit, then you are subject to sterilization so you can’t keep foisting your mistakes onto society.
Am I joking? No. Having children is a privilege and responsibility; it is not a “right”. I'm sure many will say how cold or unfeeling this is. But because almost everyone reproduce doesn't mean that they should. Take a hard look at the foster system if you'd like some evidence.
I'm childfree myself, so my ox isn't gored by this, but I still think it is a bad idea. Coercive sterilization has been abused (both in the USA, which is where I'm writing from, and elsewhere). This wasn't a hypothetical, it happened.
In general, for the people who want kids, my understanding is that this is a major life project, comparable to their career or education, and that putting it under government control would be putting a major leash around their necks.
I think most of the world still thinks of love as a magical thing. Like, literally a magic force, operating far beyond petty laws and regulations. If you tried to ban love, it would only become stronger.
- An explicitly freedom-oriented holiday seems great.
- Romance does indeed stand out as especially free in the ways you pointed out.
- I really like the candor about the gut feeling, and I applaud you for saying it loud and clear.
- I think you displayed the virtues of Lightness and Evenness superlatively well here.
- From Wikipedia: "The influence of pederasty on Greek culture of these periods was so pervasive that it has been called 'the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens.'" Hm. Maybe Libertarian Love Day should come with a "ok but don't repeal all the age-of-consent laws" disclaimer.
Ha. Your “except prostitution” completely blew up the libertarian analogy. And you further blew it up by the suggestion that some additional regulation would be in order. You are not wrong. Congratulations on your graduation from Libertarian to Conservative!
I don't have a response to any very specific part of this essay, but I have a lot of feelings about the general vibe of it since I often struggle with the idea that the way I'm fundamentally inclined (and perhaps socialized) to think about love involves a making decisions according to a far higher standard of honesty and truth and... organicness?... than other major things I seek in life, including (and particularly) my professional career. For instance, I can make a decision to take a particular job -- and be very open about the decision, possibly even to the people who hire me -- based on the fact that the harshness of the job market makes it most strategic for me to settle for that particular job. Something deep within me dictates that I can't make love live decisions this way, much less admit to a partner (or even myself) that I settled for them, even if deciding to settle in my love life is equally rational to deciding to settle in my professional life.
I have a theory that if a famous person’s tinder activity leaked, and the data showed they always swiped left on a particular race, there would in fact be some attempts to get them cancelled. I don’t think love is a safe space from cancel mobs.
Marriage is easy to regulate, since we don't count it as "marriage" unless the state signs off on it for property rights and child custody and taxes and such.
Sex is difficult to regulate since you have to do an awful lot of invasion of privacy, but it can be managed and has been.
"Relationships" and "dating" are almost impossible to regulate without enormous control over freedom of association to the level of "women are not allowed to hang out with unrelated men without a male relative present". You can't control them without control the ability of people to interact.
"Love" is an emotion. You can only prevent people from expressing it, not prevent them from feeling it.
This has nothing to do with adhering to some magical conception of "love". It's just that some of the things you're talking about are very hard to regulate!
Michel Houllebecq famously made this comparison in making the exact opposite point:
"In our societies, sex represents a second system of differentiation, independent from money. It behaves as a system of differentiation at least as merciless as money. The impacts of these two systems are actually equivalent. Sexual liberalism creates a phenomenon of acute pauperization, just like wild liberalism does. Some make love everyday; some five or six times in their life or never. Some make love to dozens of women, some never do. It is called “market law”.
In an economic system where lay-offs are prohibited, everyone more or less finds their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, everyone more or less manages to find a bed partner. In a liberal economic system, some build huge fortunes; some endure unemployment and misery. In a perfect liberal sex system, some have a varied and exciting erotic life; some are reduced to masturbation and loneliness. Economic liberalism is broadening the field of struggle, broadening it to all the stages of life and to all social classes"
Did this guy ever manage to penetrate the idea (on the economic side) that a system where lay-offs are prohibited (several have existed and ) results in substantially more unemployment, misery and pauperisation than a 'wildly liberal' one?
The sexual analogy would be.... "dead bedrooms" with no possibility of divorce? But on paper, almost everyone is married, yay! But also, most marriages do not have kids, and the ones that do usually only have one child, so the society goes extinct in a few generations?
Marriage is regulated, and courtship and dating have strong informal social norms associated with them. These have all changed fairly significantly over the past 80 years.
In one seven day stretch, we have a Chiefs Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day. Those are all drinking holidays for me... not sure my liver can take it
Are you sure on the "Most female murder victims are killed by their romantic partners" thing? I swear I saw stats for the UK in which like 40% of female murder victims were killed by a partner or ex-partner, and it was only a majority if you ignored those where the killer wasn't known. While this sounds reasonable I think the police are aware that romantic partners are a good bet to demand alibis of, and the unsolved are disproportionately likely to be people who weren't so obvious to law enforcement.
Thanks for the link. It finds 55% by including 'other kinds of victims' which based on its clarifications appears to mean 'if your partner kills your brother for trying to protect you then we counted that as an example of a women being killed by their partner'. It contains the paragraph "Worldwide, the World Health Organization says a partner or spouse is the killer in 38 percent of women's homicides. Previous research in the U.S. suggested that intimate partners carried out more than 40 percent of homicides of women."
FIY, Russia (and maybe other post-soviet countries) has form of this - one-month period between making official petition for marriage and actual marriage conclusion
Isn't regulation for marriage and relationships a core function of most religious organizations and churches? Almost literally the rules for love/relationship regulation above
Mitt Romney’s family fled America over polygamy because the federal government persecuted polygamists. Oh, and remember SF QB Steve Young being asked about his ancestor Brigham Young’s quote about unwed 30 year old men being nuisances?? That’s because BY had over 50 wives and could divorce them easily…and pretty much every Mormon is related to BY because he had so many offspring.
This reminded me of G. K. Chesterton, from his book Orthodoxy:
>This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately...Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.
This is a little out of touch I think. Woke people nowadays tend to quietly downplay and ignore MLK, as his support for nonviolence and colorbind policies runs counter to what wokism advocates. The woke holidays would be things like Juneteenth, black history month, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, and "Conspicuously Not Celebrating Columbus Day" day.
As many others have pointed out, it's only recently that love has been deregulated, and only in the West among the non-religious. The consequences have been disastrous. Cheating is rampant, with 20% admitting to having cheated on a partner. 58% of black American children live without their fathers. Half of first marriages end in divorce, with even higher rates for second and third marriages. This serial monogamy severely worsens inequality: the hottest people keep dating the hottest people of the other gender (why settle for someone uglier if all the beautiful people will be single again in a year?), instead of settling down and allowing everyone else to have a shot. It's hardly a surprise that people are marrying and having children later, and that more people are involuntarily celibate.
Yes, serial monogamy is on the rise, also thanks to increased life-spans. It is arguably the functional equivalent to polygamy. Both polygamy and serial monogamy serve to limit fatherhood to a more select groups of fathers.
....In countries that allow polygamy among men (some countries in the Middle East for example), prostitution has traditionally been the way the other - and younger - men get some sex. Now the internet is taking over that role.
...a difference though is that while male polygamy is associated with arranged marriages and patriarchal family structures, serial monogamy is arguably more an effect of increased female choice in the mating process. Thus the type of men that are selected for breeding (so to speak) might be somewhat different in polygamous and serial monogamy-cultures, concerning their personality traits; although in both cases the males are likely to be high-status in their societies.
In pretty much every sex binary species I've seen, females have the ultimate say in their choice of mate, effectively acting as gatekeepers to procreation. The ability to rape seems to be selected against, presumably due to its dysgenic effects. A particularly hilarious example of this is ducks, where the females developed corkscrew-shaped vaginas in order to avoid getting fertilized by unwanted males... and the males evolved corkscrew penises in response.
Of course, humanity is unique in that females have almost zero protection against rape. Maybe it's because the sexual dimorphism was so necessary for whatever reason that this was an affordable sacrifice to make. ...Or maybe it just means that humanity is a doomed species.
>>This serial monogamy severely worsens inequality: the hottest people keep dating the hottest people of the other gender (why settle for someone uglier if all the beautiful people will be single again in a year?),
How does this make sense? All the ugly people can date each other while the beautiful people are playing musical chairs
I think it was a mistake to put it in a gender-neutral way. It's probably more like this -- the hot women are at home taking care of their babies, the divorced hot men are out there again ruining the dating market for the average men. (Also for the average women, if their long-term goal is to start a family, because the number and quality of men willing to have sex with them exceeds the number and quality of men willing to start a family with them.)
If the situation was symmetric with regards to genders, then I suppose the society would stratify, and the behavior of one layer would have little impact on the behavior of another layer.
I'm a temporary resident on a partner visa, so I'm subject to regulations very similar to the ones you describe. This article makes me more envious than I can describe, and I hope you appreciate your good fortune.
Parent-child relationships are very unregulated too, and I think the case for having "parenting licenses" is much better than the one for Scott's imagined licenses to date. There's no restriction at all on who can father or become pregnant with a child, and it's really not hard to get out from under the requirement that kids attend school. I homeschooled my daughter thru 7th grade, and it was quite easy to get permission to do that, and nobody ever checked up on me. All states have required vaxes for kids, but if you child doesn't go to school or camp it's easy to get away with not getting them (though I have no objections to vaxes for kids, and my daughter got them all.)
I've always agreed with the idea of "parenting licenses" as a good idea in spirit, but of course, the West already has a fertility problem.
Pace Zvi's "carseats as contraceptive" post, the more barriers you throw up around having (more) children, the worse the negative impact on fertility rates.
Not to mention the enforcement would be an ethical, logistical, and philosophical nightmare - by what means are you going to ensure *default infertility?*
I'm not really in favor of parenting licenses, although all of us therapists hear some terrible stories about parents, and that's enough to at least make us daydream about somehow forbidding certain people to become parents. Another group that's in the running for parenting license forfeiture in my mind is alcoholic or drug-addicted women who continue the use the drug during pregnancy.
Can you not forcibly take these pregnant women and put them in a locked institution until they give birth? That's a legal option in Scandinavia. It is not often used since there obviously is a high treshold plus the need for solid evidence, but it is used.
Many Thanks! While I'm childfree, and my ox would not be gored even if parenting were licensed, I think it would be a bad idea.
My understanding is that, for people who want a child, this is a major life project, of comparable importance to a career, or to their education. Putting it under state control would put a very major additional leash around the necks of potential parents. I would expect this major power to be abused very quickly.
Parent-child relationships unregulated? Nor after the child is born. Mandatory education is now universal the world over, and increased efforts to trace absent partners and make them pay child support is a worldwide trend. Child protection agencies are also being strengthened, also likely to be a worldwide trend (although so far the tendency is probably strongest in Northern Europe and North America). Related: The type of parenting the state allows, is gradually narrowed. Witness the diffusion of the legal prohibition of parents to corporally punish their children. Sweden was the innovator, and this legal innovation is gradually diffusing worldwide.
Education is mandatory in the US, but parents are allowed to homeschool their kids, and there is no active checking on the quality of the education kids are getting at home. I don't know whether their have been bills in the U S strengthening child protection, but I continue to hear and read about cases of badly abused and neglected kids with the state agency, overloaded with cases, not doing a decent job. Corporal punishment is legal in all 50 states, although there are guidelines about the point at which corporal punishment shades into abuse. But old-fashioned spanking is definitely allowed here.
Yes, this legal innovation has not reached the US yet. But notice that the legal practice is spreading. And, equally important: No country that has introduced legal prohibitions against parents to corporally punish their children, has ever reversed this legislation - despite the forever-ongoing shifts in the ideologies of the ruling parties. That's why I think this is likely to be one-way affair, i.e. a diffusion process.
Wiki has a good page on the diffusion so far, if you write "corporal punishment of children". Most European (including Israel) and Latin American countries are in the bag already, as is Japan, New Zealand, Scotland(!) and several others.
...since the US is a big place and states to my knowledge have juristiction in this policy area, my bet/prediction is that in the US the process will start in California, first diffuse to other Blue states, and later to Red states. With Mississippi and Alabama probably being the last holdouts of the old order. But eventually even they will succumb...You heard it here first:-)!
Here was I, all prepared to be shocked, and then it tells me (and as a sidenote, it reads like it was written by AI):
"These are the recorded incest rates by state.
They are the percentage of marriages involving second cousins or family members."
Your second cousin, which means you are both the children of first cousins, which means that you are the grandchildren of siblings, and your nearest common ancestors are your great-grandparents, one set of whom are the same for both of you.
Oh gosh. Incest between descendants of one particular set of great-grandparents. How truly horrifying. Bear in mind, as well, that "family members" also includes people who are not blood relatives, e.g. in-laws and relatives by marriage - so if your aunt by blood divorces her husband, and then 'Uncle Ernie' takes up with you, that's technically incest but you're not blood-related.
I'll tell you what is absolutely horrifying: whatever thing wrote that article. It flails about for a term and tries "incestual" and "incest marriage". No, idiot AI, the word you want is "incestuous". It also contradicts itself all over the place:
"- incest between brother and sister is second most likely
- incest between mother and son is second most likely"
Well, which is it? Sibling incest or Oedipal incest?
The shock, horror headline ("17 Scary And Startling Incest Statistics") is clickbait and does not live up to the billing; it conflates incest and sex abuse, and goes all out about "these states permit incest" and "it is a crime in these states" but doesn't notice that there are a lot of the same states in both lists.
California is not a red state, so far as I know, yet it has a 0.2% incest rate, which puts it in the middle. Here's what that awful article tells us:
"Yes, incest is a criminal offense in all 50 states.
California: felony, 3 years in prison, and up to $10,000 in fines."
But also:
"The states that allow incest relationships are:
California [picked out from list]
They do not allow incestual marriages.
But they are relaxed about incest relationships.
And these relationships are not criminal offenses."
So again, which is it? A criminal offence or not? And if you want advice on "can I have an incest relationship which is not an incestual marriage in this state?", good luck with figuring it out from this:
"The rules for these incest relationships are:
- both parties must be consenting adults
- both parties must be related by marriage (more on this below)
- both parties must be blood relatives
- no sexual relationship of any kind is allowed (i.e., sexual intercourse)
- the relationship must be consensual
- both parties must provide full disclosure of the relationships to any partners
Being related by blood or marriage includes:
- siblings
- half-siblings
- first cousins
- aunts or uncles
- nieces or nephews
- sons and daughters with parents
Inbred families can include kids with a parental figure."
So do I have to related by both blood *and* marriage to my putative incest partner? And if we can't have sex, does that mean a romantic relationship instead of an erotic one?
It then swerves into inbreeding, and if you're going to poke the bear about red state people having intercourse with their blood relatives, you may wish to treat carefully, because:
"African Americans have the most inbreeding of any racial group in America.
African Americans have the highest rate of intermarriage within their own race."
Well, you awful racist you, accusing African-Americans of all being incestuous!
But maybe you only mean red state white people, hmmm?
Okay, this site got you covered:
"The most inbred state in America is West Virginia.
This is according to a study by the University of Washington.
West Virginia had the highest rate of inbreeding in the United States.
Approximately 4.1% of all births in West Virginia were the result of inbreeding.
This is much higher than the national average of 1.2%.
The inbreeding rate of West Virginia is largely due to its:
- geography
- small population
The state is isolated and has a large rural population.
As a result, many West Virginians are related to each other."
Oh darn, it turns out that it's not because they're all sister-fuckers, it's because in a small, isolated area people tend to intermarry within their community and so end up with common ancestry.
And my final word on this trash is that the layout of the page is *abominable*.
Yikes, I'm an idiot. I sent that link in the middle of the night when I was having a snack to help me get back to sleep. Googled "US incest per capita by state," and when the first link gratified my craving for stats showing more sister-fucking in red states I just posted the link here without even reading the whole article. Anyhow, you are totally right and I deleted that shit.
How does it get to eugenics -- is it via the idea that if we had eugenics-based regulations lots of abusive parents would never have been allowed to reproduce because they would not be up to standard in measures of intelligence and/or mental health? I'm actually not sure how many abusers-to-be that would strain out. The three worst abuse histories I've heard from patients of mine all involved parents who would not have shown up as defective pre-parenthood using the big, obvious measures. Two parents had advanced degrees, and were almost certainly of above-average intelligence. The third did not have even an undergrad. degree, but judging by her employment history and such she was of at least average intelligence. And none was obviously mentally ill before they became parents. Of course my sample is tiny, but I also worked for several years in a psychiatric hospital and heard lots of patient's histories, and came away with the same impression: prior to becoming parents, most people who are going to flunk parenthood are not obviously defective.
Oh you could not give licensees to undesirables, drug addicts, gamblers and whatever really. It’s only eugenics though if you stop the procreation rather than foster out the children after birth.
I found the right woman (or rather she found me, picked me up out of the gutter, cleaned me up, and cares for me for the past 37 years) on the second go-round. My brother swung and missed twice and is unwilling to swing a third time for fear of striking out. I figure you win some, you lose some, you get rained out once in a while, but you have to suit up and play every day.
Anyway, love is weird at best and only mildly truly describable. (I knew a guy who fell in love and got married 7 times by the time he was 35. Seriously. Died at age 50, I think from natural causes.)
After thinking about it for a while, I had an epiphany. It's obvious what the libertarian holiday is: 4/20, the holiday not recognized by any government which exists to honor of an intoxicating plant-derived substance of dubious legality.
>Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life.
Isn't this basically describing marriage records? When I got married, we had to go to the County Probate Court, and sign a document saying that we weren't already married, weren't first cousins, weren't infected with syphilis, and a few other things that seemed very quaint but were probably significant hazards in the 1800s or whatever. You're free to love whoever you want, but as soon as you want to attach any legal or economic meaning to your love, we regulate the shit out of it.
Right, but it used to be the case that you *weren't* free to love whoever you wanted, because loving (in the sense of "making love") anyone who wasn't listed as your One Acceptable Lover in the official records was a serious social and often legal offense.
So, in this case, Scott is right that we have seen a broadly popular increase in personal liberty.
"Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. 95% of people describe themselves as at least “satisfied” with their romantic relationship, and 60% as “extremely satisfied”.
...Scott, let me boost your pessimism: You are forgetting the selection effect. The unsatisfied have divorced their partners and are not any longer in the institution. Divorce rates approach 50 percent, and not only in the US. Plus, cohabitation is increasingly replacing marriage in many countries. And cohabitation has an even higher break-up rate than marriage (although data on this is wobbly and not as good as on marriage break-ups).
Yes, it’s like a statistic saying that 90% of religious people were happy in their church. Of course. If they weren’t they would be in a different church, or none.
For the longest time, I've wanted to write a story about a couple that gets their marriage license revoked.
I wanted some sort of gut-punch ending, but I still haven't managed to figure out what that should look like.
We have this strong modern Western taboo against regulating people's love lives. But... what happens if that taboo is violated? There seems to have been a long history of arranged marriages in some cultures, and marriages were seen as a coming together of families, not just of individuals. Prioritizing love in marriage is a very time and culture specific value. So maybe nothing beyond an increased feeling of quiet desperation would be the result of such a shift. Or an increase in non-marital romances, akin to courtly love.
I agree that some people's beliefs about consent in romance seems to contrast sharply with some people's understanding of consent in economic transactions.
Another domain in which Western thinking tends to be very libertarian is religious self-determination. Even if we knew we could increase utility by 1,000,000 hedons by imposing a limitation on the number of hours people can spend worshipping in order to divert them into more economically productive activities, we still wouldn't do it. Imagine that we could save an extra 10,000 lives in the third world over the next five years by simply forcing the Catholics to practice one fewer of their 12 (or whatever it is) rites, or attending worship services for five fewer minutes. Maybe, in the aggregate, that would create enough economic value in productive labor hours that it would generate a big enough foreign aid budget to save another several thousand lives per year (or even if it wouldn't, just stipulate for the purposes of this hypothetical example that it would). But nonetheless, on the altar of religion, we sacrifice humanity. How very human.
(Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this: many Muslim-majority countries make some or all non-Islamic religious practices illegal. But by the same token, love has its exceptions too: gay and interracial marriage once was illegal, and in many countries will cause you to be murdered.)
"Imagine that we could save an extra 10,000 lives in the third world over the next five years by simply forcing the Catholics to practice one fewer of their 12 (or whatever it is) rites, or attending worship services for five fewer minutes."
I'm rolling around on the floor here at the notion that modern, Western, Catholics spend *too much* time on practicing our religion. "Attending Mass for five fewer minutes"? The people who rush out the door once it's time for communion would be leaving at the Gospel, if they could. Three-quarters of an hour for Mass once a week is considered "long".
Yeah, I'm sure the ninety seconds I spent today saying the Angelus at my work desk would have been better employed doing - what? An extra ninety seconds clicking on my emails isn't that much, really.
And, as we've seen from relaxed Sunday religious obligations, if people stop going to church services, they are not spending that time being "economically productive" - they either use it for leisure, or they work on jobs around the house, or they go out and spend money shopping. Depending on their job, they might even spend that Sunday working (people have to staff the shops and restaurants and pubs that you go out to, after all).
As for "12 rites", do you mean the seven sacraments? Yes, ban Shrove Tuesday (New Orleans tourist trade will love you for that) and instead make everyone do an extra hour of work! The economy is all, Mammon is our god now!
If you're just trying to do the usual "religion bad and dumb", only from the angle of "instead of praying, just work extra hours to earn more money to give to charity", then I think you're coming at it the wrong way round. You're entitled to go "religion bad and dumb" but please, don't dress it up as "I am just thinking of the children!"
Lol obviously it was a hypothetical intended to test the moral theory of utilitarianism (and evoke pluralistic/deontological intuitions about religious freedom), not an attempt at an empirical description/prediction of what would happen if XYZ law was passed with what probability. Have you ever done philosophy? If the issue is that you don't accept hypothetical idea-testing of abstract ideas (like moral theories), I recommend checking out this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Thought Experiments:
Not that it matters, but the hypothetical could actually happen in the real world more realistically if we were to just make being Amish illegal, resulting in an extra ~400,000 productive US citizens (which would become millions of extra civilian workers within a few generations, because their yet-to-exist future children would also not be diverted into less-economically-productive lives).
You say that *now*. As for "do you even philosophy, bro?" No, not particularly. And the only way to test the hypothetical is take the argument to a real application and see what falls out. And what fell out is that you sound indistinguishable from Fedora Euphoric. "Let's force everyone to be cogs in the economic machine, even though the push is on to automate away manual labour and replace even white collar work with AI". Yeah, that's going to "result in extra productive US citizens" when you take farmers and, what? 'learn to code' them? If you do force the Amish to become secular Americans, you can't count on those extra millions of children because, as has been pointed out in discussion before, secularisation and the modern Western lifestyle causes fertility to crater.
Besides, what do you think the Amish *do* all day, sit around reading the Bible? What do you think non-Amish farmers and small tradesmen do? If your notion is "get them all working in offices", isn't there a whole book about Bullshit Jobs and how those aren't really productive?
You have a ton of unexamined assumptions there, friend, and I think instead of LOLing at me, you should go back to your priors and give them a good shake to see how firmly planted they are.
I could put up a lot of blah blah blah words and scientific evidence to demonstrate this point, but I think really you either want to come to the pool to drink water for enormous benefit or don't and I'm not going to convince anyone that technology writ large is in fact the actual problem.
and not *just* a problem for relationships, but the reason cities themselves don't work, the reason we have no place for the 70 IQs, the reason we have homeless problems that are only getting worse, the reason the environment is starting to not just break down but create extreme human interaction so forth.
And while yes, some advancements have been great particularly some in the medical fields and some have been great in creating solves, it's become incredibly irresponsible, blame whomever or what you like but the glaring pattern to me on a multitude of different social and health problems comes down to this man's simple advice.
So, I'll just let this guy state what is obvious in my mind.
Looking for a perfect someone to love is backwards. Thankfully most people jump into relationships based on proximity and then learn to show love best for that partner.
I *am* fascinated by the Consent Warriors on the left who so passionately argue for the importance of explicit and detailed consent in this one area, while otherwise default to "just do what you're told!".
"In every fantasy book, there’s the Magical Hidden Valley with the Mystical Ring Of Protection that means the forces of the Dark Lord can never reach them. Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. "
MLK was a liberal - the exact opposite of woke. He opposed the woke of his time (ie denouncing the Nation of Islam in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, and making speeches against riots), and his program was in favor of racial reconciliation rather than conflict. In general, I don't think the woke should have any of the other days - not Juneteenth, not Susan B. Anthony day, nor any other liberal holiday.
I used to believe this, but MLK did expressly state that differing rates of white vs. black achievement, even in the absence of explicit discrimination, must be taken as de facto evidence of racism. If Ibram X Kendi is woke, so was MLK.
Did he really state that, including the case where there is no explicit discrimination? I find it hard to believe, especially since most of his work was about fighting explicit discrimination.
Also, even if he did make such a statement, he did not go nearly as far as Kendi (ie, he did not advocate for an all-powerful "Department of Anti-Racism"), and he was still against everything else woke.
> lots of dictatorial countries regulate what kinds of art are permissible in a way even they don’t try to regulate love
Uh, what? Gay marriage is illegal in 160 countries. Incest is illegal in basically all of them. In many countries you can be executed just for having gay sex.
In most of the post you seem to talk about restrictions on liberty, but in the first footnote you also mention other interventions, such as subsidies. The big one is marriage. We do have that database. You can just hold a wedding and demand that your social circle treat you as married, but virtually everyone allows the state to define marriage. It has always seemed weird to me that there was a campaign for the state to allow gay marriage, rather than for the state to recognize something that precedes the state.
Excuse me, but I feel like you have the timeline on love and its regulation completely backwards.
You paint the picture that most everything used to be free and unregulated until the arrival of the modern state introduced all these legal regulations and ruined it all. I think this is false and ahistorical on almost every dimension but maybe most obviously when it comes to romantic love. As you know – but decided to omit – many forms of love used to be strongly regulated just a couple decades ago. In the not-so-distant past even the most classically-liberal states spent centuries outlawing for example homosexual love, persecuting and imprisoning lovers for the crime of infringing on the regulations on love. The same is true for interracial love. In the US the criminalization of interracial love was only slowly lifted after WWII.
And those are just some of the most blatant examples of the “written” law. There are also social conventions on love that used to be so strong that in their effects they were almost as binding as legal conventions. For example love between different religions or denominations. As a good catholic your spouse was supposed to be catholic – and vice-versa as a good protestant – otherwise your family might have disinherited and your community expelled you. Similarly regarding social class.
In general, romantic love historically never used to be particularly important when it comes to forming social relationships. Institutions like marriage used to be purely economic affairs. As far as I know, romantic love used to be a luxury afforded only to aristocracy, and for the masses, even in the West, romantic love only became a relevant qualification for relationships after WWII – i.e. when the masses became economically secure enough to afford such luxuries themselves.
So no, romantic love did not use to be this unregulated utopia that everyone freely engaged in. For most people for most of the time romantic love used to be almost irrelevant. And whenever it was relevant, it was heavily regulated, regarding heterosexuality, race, denomination and class. So historically, love used to be unfree and highly regulated, and ironically only the advance of the modern state liberated love throughout the 20th century.
This may seem contradictory but I don’t think it is; it can be explained sociologically. Premodern societies ran on all kinds of interpersonal differentiations (social classes, trades, religions etc.). Modern societies with their modern states, however, run on “functional” differentiations, which – among other things – heavily rely on the distinction between the private and the public. Romantic love is therefore considered private and thus non-public and thus shouldn’t be concerned by the functions of the state. So empirically one might say: the more modern the state, the freer the love. (And by the way, it takes quite a strong state to stop a community from lynching its members for impeding on their "communal regulations" on love.)
I know your post wasn’t meant as a history class, but rather itself as a romantic reflection on the concept of romantic love. But still, I feel like your post, in order to work, presupposes a very ahistorical version of history.
The issuance of marriage licenses, and regulations involving divorce and child support are designed to make the whole thing safer and fairer: you can't get left in the lurch with a child; you're committing yourself in marriage in a way that is complicated to get out of. Adultery laws are still on the books.
It's true that we don't assign a woman to every man, or vice versa, out of an effort to make things fair; but laws against polygamy go a long way toward bringing about fairness. Beyond a certain point, there isn't much that the state can do, as there is no way to make sure that everyone ends up with, say, one of the 50% most desirable partners. The institution that traditionally did the regulating was the family, but their job was to insure the most desirable partners for their own offspring, not to insure society-wide optimization.
Driving by 80-year-olds is dangerous, but we mostly leave it to the family level to decide when the patriarch needs to give up the keys. Guns are legal, although regulated.
I'm pretty sure that waiting periods for marriages are the global standard, and the US is an outlier in allowing you to marry someone on a whim during a drunken Vegas night.
At least *my* gut instinct doesn't tell me that these waiting times are encroaching on our humanity.
If you'd talked about waiting times to date, that would be a different story
It occurs to me that happiness/mental health, physical beauty, and non-monetary accomplishment are other areas where we largely leave people to their own devices. On reflection, would we say that anything not mediated by money is left largely unregulated and un-redistributed? It seems like all the advocacy for regulation on the left has focused on the economy, and thus we haven't had a need for fairness on other fronts drummed into us for the last several hundred years.
This is probably not a new suggestion at all, but I've never seen it, so...
Wouldn't it be possible to combine dating docs and matchmakers (like in the orthodox Jewish system described in the describable dating preferences post)? Like, if a community has a dating doc directory, then there would also be one or more people in the community who read all the dating docs and suggest people to each other.
(I think this might work best if there's also a strong social norm that if you've been suggested a match, you should at least go on one date.)
This is my first time commenting on substack, I hope this level of "necroposting" is fine.
Love is not a disaster, it just has a high amplitude. Regulating things because of low lows is how you destroy the high highs in life.
To be honest, I think love is on the way out as well, due to a hedonic approach to existence, people increasingly evaluate things by the extent which they make them feel good. Did this kind of thinking not infect you a little when you started pointing out the negatives of love?
Recently I hear that dating apps feel like "job interviews", and that people want relationships "without bullshit", and that one should "run away" at the sign of any red flags. Now hear me out, what if this change is caused by indifference? Sex is no longer sacred, and dating is not emotional connection but rather a trade. This would explain the support for sexual freedom and the casual reactions to cheating and polyamory. It seems like we're lacking emotional depth, as if people are becoming more simple in a way that I can only describe as apathetic or nihilistic.
Love is great because it's real, it makes myself feel alive, at least. I'm afraid that superstimuli are beginning to exhaust not only sexual drives but the concept of love as well (and the difference between the two is no longer recognized by many?). We like reactivity (think "reaction videos" on Youtube, or trolls in online comments getting an reaction out of people), but if we get our reactions from shock humor, brutal videos, oversexualized animations, ASMR, and 3D dating games, then I'm afraid everything most things in life might lose their emotional impact (and that those who don't consume these things will be put off by the vulgarity of those who require strong stimuli)
the difference between driving and love in your framing is the externalities
and even love can have externalities, that's why for example:
- you can't have sex in public
- parenthood/education is subsidized
there are even social norms codified as laws like what contracts for gamete donation or asset allocation between parents is legally enforceable even if all parties agreed to it (which my libertarian intuitions say that it seems bad)
I'm leaning towards libertarianism a lot (except post-AGI), but I think a negative externality is an aggression (and mayyybe freeriding is stealing or something???)
Es ist interessant, dass der Autor vorschlägt, dass der Valentinstag die Feier für Libertäre sein könnte. Er argumentiert, dass die Art und Weise, wie Menschen über Liebe denken, das letzte Überbleibsel dessen ist, wie Libertäre über alles denken. Liebe funktioniert nach dem Prinzip der Nichtaggression, wobei die einzige Regel ist, dass man sie nicht mit Gewalt ergreifen darf. Der Autor diskutiert auch die Ungerechtigkeit und Unsicherheit der Liebe und schlägt vor, dass gewisse Regulierungen, ähnlich wie beim Führerschein, in Betracht gezogen werden könnten. Übrigens wollte ich eine Seite zur Bewertung von Online-Glücksspielen empfehlen: https://maichn.com/bonus/
Eva Illouz in "Why Love Hurts: a Sociological Explanation" makes an interesting case for how rituals around getting together were socially regulated and how the loosening of those traditions (or the fall of mesalliance as a concept), while liberating, opened the way for experiencing heartbreak as all the more painful.
Scott Alexander's "Love And Liberty" makes a compelling case for why love should be considered a bastion of libertarian values, untouched by the regulatory and redistributive impulses that govern other aspects of our lives. Through humorous yet thought-provoking hypothetical regulations on love, Alexander illustrates the absurdity of applying the same principles we accept in other domains to our romantic lives, thereby underscoring the unique position love occupies in human society. By the way, I wanted to recommend a site for you to play Gates of Olympus: https://gatesofolympus.app/.
das klingt nach einem Motto, dem ich zustimmen kann! Als jemand, der Freiheit und Liebe schätzt, finde ich es wichtig, diese Werte zu fördern. Danke, https://icecasino-at.at/, für die Erinnerung daran, dass Liebe und Freiheit untrennbar miteinander verbunden sind!
Als jemand, der Werte wie Liebe und Freiheit schätzt, finde ich den Ausdruck "Love And Liberty" äußerst inspirierend. Er verkörpert die Idee https://spielautomatenechtgeld.de/book-of-dead/, dass Liebe und Freiheit grundlegende menschliche Bedürfnisse und Rechte sind, die untrennbar miteinander verbunden sind. Diese Werte sind ein starkes Fundament für eine erfüllte und respektvolle Gesellschaft.
Als jemand, der Freiheit und Liebe schätzt, finde ich die Verbindung zwischen diesen beiden Konzepten sehr bedeutungsvoll. Liebe und Freiheit ergänzen sich gegenseitig und schaffen Raum für persönliches Wachstum, Selbstentfaltung und gegenseitigen https://spielautomatenechtgeld.de Respekt. Die Freiheit, sich selbst zu sein und Liebe zu erfahren, sind grundlegende Bedürfnisse jedes Menschen und bilden die Grundlage für eine erfüllte und authentische Lebensweise.
May Day is not a "communist holiday" LOL. It originated in none other than the United States of America, from which it spread to the labor movements of other countries before it was abolished in the US at the zenith of the robber barons. Our current Labor Day in early September is a revival of the May Day spirit.
From the 2017 repost:
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas. I’m reposting it by popular request and for historical interest only. I’ve made some very small updates, mostly listing rebuttals that came out over the past few years. I haven’t updated the statistics and everything is accurate as of several years ago. I seem to have lost the sources of my images, and I’m sorry; if I’ve used an image of yours, please let me know and I’ll cite you.]
"Dating licenses can be revoked for sufficiently serious crimes - eg cheating, domestic abuse, or persistent alcoholism/drug use."
Another crime, "failing to do the dishes after promising to," should be added.
Also "nagging me to do the dishes when I'm definitely going to get around to it later and I'm just having a quick rest, geez".
What a nice view into another world's hellish culture war.
If you say you'll do it, you'll do it. You don't have to be nagged about it every couple of weeks.
What about generalizing that to breaking promises?
Then it would no longer be humorous.
"The dishes are never the dishes" - Esther Perel
Also, complaining that "everyone I date is horrible in exactly the same way" should get them a timeout until they've completed some continuing education courses.
Just in general: why do people still do the dishes by hand?! Why are dishwashers not a thing in every house and apartment?
Some people still insist on buying dishes which are not dishwasher safe.
Some people think doing the dishes by hand is more environmentally friendly even though the opposite is true.
Some people need 30 pieces of cookware to fry an egg, so even loading and unloading the dishwasher is a major chore.
Some houses and apartments are small. I have a friend whose house doesn't have a laundry room, so the kitchen was basically the only place to put the clothes washer and dryer - and that effectively crowded out a dishwasher.
Why do people still have cupboards, instead of just having two dishwashers and cycling them between the roles of dishwasher and cupboard every night? It's simple, people are fools.
Or voting for Trump...
"For some reason nobody except libertarians has this gut feeling about anything else anymore, so we go and do the things that superficially look like they’ll make things fairer and better and safer."
This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas. An O'Neill Habitat, as implausible as it is, is still more plausible than libertarians taking over New Hampshire.
The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Yes, Atlas Shrugged is a fascinating book to read, but in real life, Galt's Gulch would crash and burn for this reason.
Plenty of countries would let you trade. Gaza is blockaded by Israel due to terrorism, so you would just have to not get blockaded (and blockading is harder if you are farther away, I think - although no tunnels)
If you can turn social problems into technical problems, you raised your chance of perhaps being able to solve them.
Hooray for space habitats.
>If you can turn social problems into technical problems, you raised your chance of perhaps being able to solve them.
Very much agreed!
Have 30 seconds of beautifully-animated O'Neill Habitat, set to a cheesy Japanese love song (copy the link to jump to the right part, or edit it once it's in your address bar):
https://archive.org/details/the-gundam-supercut&start=555
> This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas.
Oh yes, I've been secretly saying (i.e., thinking) this for years! Somewhat like Scott's archipelago essay [1], but in space, which has virtually unlimited, unclaimed, uninhabited ... you know, *space*.
Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks. Just pay for the habitat in advance, please. And if an experiment doesn't work out, we can simply deorbit those damn commies.
Okay, the above paragraph is tongue-in-cheek, but otherwise, I'm serious. Just do it in Earth orbit – Mars colonies as a first step are a dumb idea.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
Plus it'd be fun.
> Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks.
For what it's worth, seasteading pretty much is this approach without the "also get to space first" part.
The problem that seasteading has already encountered several times is that, while the world is full of unoccupied land, it isn't full of unclaimed land.
Please elaborate?
Seasteaders keep running into legal trouble with governments that claim the territory they're trying to seastead on.
Space doesn't have this problem. If you can live in space, you can go somewhere unclaimed.
But if you're willing to go somewhere claimed just because it's possible to live there, seasteading doesn't really help you. It's hard to live there and you don't get any additional freedom. You might as well live on land and just avoid the government.
> If you can live in space, you can go somewhere unclaimed.
Well, until governments start claiming orbital bands...
They can do seasteading in international waters. This will require building artificial islands (or floating islands), but this is still easier than space habitats.
Yeah; Earth first, e.g. ocean, polar caps. Then the Moon, maybe L4 and L5. Then the Earth-Mars asteroid belt and Mars.
> Mars colonies as a first step are a dumb idea.
Drifting off topic slightly, but I sometimes wonder if a Mars colony couldn't eventually construct a vast (maybe ten miles in diameter) underground rotating carousal with suitably sloping sides round the periphery, sort of like an upturned frisby, such that Mars's gravity combined with the centrifugal force would allow inhabitants on the interior edge of the periphery to experience almost Earth like gravity without sensing any rotation or bizarre effects or feeling they were on a hillside.
I mean, nobody's even built Biosphere 3 yet, but Prospera is getting started. Why not begin there?
Someone's been reading their Alastair Reynolds? :-)
No; looks like he's written a lot of books. What's the best to start with?
The two best are Revelation Space and Chasm City (parts 1 and 2 of the Revelation Space series).
But if you're interested in the "people make weird communities on their habitats in orbit (and also AI emergencies)", then it's the series The Prefect/Elysium/Machine Vendetta, which take place in the same setting but as prequels.
If you watched 'Love, Death, Robots', then he has a couple of stories there.
Revelation Space has an interesting plot, but bad writing—and bad writing from the second sentence: "Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night." "Any of" adds nothing and should be struck. Also from the first page: "'It's going to be a hard one, sir.' The man fidgeted, drawing the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck." We don't need the second sentence: the dialogue should stand on its own, and the reader can infer the speaker's mood or fidgetiness or lack thereof. Bad fiction is full of this sort of overwriting.
Page 11: "Cal nodded without saying a word." "Without saying a word" should be omitted: if there's no dialogue from Cal, we know he's not not saying a word. My book is filled with crossings out of superfluous, repetitive words.
Much later, on page 85, Sylveste "had taken to visiting and waiting with absolute patient while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings[. . . .]" The word "absolute" isn't needed—it doesn't convey anything important—and, beyond that, on page 88, we Lascaille says: "You had patience with me." The narrative voice already told us that Sylveste had patience with Lascaille, on page 85! Pick one spot, not both.
There's a better book in here, and one with a writer more attuned to language and meaning.
It must be terrible to have good stories ruined by a pedantic writing-bot in your head
Good stories are good because the words from which they're composed are good. If the words aren't good, the stories aren't.
It must be terrible to read badly written material and not even realize it's badly written!
> The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Not a problem - by that time we'll either have superhuman sexbots, or if weight is still a problem, will be able to gengineer everyone to be gay and happy about it! (Mission Accomplished banner unfurls)
If the technical aspects of the space habitat are handled by a benevolent but aloof AI, maybe.
But if the technical aspects of maintaining a habitable environment are part of the human society, I expect such societies to trend authoritarian in the way that ships at sea trend authoritarian. When there are things we must do regularly and correctly, or we all die in a terrible fashion, the scope of liberty gets curtailed.
>The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Ethan of Athos?
Of course I see this comment five seconds after proposing to market the habitats to gay libertarians. Not that Athos seems like any kind of libertarian utopia, what with their Social Duty Credit system and the rigorous censorship of any imported books and journals.
[slightly tongue in cheek:] Sure, they've got their religious hangups. But as Ethan's half-brother demonstrates, it's possible to go through life ignoring the social duty credit system, as long as you don't care about having children of your own. In a way, it's just the parenting license that some people talk about, but given a bit more force because there's (almost necessarily) centralized control of the means of reproduction. Or you can think of it as a parallel currency system, where you get paid in SDCs for pro-social acts, are fined SDCs for anti-social acts, and can spend SDCs for certain services that are not purchasable with mere cash.
And there's the whole homesteading/frontier aspect, which is libertarian catnip. And people who really don't want any rules can go off beyond the frontier and live the anarchist dream!
Seriously, in a lot of ways, I find it a very appealing vision of a future society.
>The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
The obvious solution would be to market it to gay libertarians.
A good point, but they'd have to be gay libertarians who want to live in space. I'm sure some of them are out there, but we're getting to a pretty small number of people.
why am I tearing up right now
Half the marriages worldwide are arranged though. The western idea of autonomous romantic love has high memetic power, but may lose out in the fertility game to the higher matchmaking capability and stability of arranged marriages.
Wikipedia:
> The lowest divorce rates in the world are in cultures with high rates of arranged marriages such as Amish culture of United States (1%),[97] Hindus of India (3%),[87] and Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel (7%).[98] According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, 53.25% of marriages are arranged worldwide. The global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6.3%, which could be an indicator for the success rate of arranged marriages.[99] This has led scholars to ask if arranged marriages are more stable than autonomous marriages, and whether this stability matters.
Yeah, I was just going to mention that. There are lots of humans societies where parents invest at least as much effort into arranging their child's marriage as they would into arranging their child's education, and as far as I can tell it's not an irrational strategy.
Slightly confounded by the way divorce tends to be much more frowned upon in those cultures.
Slightly? : )
What do you mean, confounded? That's the whole point.
There is the question whether it's better in terms of satisfaction, and therefore more stable, or culturally taboo to divorce, and therefore stable regardless of satisfaction, stable even if satisfaction is lower.
Personally, I have some friends in arranged marriages, and they seem just fine to me.
I think "the whole point" here is that Scott's original claim of love as the last unvarnished bastion of libertarianism is reading general principles into recent phenomena of the culture he/we grew up in.
If arranged marriages are the norm worldwide (and especially if divorce was nigh illegal for most of history) then a taboo against regulating love is a modern concept. If the metric is "how it looks" - e.g. ratio of marriage to divorce, number of children, per capita marriage rate - societies that eschew freedom for love are able to put up much stronger numbers than those that embrace freedom for love. The question of what actually works is a bit more difficult/nuanced, and entirely depends on how you define "works". But it's not true to say that love is uniquely unregulated, nor to say that its regulation makes life no longer worth living. Which system is better/preferable is a more difficult story to tell.
Yeah
I think cultural expectation around a "happy marriage" play into it a lot, obviously - and I'm not saying that to mean that the Western model is better. If your goal for a marriage "Find a sane partner with good money management and childrearing skills who is attractive enough that I enjoy having kids with", the bar is obviously a lot more achievable than "Find the one TRUE LOVE that drives me mad with desire even 50 years in and also self-actualizes me to a better person and I do the same thing in reverse to them."
there’s also the school of thought that says most if not all of the latter can be built over time from a foundation of the former.
Love and marriage, pace old American proverbs, are not exactly aligned, though. Some of the most cherished love stories in cultures with arranged marriages are either of a socially-unsuitable but hot/clever party improbably marrying the other, or heartbreak on account of the lovers' inability to be together (but perhaps with the promise of being united in death).
There are also correlations between arranged marriages and fertility. Both cross- countries & cultures today, and historically. The global diffusion of the individualistic-romantic notion that siring and rearing children should be love- based, is connected to the global demographic transition.
There are a lot of confounders, like religiousness.
Sure. That's why I wrote correlated & connected, not caused. These things are probably best seen as hanging together in some sort of "mental & institutional package", which includes changes in religiosity. Cue: Old-style modernization theory, assuming psychological changes like individuation & meta-acculturation, and changing social structures: new gender roles, increased geographical and social moblity, breakdown of feudal power structures, urbanization....
By 'half', you mean China and India? (Which are indeed something between half and a third of world population.)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/arranged-marriage-countries Mostly, but Indonesia and Bangladesh too
Parents can usually spot a bad match, and are more objective in assessing the relationship. If a couple is blinded by love, or other things, they may overlook or whitewash red flags, or yellow flags, thinking something like "love conquers all".
If you can't accurately select a good match, why not let your parents select someone at least likely to be compatible?
Arranged marriages also overcome the collective action problem of everyone pursuing the hot people and neglecting the plain-looking but otherwise desirable people. It’s not even sexual attraction that’s the main culprit here, but status seeking and status anxiety. And an arranged marriage takes a lot of the load off of a young person in terms of status anxiety and choice of mate.
It also reduces the time from young people reach fertile age till most of them find someone they permanently settle down & have children with. Hence the female "window" for having children is longer than in societies where women are on their own & therefore search longer before finding a mate they deem suitable to have children with (if at all).
Something similar is the case with men, but with men the main problem when pairing goes from being arranged till being a "market" based on attractiveness is increased probability of not being selected by any women at all. Childlessness at age 40 - a fairly good proxy for life-cycle childlessness - has been rising faster for men than for women during the last decades, in the countries where I have seen data.
Taken together, this helps explain the correlation between societies practicing love-based pairing and reduced (average) fertility levels. (Although there are also other factors involved, of course.)
Yes, although it's hard to disentangle all the confounders here. Families and societies that practice arranged marriage are likely to have parents very involved in their children's affairs, including providing financial support, housing, and childcare in a way that makes it much easier to have children while still young. They are also the sorts of societies that will pressure young people into marriage and parenthood at the culturally-prescribed age. It may be more useful to look at arranged marriage as just one aspect of a whole cultural complex that leads to these various outcomes.
Sure, cultural elements hang together in larger cultural packages/complexes.
Related to this, the late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger made a useful distinction between intrinsic versus extrinsic cultural linkages.
Intrinsic linkages relate to cultural elements that hang together and mutually reinforce each other. People tend to have adopted all, or none. Arranged marriages + deference to the eldest + subordination of women to men + religious beliefs stating all of this pleases God, might be intrinsic linkages.
Extrinsic linkages are the opposite. Here, it is possible to pick elements from different cultural packages without creating contradictions (=instability) in the whole-of-culture overall mindset of members. One example could be fundamentalist Islam + cultural acceptance of weapons made by Western (secular) engineers.
The point in this context: If arranged marriages belong to a different cultural “package” than the romantic love cultural “package”, once you leave the former it is difficult to go home again. The new package consists of other linkages, which strengthens and locks each other in, and you and your local society are on the road to what (for lack of a better word) can be labelled “modernity”. Where low fertility is partly a long-term outcome, and partly one of the intrinsic linkages in the new package.
Only an (old) hypothesis. But old hypotheses that still intuitively make some sense are worth keeping in the theoretical repertoire; they have in a way stood the test of time.
At the end of the day it is an empirical question, of course. Some individuals as well as societies are better at living with cultural contradictions without individual members experiencing psychological tensions (leading to cultural instability).
Your analysis is extremely compelling and also depressing. The jokes I make with my college friends about arranged marriages between our children are probably doomed to remain jokes.
good point, but I'd also say status is driven by limbic technology offering more than what is healthy.
The major problem with arranged marriages isn't a lack of love issue, it's the carrot and stick technology issue. I've seen more than one woman go mental after entiering an arranged marriage because technocratic perverts convinced her that she was wronged and isn't realizing her true self.
Which is of course downstream of a lot of things but most directly urbanization.
Even in India people generally frown upon people being forced to get married. Arranged marriages still involve people getting a choice in whether they want to marry the other person.
I've heard that that's a fairly new feature. Anyone know when it started?
It's my understanding that the potential bride and groom have a say in the process, or perhaps a veto, but you'd better have a good reason, or at least be firm in your refusal if the parents are set on the marriage going forward.
I was going to say something like that. Valuing romantic love and eventually using it as a basis for marriage goes back to the 12th century. Not so long ago in human history. It's not a human fundamental.
It was and is a fascinating cultural innovation. European countries were early adopters of this cultural practice, but it has turned into a global cultural diffusion process. Still ongoing.
...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way.
Thus all hail romantic love!
Agreed re population growth.
Re
>and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history
Umm... It has a lot of competitors for that slot. Agriculture. Literacy. All of our technology, from stone knives to LLMs.
...but these are not pure "cultural" innovations. They also involve technological innovations, i.e. things, not only ideas.
Many Thanks! Yes, they involve things. I tend to see the distinction as fairly blurry.
Does having someone in the role of matchmaker not count at all as a thing? (and then omitting them in the switch to romantic marriages becomes a negative technology) What about the documents that record the marriage? What about written laws that say which marriages are considered as legitimate and which not?
And literacy, yes, involves some sort of writing tool and some sort of writing surface, but involves inventing the alphabet, teaching it, the acts of writing and reading, so I see it as more cultural than technological.
One other competitor: Government. Would that count as cultural, or partly technological? A person acting in the specialized role of king - as with matchmakers, they could be considered an object as part of the machinery, or as a purely cultural phenomenon. Are the weapons of the king's henchmen the crucial part, or does strong-arm rule, where it is just the obedience of the henchmen to the king, and therefore of everyone else to the king and his henchmen, count as purely cultural?
Good points all of them. So yes, I agree, "culture" is a concept with blurry edges.
I wanted to boost Nancy's comment, through, because this innovation (romantic love being/becoming seen as the main legitimate reason for pair-bonding) is more under the radar than the innovations you mention. While its long-term consequences arguably are just as important - perhaps even more important - for nothing less than the gradually evolving gene-pool of us humans:-)
"...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way."
This is like saying "You cannot build infinitely high, therefore it's a good thing you only built two stories high."
Well, we're going to build approx. 11 billion humans high, if I may mix metaphors...I would argue that may already be dangerously high, before we start to scale down
Given the level of obesity I'd argue that we're way below being dangerously high.
This is true, but as I understand it even arranged marriages are changing to be a little more like romantic marriages. People are talking more, getting to know each other more beforehand, calling marriages off where they find their partner unsuitable where before they just would have gone ahead with it, etc.
The average arranged marriage of today is a little more flexible than the average arranged marriage of the past. Will that eventually become full on romantic marriage? Maybe, maybe not.
Love the bubble confirmation: Indians are obviously a huge percentage of world population, and also huge in tech, where Scott swims. Yet very few weighing in with personal experience, real knowledge, just a lot of "I understand . . ." or "I've heard . . . ."
Considering the base-rates of domestic violence and child abuse the world over, I would say that these rates of divorce are too low. There are situations where a person should leave a marriage. These rates do not reflect stability, but force or a lack of other options, that come at the expense of someone's wellbeing.
If the government doesn't especially help or hinder arranged marriages, then they can still be part of a libertarian regime. Families and communities make steep bargains with individuals all the time. There isn't necessarily anything statist about it.
I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage
The practice is still surprisingly common (surprising to me at any rate) in many migrant communities. I have several friends who travelled to their home countries for a few months (and no, not primarily India or China) only to then return to the west with a bride or groom in tow.
Or, on a couple of occasions, return to the west without said bride or groom but a very very interesting story about how they almost did.
One argument why love is special: it affects the specific person you're intentionally involved with instead of the general public (unlike things like selling drugs at pharmacies or crypto scams, or driving where you can potentially hit and kill anyone on the street).
I guess child raising is also like this? But the advocates for the laws that interfere with child raising would argue that those laws are only against abuse, which does also apply to marriage. And the laws against home schooling probably come from schooling's history as a communal thing everyone sent their kids to. Which does imply that centralized dating apps increase the risk of regulations on love.
Different countries have different laws against home schooling and different historic contexts for them..
Best American legal case name: Loving v. Virginia.
Shortly after which, Virginia acknowledged its defeat by establishing as its slogan, "Virginia is for Lovers."
Most romantic perhaps, but have you heard about United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton? Sounds like an anime title.
Hahahahaha
My personal favorite is United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins
It's a toss-up between this one and the Tyrannosaurus for me, but I think this one has the edge because the shark fins actually won.
Also the pedantic legalism of "Approximately 64,695" instead of "Approximately 65,000".
Maybe there were exactly 64695 pounds of fins, but they didn't want to risk having their case dismissed on a technicality, such as the lawyer of the other side drying the fins a bit more, weighing them again, and demonstrating that now it is only 64694 pounds? But if they wrote "approximately 65000" instead, the lawyer could accuse them of exaggerating the number on purpose?
(I am not a lawyer.)
More lovely examples here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction
United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster
United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls
United States v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque
South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats
Gotta love the "More or Less" in there. I'm not counting all of them, geez, whattya take me for a calculator?
I'm also taken by the absurdity of referring to this collection as an 'Article' rather than an assemblage or 'Goods' or what have you
I thought economic deregulation had been more common than the converse, past 50 years so, barring DEI initiatives?
It's not that hard to break out the life-satisfaction stats on arranged marriages vs. non-arranged marriages, and the former generally stack up pretty well, though obviously there's a lot of confounders related to SES and ethnic background.
I guess it depends on how you measure the amount of regulation.
Measures by page count, regulation has definitely gone up almost everywhere.
Measured by eg government ownership of companies or top marginal tax rates, regulation has receded in some places compared to 50 years ago.
Deregulation can very plausibly (I don't know how to actually check this) lead to laws with higher word/page counts, because many forms of deregulation come in the form of new and convoluted loopholes inserted by regulatory capture.
Perhaps this isn't what "deregulation" means to most people, but it seems plausible as a manner of disagreement; principled libertarians would plausibly view regulatory capture as equally bad (or at least on the same scale of bad) as any other sort of government regulation. I (and many others on the left) would view regulatory capture as very bad (it's regulations that cause harm to increase wealth disparity while leaving the net welfare of the general population the same or worse than before) while other types of regulations as often neutral to good (it causes harm to either improve the net welfare of the general population while either leaving wealth disparity the same or lower).
De facto deregulation via loophole is possible. I am not sure how common it is: when the regulators don't like that loophole, they can close it with a new law.
You are right that what counts as deregulation can require a judgement call, and different people can make different judgements.
There are a few clear cut cases that most people agree on, but also lots of grey areas.
Incumbents are often quite ok with extra regulations, because there are economics of scale in compliance: ie extra rules hassle upstarts more than bigger established players.
> Usually when things are this unfair, we demand some attempt to restore fairness, maybe through redistribution.
I suspect there are very few incels among the Amish, or other very religious groups, because they have a strong interest in match-making within their groups.
Thinking back to your gene selection post, I suspect the Amish are on average more evolutionarily successful than even the richest billionaires, the most intelligent geniuses, or the tallest basketball players.
I think culture wins over genes a lot of the time, provided the genes are just *good enough* to provide a substrate for the culture to grow on.
Maybe that's how Jews have lasted thousands of years, even.
Wilt Chamberlain, (7'1") claims to have slept with 20,000 different women. I have to imagine he's got a good number of unacknowledged kids out there.
He would have had to sleep with a new woman every day for 55 years to do that. He died at 63, so in fact he would have to average over 1 new woman every day during the years he was sexually active.
According to wikipedia, he based the claim on having slept with 23 different women in an unremarkable 10-day period, halving that (to err on the conservative side while accounting for variation), and then extrapolating back to age 15.
The man loved threesomes, and could have them on-demand, apparently.
Sex != children because of birth control. Chamberlain was a multimillionaire, if any of those women got pregnant, they would have had a *very* strong monetary incentive to file for child support. So it's unlikely he had *unacknowledged* kids.
Many Thanks! I'd _thought_ I'd remembered a case like that, but had forgotten the athlete's name.
He has at least one unacknowledged kid. There was a recent basketball documentary called "Goliath" where they tracked down and interviewed a man whose DNA test results confirmed that he was Wilt's son.
Supposedly part of the explanation for polygyny is that if you have very high fertility population where men marry downwards in age, there are too many women as younger generations are bigger. I've heard similar issues about unmarried women among high fertility groups such as Jews.
But do the Amish have nukes? They're not actually "evolutionarily successful" if they don't have the power to secure their own existence. Technology and violence are part of the game. Native Americans learned that the hard way.
The Amish have nukes in the same sense that everyone else in America does. That is, the government has them, and we (hopefully) benefit from that protection.
But they barely have any societal influence. If the rest of society sees them as a liability, they have no means of protecting themselves. The same can't be said for bigger, more powerful social groups, which have enough influence and leverage to avoid being ostracized in the first place.
Becoming a larger group takes time but the Amish are achieving that faster than most other groups their size.
The Amish win. At least until their influence, unbeknownst to them becomes a threat by caveat of simply not losing. I'm sure some blue hair wacko will start causing them more shit for no good reason other than mental illness via city living.
the Jews did it the other way, via infiltration and coincidentally being the smartest, whilst dually only breeding with other Jews, a LOT more suffering and discontent that direction though. Amish are the Isolation path.
> becoming progressively less regulated
Isn't «both parties were equally drunk when agreeing» moving from «people have right to be stupid» to «let's punish someone, or both» though?
Yeah, I was going to say, the whole norm of <always punish the man> and <believe women> definitely seems like an increase in regulation. You also see a corresponding rise in prudery...I'm sorry, *preventing the objectification of women* in movies, TV, and video games by showing much less skin and (in video games) making major characters much less attractive.
(My hypothesis: cultural norms are sticky in subtle ways, and Americans just found another way to suppress sex. even though the political valence switched sides.)
I think some places in US maintain enough equality that when the man complained about the drunk date first, it was the woman who ended up with some restrictions imposed.
«Believe» is about evidence standards, though! I tried to pick an example where the situation is symmetric, people wanted (in the moment) what has happened for non-transactional reasons, and even with facts being undisputed and well established the regulation previously was not expected to happen.
I'm pretty sure the attractiveness of female leads in Hollywood films plummeted over the past decade as well. Sure, there are still some obvious bombshells, but there are a lot more realistic-looking women up at the top now, too.
I do not particularly think of this as a good thing. I think films should show the pinnacle of achievement, not average, and that this should follow through to physical nature.
The rise in "prudery," preventing objectification of women, doesn't really follow for males. This seems almost blindingly obvious in eg TV series like "The Boys" where they will show full male nudity, and have an entire scene taking place in the ass of a man (who shortly thereafter explodes... yes, the entire man). Meanwhile, never even a bare female breast is ever seen, because <CLUTCH THE PEARLS>.
It's also going to be market forces; you probably can't sell a film/tv show to men on the basis of sex appeal, as porn's so ubiquitous it's destroyed the market for quasi-porn.
Oh that's an interesting take that strikes me as true. It didn't occur to me only because I largely dislike porn, but I love nudity in non-porn films. I'm probably not the target audience for any of this stuff.
I doubt that has anything to do with it whatsoever. A lot of men love female nudity in media regardless of porn.
#3 reminds me that a lot of the problem of dating apps is due to lack of information. Fuller and more accurate disclosure could fix some of what’s wrong with them - e.g. filtering matches by how many people they’ve hooked up with through the app could prevent commitment-minded women from wasting time with lying rakes. All of people’s behavior the app could basically be made part of their profile in lieu of the reputational system that would incentivize good behavior if you met through friends.
Misrepresentation is indeed the Achilles heel of dating apps. I know why but what an unfortunate phenomenon given the potential to match accurate wants and attributes at scale.
Preach it - the tens of thousands of Phd's at FB and GOOG are entirely wasted.
With the amount of data they have on everyone, and the amount of brainpower they have, if FB or GOOG did dating apps and you were looking for a LTR, they should literally be able to instantly pick a partner with much higher chance of LTR success than both of you could yourselves, swiping for months. All the information is there, with certainty. An ASI would have no problem doing any of these things, and I'd even bet GPT-5 or 6 could do this with high fidelity.
But nooo, all that collective brainpower is wasted on enshittification and making their core products worse, while totally failing at relevant ad customization and serving.
Counterpoint: at least one wouldn't swipe on the other. What's the highest LTR for A is probably not the highest LTR for B. Symmetry shouldn't be assumed.
FB Dating is literally free so you don't have that whole profit incentive argument you do with Match Group properties. In fact the incentive is probably the other way if people in LTR are happier and post more.
The fundamental problem is what people say and what people want is different, and even if FB or GOOG gave you what you wanted, people wouldn't meet up.
Do you really think so? I mean yes, the Stable Marriage Problem requires one gender to be the proposer and the other chooser for it to work mathematically, but I think we're close enough to that in empirical dynamics.
As long as they tranched both genders by ELO and proposed your top 3 matches (or whatever) within your ELO band, and then the woman chose, I don't see why this wouldn't work out like the classical Stable Marriage solution.
Yes, what people say and what they want is different, but that's the whole *point* of Google knowing you better than you know yourself - it can propose the "want," rather than the say. And with appropriate marketing and differentiation, I don't see why they couldn't get past the superficial swipe problem / assymetry you're calling out (maybe using LLM's or simple local biz partnerships to set up 3 actual dates that are blind going in with the top 3 candidates, so that you can't nope out before a date, and so you have time to actually interact and perceive the underlying quality of the match).
Unless you're trying to say that current dating app dynamics have poisoned the culture and mentality of "choosers" so much that this wouldn't work. The classic exposition of this problem is that women can get 9's and 10's for short term dates and hookups pretty much infinitely, so they don't want to settle for a 7 for an LTR (or whichever ELO would actually settle for an LTR with them), because they think they should be able to pull a 10 for an LTR too.
But A) this is just a small subset of women who actually want and try to hook up with 10's, B) even those women eventually figure this out, and C) if GOOG or FB sufficiently differentiated the format so you couldn't swipe, and so you'd actually interact with the person to observe the underlying compatibility, I don't see why it couldn't work.
>Yes, what people say and what they want is different, but that's the whole _point_ of Google knowing you better than you know yourself - it can propose the "want," rather than the say.
I like it - but I hope it works better than Gemini... (I posed my usual "What inorganic compounds are gases at STP" again to Gemini, and got the usual bad answers. It even included water.)
I love the double entendre of "lying rakes"
Love and friendship are indeed the last bastions of unregulated relationships: you have your preferences and there’s nothing the state can do about it. I second this
No one is trying to regulate friendship, at least not formally.
> Love operates on the non-aggression principle. To a first approximation, the only rule is that you may not seize it by force. Otherwise, anything goes.
"I love you therefore you owe me" is a pretty common and [micro-]aggressive stance.
Guilt ain't force though.
“Love” is driven by the sexual desire right? I’m talking purely of romantic love for now
And societies have tried to regulate sex— somewhat successfully I might add. Sure we had the sexual revolution in the 60s but that also led to soaring STD and divorce rates.
Even now, sex is regulated by a strong shaming culture.
Love is separate from sex. You can have love without sex (e.g., platonic) and sex without love (e.g., prostitution). They CAN be related, but don't have to be.
I feel like a strong shaming culture is the cornerstone to a lot of proposed libertarian societies. Read many libertarian writers, and they explain that companies will not intentionally sell defective goods because it will decrease their reputation.
The proposed motive there is avoiding lost business, not shame. Given that many people are shameless, the desire to avoid losing business is a more plausible argument.
Shame is not a regulation. If someone is "shamed" it is because they are responding to freely expressed opinions, specifically to maintain access to the good graces of people and groups.
What a beautiful post.
Love is.......
Love is a stranger
In an open car
To tempt you in
And drive you far away.......
Nice, thankyou.
After reading the footnote on the progressive deregulation of love over time, I feel like this is a pretty big bullet to bite and still keep the overall claim of the essay. How many of the love stories of legend are about forbidden love? Regulation over the conditions under which intimate bonds and babies get made is an unbelievably powerful tool of social control. See anti miscegenation laws, sodomy laws, forced sterilization, forced marriages and enslavement, even primate bands regulate mating through direct violence in maintenance of the group status hierarchy.
You frame love as enduring under a protective power while regulation slowly strangles all else. But that has been incredibly far from the status quo throughout most of human history. If you care about increasing liberty overall, it might be worth asking what caused the rapid draw down in state intervention and if there were deliberate tactics that can be applied elsewhere.
The moral of a forbidden love story is almost always 'Deregulate Love!', though. Romeo and Juliet even gets name dropped for modern deregulation surrounding age of consent, something even most libertarians consider sacred in other domains. The people have always aspired to libertarian treatment of love, even when the state had little incentive to comply.
l don't think a 'regulation slowly strangling everything' narrative holds up pre-democracy for much of anything, apart from that which is only possible in industrialized, wealthy countries. The liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were a huge leap towards libertarianism and codified many of its principles.
"The people have always aspired to libertarian treatment of love, even when the state had little incentive to comply."
Historically, the primary opposition to free sexual and romantic behavior has been from family patriarchs specifically and the family unit more broadly. Next to that, religious institutions. The state has not been very involved in most places for most of history. It simply makes no sense to say that "the people have always aspired" to something that the people themselves were in control of.
Well, it certainly helps that sexual liberation hasn't been all that consequential. Interracial marriage is a complete non-issue, gay marriage hasn't changed anything beyond making gay people's lives a bit better, and people are actually having less sex now because everything sucks. We still regulate the things that do have consequences, like rape and child molestation, but otherwise, why should the state care about love? There is no pragmatic incentive for it... unless they wanted to raise fertility rates by forcing people to have children. But that would be an extremely hard sell.
Prostitution is the liberterian model for love. It's transactional, and as a single category of behavior it obfuscates enormous differences in the power dynamics that define each case, such that trafficking or survival sex becomes grouped under the same label as call girls and others who have no plausible coercion to work.
That's a case where it's worth distinguishing between sex and love.
Sex is a concrete act, a service to person very similar to massage. It can (and it is) priced, including division into specific services and metrics. Quite codified in fact.
Sexual pleasure is relatively concrete but seldom priced because it's subjective. Same as food: it's priced, but not in term of pleasure you will derive from it. People pay more for food that is in high demand/supply ratio because it usually please more a lot of people, or food that is hard to do because else nobody would do it....but no garantee you will get pleasure in relation with what you pay: you can hate foie gras, caviar or champagne, and love cheap pancakes. The price you pay and the pleasure you get are not individually and directly connected, only market-connected, which is very different. Same for sex.
Love is not priced, not because it is some transcendent beautiful thing that can not be measured, but because it is an indirect term that cover a lot of different things. My best attempt at finding a common pattern is any behavior that net-increase the happiness of the loved one and do not increase the happiness of the lover-one, while still costing him something. This is just another name for pure altruism.
And, like pure altruism, my take is it is extremely rare (or even completely absent) out of biological territory (the benefit is genetic but not individual and altruism show in the rare case they differ). Most of what look like pure non-biological altruism is wrong appreciation of cost/benefit for the altruist: individual cost and benefits can differ a lot from average ones and are not often fully exposed, or even fully conscious. And they also have a large biological part.
Romantic relations are imho a kind of transaction, a very high-stake and non-commodized one (and thus a very opaque and imperfect one: ever wondered why buying a laptop is so straightforward, regulated and with clear consumer protections and garantees, while buying a home is like bargaining for a used carpet in a middle-east bazar? Well, romantic relations is the house-buying kind of transaction...and it's on the way out in quite a few parts of the world, because people refuse to see it's transactional nature, i.e. refuse to see it conditional to a set of benefits exceed the set of costs.
Maybe there is another element: in addition to the transaction that you need to pretend do not exists, romantic love (and other kind of) also imply a kind of time insurance of not fleeing quickly to a better offer (vague because it is expected to move if you keep getting much better alternative for a while - again while pretending it's not the case). But this is common for personalized transaction where some fidelity component is expected and present to some extent. This is again very similar, enforced by reputation and traitor punishment, dissolving with anonymity and asymmetry of punishment in case of contract breach.
Within economics, I would make a comparison to the problem of the firm. Theoretically, we could all just contract on the spot for all the work that needs to be done. But instead there are firms with salaried employees who are not paid per unit of work, but instead regularly paid over long periods of time to carry out arbitrary commands their bosses may give them. The theory is that contracts are incomplete and there are costs to matching up, drafting contracts, etc and thus that it's more efficient to establish that employee-employer relationship. Similarly, marriage is supposed to be a long-term stable relationship rather than a one-off. It is supposed to encompass much more than a one-off sex act.
"People pay more for food that is in high demand/supply ratio because it usually please more a lot of people, or food that is hard to do because else nobody would do it....but no garantee you will get pleasure in relation with what you pay: you can hate foie gras, caviar or champagne, and love cheap pancakes."
Allow me to quote from "Four Faultless Felons" by G.K. Chesterton, where a small group of men are discussing the noted, indeed notorious, socialite Count de Marillac:
"In short, it is what people call Asceticism, and one of the modern mistakes is not allowing for its real existence in rare but quite real people. To live a life of incessant austerity and self-denial, as Marillac does, is surrounded with extraordinary difficulties and misunderstandings in modern society. Society can understand some particular Puritan fad, like Prohibition, especially if it is imposed on other people, above all, on poor people. But a man like Marillac, imposing on himself, not abstinence from wine, but abstinence from worldly pleasures of every sort. . . ."
"Excuse me," said Pinion in his most courteous tones, "I trust I'd never have the incivility to suggest that you have gone mad, so I must ask you to tell me candidly whether I have."
"Most people," replied the other, "would answer that it is Marillac who has gone mad. Perhaps he has; anyhow, if the truth were known, he would certainly be thought so. But it isn't only to avoid being put in a lunatic asylum that he hides his hermit's ideal by pretending to be a man of pleasure. ...But our friend is a Christian anchorite; and understands the advice, 'When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.' He is not seen of men to fast. On the contrary, he is seen of men to feast. Only, don't you see, he has invented a new kind of fasting."
Mr. Pinion of the Comet suddenly laughed, a curt and startled laugh, for he was very quick and had already guessed the joke.
"You don't really mean —" he began.
"Well, it's quite simple, isn't it?" replied his informant. "He feasts on all the most luxurious and expensive things that he doesn't like. Especially on the things that he simply detests. Under that cover, nobody can possibly accuse him of virtue. He remains impenetrably protected behind a rampart of repulsive oysters and unwelcome aperitifs. In short, the hermit must now hide anywhere but in the hermitage. He generally hides in the latest luxurious gilded hotels, because that's where they have the worst cooking."
"This is a very extraordinary tale," said the American, arching his eyebrows.
"You begin to see the idea?" said the other. "If he has twenty different hors d'œuvres brought to him and takes the olives, who is to know that he hates olives? If he thoughtfully scans the whole wine-list and eventually selects a rather recondite Hock, who will guess that his whole soul rises in disgust at the very thought of Hock: and that he knows that's the nastiest —even of Hocks? Whereas, if he were to demand dried peas or a mouldy crust at the Ritz, he would probably attract attention."
"I never can quite see," said the man in spectacles restlessly, "what is the good of it all."
The other man lowered his magnetic eyes and looked down with some embarrassment. At last he said:
"I think I can see it, but I don't think I can say it. I had a touch of it myself once, only in one special direction, and I found it almost impossible to explain to anybody. Only there is one mark of the real mystic and ascetic of this sort; that he only wants to do it to himself. He wants everybody else to have what wine or smokes they want and will ransack the Ritz for it. The moment he wants to dragoon the others, the mystic sinks into a mire of degradation and becomes the moral reformer."
There was a pause, and then the journalist said suddenly:
"But, look here, this won't do. It isn't only wasting his money on wining and dining that has got Marillac a bad name. It's the whole thing. Why is he such a fan for these rotten erotic plays and things? Why does he go about with a woman like Mrs. Prague? That doesn't seem like a hermit, anyhow."
The man facing Pinion smiled and the heavier man on his right half turned with a sort of grunt of laughter.
"Well," he said, "it's pretty plain you've never been about with Mrs. Prague."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Pinion; and this time there was something like a general laugh.
..."But her conversation!" groaned his friend. "And Marillac stands it for hours on end!"
"And her play!" assented the other. "Marillac sits through five mortal acts of it. If that isn't being a martyr—"
"Don't you see?" cried the shabby man with something like excitement. "The Count is a cultivated and even learned man; also he is a Latin and logical to the point of impatience. And yet he sticks it. He endures five or six acts of a Really Modern Intellectual Incisive Drama. The First Act in which she says that Woman will no longer be put on a pedestal; the Second Act in which Woman will no longer be put under a glass case; the Third Act in which Woman will no longer be a plaything for man, and the Fourth in which she will no longer be a chattel; all the clichés. And he still has two acts before him, in which she will not be something else, will not be a slave in the home or an outcast flung from the home. He's seen it six times without turning a hair; you can't even see him grind his teeth. And Mrs. Prague's conversation! How her first husband could never understand, and her second husband seemed as if he might understand, only her third husband carried her off as if there was real understanding — and so on, as if there were anything to be understood. You know what an utterly egotistical fool is like. And he suffers even those fools gladly."
"In fact," put in the big man in his brooding manner, "you might say he has invented the Modern Penance. The Penance of Boredom. Hair-shirts and hermits' caves in a howling wilderness would not be so horrible to modern nerves as that."
People pay for love as well. Just look at all the "sugar daddies" out there.
Not even just sugar daddies - if (as is often the case), you make a lot more than your partner, you tend to pick up a lot more of the checks / expenses, just because it makes more sense for you to do so.
I almost never see a 50/50 expenses relationship, but my social circles are skewed by overtly successful men.
The question is certainly worth investigating, and I'd love to see Scott's take on it. Over all recorded history, prostitution was considered normal and even necessary. (E.g. there is no "incel" problem in such cultures.) Only recently there's been a concerted campaign to outlaw it. From what I've read, in the US, it was "the great morality campaigns" of the late 1800s in the cities which outlawed it, and those were driven by middle-class women to ensure a supply of men who wanted to marry them. On the ideological front, there's been an intense campaign to differentiate "sex" from "love", so we can chatter about how love is a libertarian freedom without mentioning that how we carry it out is extremely regulated. (You don't have to read much historical anecdotia to discover that transfer of assets was often considered a normal part of romantic relationships even when they weren't purely transactional.)
"Over all recorded history, prostitution was considered normal and even necessary."
But the prostitutes were not considered part of normal society and were still shunned as 'fallen women'. Even for institutions where you might have gradations, like courtesans or hetaira or geisha, who were not expected to service several clients but were more the acknowledged mistresses of one man, while they also provided entertainment with music, dance, and literary skills to their clientele there was still the distinction between respectable women who would be wife/marriage material, and such women who may have had greater social freedom but would never be of the same status.
Also, in societies where prostitution was "considered normal and even necessary", there were a lot of slaves used for prostitution, women sold into prostitution by their families in times of economic necessity often as girls or children, and the difficulty of ever 'buying out' your contract since expenses upon expenses were added on and unless you managed to attract a wealthy man as your patron who would pay it off and establish you as a concubine, you were pretty much stuck in that life for good.
It wasn't always a matter of choice, either; dancers and entertainers were also providing sexual services as 'part of the package' be it at Greek symposia, or when the system of Indian temple patronage for dancers had broken down into prostitution.
So while men might avail of prostitution with little to no stigma (hence, it's normal and natural), it was by no means the same for the women involved. This is at the root of the campaigns around "sex work is real work".
> But the prostitutes were not considered part of normal society and were still shunned as 'fallen women'
Depends on the prostitute. In many religions, from ancient Babylon to India, the temple prostitute was a priestess, and sex with her was an act of worship and devotion, not a mere carnal pleasure. In fact, the Hindus invented the Kama Sutra to allow lay people (heh) to follow the bare (heh) minimum of sexual worship procedures necessary to remain sacred, without going through extensive theosomatic training.
Re: devadasi, I avoided that topic since I don't know enough about it, but there does seem to be a degradation over time where the patronage by rich and noble rulers of temples ceased or diminished greatly, and the temple dancers/wives of the god were reduced to prostitution.
This would not have been the same everywhere, of course, and I imagine there was always a difference between "formally associated with the temple and married to the deity" and "singers/dancers/musicians who performed there as well as for secular celebrations". But even with the high status entertainers, where the sexual services were not assumed to be automatic, there was still the delineation of separateness from 'ordinary' life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawaif
"There were hierarchies among the performing artists, and the tawaifs were at the top, a class distinct from street performers and prostitutes. (A Tawaif is a dancer, not a prostitute.) Tawaif kothas, where the tawaifs often lived and performed, would host meetings of local intelligentsia, presided mostly by the most senior tawaif of the kotha. Tawaifs enjoyed influence among writers, journalists and poets. The poets longed for a tawaif to sing their works and asked the famous tawaif if she could sing his poems. In those days, having tawaif perform his own work was a way to ensure that poetry would be remembered and passed down from generation to generation. A Tawaif had an unconventional approach to relationships, where female performers were expected to remain unmarried but were permitted to have relationships with patrons. Tawaifs traditionally served loyal mistresses to wealthy patrons. Only once a relationship was terminated, either due to the death of their patron or a mutual decision to part ways, would a tawaif look to enter into another relationship."
Similarly, for a devadas to be 'married to the god' meant that she could never have marital relationship with men, whether that be that she lived celibate life in temple service, or that this was a form of social permission for men to visit women outside of their own marriages.
Movies are not evidence, of course, but they also show elements of what is considered acceptable socially or, by the events within the plot, what is not remarked upon by the particular audience for being outside custom or too outrageous.
Look at this Kannada movie from 2001 and the simple line here which has a *lot* to unpack if you're not familiar with what goes on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Manjunatha_(film)
"Manjunatha meets Katyayini a to-become devadasi (Servant of the Lord) and marries her."
So what does this mean, a "soon to become devadasi"? Well, part of the plotline is that Katyayini is hoping to have a marriage arranged for her soon, but the wealthy (relatively, by the standards of her small village) rakes and headmen want to have sex with her without marriage. So they set up a trap whereby she, by staying out all night unchaperoned! in the company of a man not a relative! is declared to be a fallen woman and is going to be 'initiated' as a "servant of the lord" (that is, a village prostitute). Even against the protests of her parents, because nobody dares go against custom, tradition, and the powerful men of the village, until Manjunatha (who has been acting as a social reformer and rebel all along) steps forward and says he'll marry her.
See from about 36 to 39 minute mark here, and tell me that she and her parents look delighted that she is now going to be a temple prostitute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb7e3saE9gQ
Right, and humans being human, there was probably some, shall we say, expedient flexibility inherent in the practice of temple prostitution and sacred sexual rites, dating before even the devadasi all the way back to Ancient Sumer. Temple prostitutes existed even back then, as female priestesses dedicated to Inanna (the major goddess of fertility, love, and war). However, the worshipers still had to pay a fee to be, ahem, blessed by Inanna through them; the fee was very conveniently collected by the temple as a whole, especially since even the kings were obligated to render their dues to Inanna before they could take up their reign.
Herodotus reports a similar practice in Babylonia, in his own totally neutral and dispassionate way:
> The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life. Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to mingle with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and stand there with a great retinue of attendants. But most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the men pass and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, "I invite you in the name of Mylitta". It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. After their intercourse, having discharged her sacred duty to the goddess, she goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfil the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four. There is a custom like this in some parts of Cyprus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution
I've noticed that psychotherapists have pretty conventional/conservative views on love and sex -- that is, conventional relative to the well-educated social class they hail from and treat, which can be at odds with the larger society. I suspect this is why Scott can write about the libertarian aspects of love without noticing how it's regulated in our society. A good litmus case would be how he would counsel somebody who had successfully taken up being a "pick up artist", picking up girls from clubs for non-committed sex. That's perfectly legal in our society, but frowned upon by our social class.
We can focus on power dynamics, or we can focus on consenting adults making the best choices they can for themselves under the circumstances. I don't think we can do both. Preventing transactions driven by power dynamics inevitably also prevents people from doing what they think is best for themselves. What most people call "freedom".
Being able to do only things that society approves as proper is conformism. It's fundamentally opposed to the idea of human rights - rights that allow people to make their own choices, despite the disapproval of society.
Sure. Let's follow that to it's conclusion and allow child labor, pederasty, remove paternalism towards people with severe cognitive disabilities and let them fend for themselves, abolish laws requiring the use of translators in contracts between people who speak different languages since different levels of access to information are just part of the natural world and have to be accepted for the sake of freedom. Let's stop trying to prevent old people from being scammed. In fact, the concept of a scam should be abolished as it's too subjective; where is the line between a legitimate and illegitimate difference in knowledge?
I did say "adults" up there, didn't I? I favor strong (much stronger than current) enforcement of common law fraud and legal penalties for deception of all kinds. Even legal requirements to inform people.
But requirements for honesty and information isn't the same as prohibiting informed adults from doing what they choose to do (that doesn't directly harm 3rd parties).
We're not going to agree, I suspect. I'm just saying you can *either* prohibit transactions society doesn't like, or you can let people make the core decisions about their own lives. You can't do both.
I have heard what you said and would need to see substantially more evidence to make a determination about it.
>I'm just saying you can *either* prohibit transactions society doesn't like, or you can let people make the core decisions about their own lives. You can't do both.
There are intermediate policies. I think of your
>Even legal requirements to inform people.
as being one of them. Another possibility is a "cooling off periods" before a (long term) transaction becomes permanent. Another class of possibilities is some flavor of "prove that you know what you are doing" requirement (e.g. for a binding commitment, to be able to recall the terms of the commitment).
Most cases of "sex trafficking" turn out to be voluntary prostitution. It's just a word anti-prostitution activists made up to gin up public fear, like "white slavery" in the 19th century. When pressed, advocates have already prepared their withdrawal to the motte of "redefine the word coercion so that it's coercive if you do it because you need the money," an idea that, if taken seriously, would prohibit all work done by the poor.
It wouldn't prohibit work by the poor. It is an argument against capitalism, or rule by capital. As a formerly homeless person I've definitely chosen to risk death over indignity before. It's neither inconceivable nor good nor necessary.
You got a source for "most cases?"
Also, I recall reading part of a book (I wish I could remember the name) where the author, a human rights activist, says their organization used to to advocate for legal prostitution, thinking that legal regulation would curb the worst abuses. But they reversed course when they observed that this didn't seem to be the case; legalizing prostitution only allowed the abuses to continue.
It's hugely dependent on country, but I indeed think "most" is likely to be true. When it's not true, it's often mixed with other issues like illegal immigration, which indeed allow most modern forms of slavery. This is human trafficking, sex is a subpart of the issue ( "sex trafficked" prostitutes have more in common with migrant workers doing construction/harvesting work/servants in wealthy house (typically with their passport stolen and often not speaking the local language) than with escorts or students looking for sugar daddies). Same for drug addiction and homelessness: In this case prostitution is much closer to street thieving than to European eros centers.
So I agree: sex trafficking is often used to as a scarecrow for prostitution, to regulate access to casual sex from money. Like pedophilia for regulating acceptable age difference, heroine addiction for regulating recreational drugs,....A common scheme, as old as the world (or at least mass medias)...
The argument about looking good / actually working begs to be turned around, though? What looks awful currently is regulating people's love lives, what could -in an utilitarian sense- be good is reducing one of the main sources of murder. At the expense of trivial government controls of the sort of drivers' licenses and traffic rule enforcement, which reduces traffic deaths and hasn't really been the way we've been turned in a dystopia.
Fwiw, not endorsing that we should regulate it. It'd probably have a million failure modes and be abused horribly. Just taking the argument to its logical conclusion: often what looks good is what our fuzzy feelings about very direct personal experiences tell us, and that opinion doesn't change until a lot of effort is put into having people internalize the meaning of big, abstract numbers. Cf buying mosquito nets vs helping your local community.
Could issue state-backed competence-in-romance licenses, but without any specialized formal enforcement mechanism. Anyone who wants to go on an unlicensed date is still de facto free to do that, but if something goes horribly wrong during that date, presence or absence of licenses might factor in to the judicial response... and thus, the kind of people who worry about such outcomes might add "check prospective partner's license or lack thereof" as a worthwhile step in their decision algorithm.
Fictional city of Templar, AZ (in the comic of the same name) featured prostitution licenses functioning in a similar capacity. Young women with no actual interest in earning money that way would go through the certification process just to use the card as a prop as part of flirting.
Private companies could offer competence-in-romance certifications.
Lacks credibility since profit motive creates an obvious conflict of interest. Same as the issue with non-accredited diploma-mill colleges.
Accredited = certification, dude; not governmental.
Marriage licenses used to have actual substantive requirements, like medical exams (to check for venereal diseases, etc.). Adultery used to be a criminal offense not too long ago. As others here have noted, love and marriage have long been regulated by the state.
Re. footnote 2: yes, it's definitely a simplified story. AFAIK, in Germany people needed a marriage license until the mid-1800, to make sure that marriage partners had sufficient economic resources to raise children. Marriage is a different thing from love and passion, though, and the many children who were born out of wedlock were, of course, dealt a shitty hand. Maybe that's one of the reasons for deregulation: many regulations also punish innocents and push them to the margins of society for life. Then again, deregulation hasn't exactly solved that problem, it has only absolved the state of the direct responsibility.
At least in Finland, confirmation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_(Lutheran_Church)) was required to get married in a Lutheran Church, and until freedom of religion was expended, that's how you got married (well, unless you belonged to some other approved church, back before the freedom was expanded fully but after the most strict period of Lutheranism was over).
We've gone through a fairly recent (in the grand scale of things) deregulation of love, and since things have seemed to still go fairly OK, nobody has yet bothered to reregulate it. Of course it's always possible that it happens in the future.
The confirmation isn’t much of a barrier to love since everybody did it.
It's still a formal regulation of love, in the sense noted by Scott in the post.
There was a small but real possibility to fail. You had to demonstrate ability to read the catechism. Or after failing the test sufficiently many times (to your public humiliation and delaying your confirmation by several years), cite sufficient amount of passages from memory while you and the priest administering the test agreed to pretend you were able to read.
Also, divorce law is quite complicated and varies substantially by country. In some countries there's still a waiting period of 9+ months after a divorce before women are allowed to remarry, nominally to guarantee the parentage of any potential issue from the new marriage.
Even in the U.S. and Canada, there’s a 12 month waiting period after separation before the divorce can be legalized, allowing the people to remarry.
This varies wildly by state. In Arizona, where I practice, you can get a divorce in 60 days if everyone agrees.
Ah, right. That rings a bell. Is that only for AZ marriages, or do you get divorce tourism?
You have to be a resident of AZ for 90 days to initiate a divorce here. I haven't noticed any divorce tourism in 13 years of practice.
I looked it up, as I never thought AZ was particularly special.
https://partasfriends.com/the-divorce-waiting-period-in-every-state/
60 days is fairly typical. Most states are 30/60/90 with CA at 180 and LA and MD the outliers at 365. Several states have no waiting period at all.
I didn't know about the Germany part, and I haven't found anything about it. It seems like after the end of feudalism, and under the influence of new ideas Napoleon brought from France, the civil marriage ("Zivilehe") was introduced, then in restauration time abolished again, then reintroduced in the 1870s. In Austria, on the other hand, there was this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politischer_Ehekonsens Perhaps this is what you were referring to. It is a license to guarantee that the couple is economically able to have a marriage, introduced in 1820 and mostly abolished again in 1869. Fun story: Austrians who could not marry without this license would hike to Rome, because in Rome if an unmarried couple was found together, they were married by force.
This is something my wife told me about; she came across mentions of marriage licenses frequently when digging up the family registry entries of her ancestors. Of course, Germany was not a unified country until 1871, but rather a hodgepodge of more-or-less independent kingdoms, duchies and cities, so there was probably a patchwork of marriage regulations as well.
As for internet sources, wikipedia claims this (translating from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiratserlaubnis ):
"The right to grant marriage licenses was claimed by feudal lords, as well as employers.[...] In the middle ages, the magistrate or guild granted the right to marry and start a family only to those who were, due to wealth or income, able to support a family. [...] In the 18th and 19th century, factory work was not considered a sufficient basis for a marriage. Limitations on marriage led to an increase in the age of marriage and a larger number of unmarried men and women. Births out of wedlock were not unusual among labourers and in rural areas (e.g., among menials)[...]
In the Norddeutsche Bund, the 'Eheschließungsfreiheit' (liberty to marry) was introduced in 1868, which was extended to most southern German states in 1871."
Very interesting! I especially like the part where in Trier you need a bucket to get married. (So you can extinguish a possible fire)
The first thing that came to my mind for an actual libertarian holiday would have been Black Friday - that ultimate celebration of capitalism.
I rather like the Greek "'No' Day", myself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohi_Day
"Thirty years ago, it sounded horrifying and dystopian to think that the government could monitor everyone’s phone calls and read their emails. Now the government does this all the time, and if you don’t like it you’re soft on terror [...]
This doesn't seem like a very good example, to me. Almost all of the institutions spying on and tracking people are huge corporations who are doing it perfectly consistently with libertarian principles and who are controlling people (again perfectly consistently with libertarian principles) considerably more effectively through manipulation, marketing, and via control of the products we buy than governments are through their reading of people's emails etc.
The reason people accept this espionage and manipulation /isn't/ because they don't want to be seen to be "soft on terror" but because the espionage and manipulation are almost entirely a hidden-until-it's-too-late side-effect of all the shiny, attractive, superficially-empowering things the corporations tempt us with..... in other words, the appropriate fantasy novel ring metaphor for this section of the post is much less "magical ring of protection" and much more Tolkien....
As for love being the last libertarian holdout, I have to admit that likening love's terribleness to libertarianism appeals to my anti-libertarian sensibilities (do they show?) but I'm not sure about the "holdout" part: it seems to me that the world is trending *more* libertarian, rather than less, insofar as (owing to corporate lobbying, regulatory capture, races-to-the-bottom, and a dozen other mechanisms all the way up to outright corruption) the aforementioned huge corporations that monitor and control our access to almost everything and feature in almost every transaction we make are increasingly able to pay their way above the law, and are acting on increasingly libertarian principles..
(..Happy Valentine's Day! 💖)
"This doesn't seem like a very good example, to me. Almost all of the institutions spying on and tracking people are huge corporations who are doing it perfectly consistently with libertarian principles"
Someone could say "I am not against it when Google reads my emails, only the government". But it also seems to me that a world in which Google reads everyone's emails, is a world in which you aren't going to build any sort of coalition against government-email-reading.
By the time the "Government Can Read Your Emails Act" is in Congress, everyone is resigned to not having privacy, and it seems odd to say a million corporations can read your emails to sell you shit and manipulate your behavior, but the government can't read them to solve a murder.
> By the time the "Government Can Read Your Emails Act" is in Congress
Dude. The NSA reads all your emails and listens to domestic phone calls. This started shortly after passage of the Patriot Act and was only brought to light a year after media outlets learned about it (journalists doing their patriotic duty of lying to the public donchewno). After the revelation, everyone shrugged because both parties, including great liberal hope Barack Obama, supported the policy. The government pretended to stop, but it turned out a few years later during the Snowden revelations that, shocker, they were lying.
This is all a matter of public record. This isn’t Google and Facebook. It’s the US government. It happens every day. Nobody cares.
Where do I sign if I don't like it?
Your will.
If you don’t like it, you can leave.
LOL just kidding, then they will DEFINITELY spy on you 24/7.
The "Government Can Read Your Emails Act" is meant to be a tongue in cheek, stylized example. What I'd say is that the real life "the time the 'Government Can Read Your Emails Act' is in Congress" moment was when the Snowden revelations happened. That was when there was widespread awareness of the idea that the NSA is basically snooping on everyone.
And by then, people mostly shrugged.
Various reasons, but I think what I said is part of it ... everyone tacitly assumed by then that Facebook, Google, et al were already spying on you, the ship has sailed.
Yes, I hear you. And I agree that Snowden was a key moment.
Come to think of it, that was also about the time “he works for Putin” started getting used as a thought-stopper by the American media class. Snowden cares about the constitutional rights of US citizens; Snowden had to flee to Russia to avoid being disappeared for criticizing the U.S. government; ergo Snowden loves Vladimir Putin; ergo if you care about the constitutional rights of US citizens you love Vladimir Putin and are a bad person. Works on presidents too, I hear.
Also, more obviously: government mass surveillance programs are generally pretty unpopular. So Scott's premise here is false. The only polling I could find was from Amnesty International [1], which is obviously not disinterested, but my experience is that almost everyone immediately reacts with horror when you explain to them that the government reads their text messages. (Obviously, I might be explaining it in a particularly horrifying way - I'm interested to hear other peoples' experiences.) Generally, it seems to only be politicians and people on cable TV that mostly support it, for some reason.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/n0n04aqglbvbjvm/
No mention of the coincidental Japanese word for love?
Unwilling Singles' Day is a little more bearable if I frame it as an anti-regulatory holdout. The Siege of Hallmark's Deep. Thank you. Although it is still somewhat depressing the absurd amount of shitty chocolates/flowers/whatever I help foist on people this time each year. They say nudges are overrated, but I dunno...I just don't get that mental groove which would compel someone towards saw-it-by-the-checkout-stand token gifts. At least that aspect of the dating market is fully competitive and highly profitable, no regulations needed. ("And you wonder why you're still single," chided Angel.)
95% of people describe themselves as at least “satisfied” with their romantic relationship, and 60% as “extremely satisfied”. Is there any other institution that can say the same?
Well, any major religion..
Statisticians as well, they can make percentages say anything.
97.4% of statisticians can make percentages say anything.
How trustworthy are the answers? I bet social pressure would lead many to say they have found true love with their partner and are extremely satisfied to "fit in" with what is expected of those who marry, even if that isn't how they feel.
Definitely this - just think empirically among colleagues, acquaintances, non-immediate family, and people you know from church / school / wherever (not friends or close family, who are more selected to be like you).
If you seriously evaluated and scored their relationships on a 1-10 scale, how many would honestly be above a 4? Almost none in my experience, and I'm around more conscientious, responsible, and higher-achieving than average people in all those fronts.
With a 42% vintage divorce rate, and (I would personally bet), half again that in "net unhappy" relationship rates, the median relationship is net negative for the majority of people, given enough time.
I'd suggest that the marriages you're seeing are from a highly selected population, but working in mental health, I'd actually expect that to be a negatively selected population, so not sure how your sample is so positive.
But kudos! I'm really happy the folk around you are largely in stable, rewarding relationships. That's not the case for the people I see around me.
Maybe my population is hugely negatively selected somehow, but I'm usually in a pretty good relationship, and have managed to remain friends with most exes, so I'm used to being an exception there, and would expect positive selection if anything.
My relationship with my wife has been many different kinds of fucked up over the years, but I'm very happy anyway. ;)
Yes, that statistic definitely raised my eyebrow. If someone is living with a spouse or romantic partner (which was the population base for that statistic), yes, they are probably satisfied. At least in WEIRD cultures, if they are not satisfied, they can leave (at least the house, if not the marriage).
Is MLK woke?
He's a martyr. Martyrs stand for whatever the living people want them to.
If someone quotes King, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," there's a high probability that they're opposed to some significant aspect of wokery.
I raised my eyebrows at that as well. I don't think he's accepted by their ilk anymore. They call him well-intentioned but naive and ultimately backwards.
No, not really but Independence Day isn’t really for nationalists either. I think Scott was just speaking figuratively.
No, not really. The true Woke holiday is Junteenth, or maybe Kwanzaa.
A few years ago in my city, Antifa seemed to be "interested" in MLK day, but I haven't heard much from them lately. Maybe their focus went elsewhere.
Certainly not in this incarnation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee-Jackson-King_Day
Ah yes, the wonders of truly unregulated love and marriage:
(Disturbing)34yo Homer Peel kisses his 12yo bride Geneva on the courthouse steps in Tennessee, 1937.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1ao7p7o/disturbing34yo_homer_peel_kisses_his_12yo_bride
To be fair, child marriage was illegal at that time and place, but the judge deciding the case refused to annull the marriage anyway.
Yeah, I was gonna say love definitely has become more regulated lately for minors.
The data for this is a bit outdated but the trend is still upwards (https://doi.org/10.1177/2032284417699293). Relatedly in the UK most sexual offences against minors are committed by other minors, with the most common age for a minor perpetrator being 14 (https://www.vkpp.org.uk/assets/Files/Publications/National-Analysis-of-police-recorded-CSAE-Crimes-Report-2022-external.pdf), haven't gone through the entire report but this stood out "Given we’re talking about child-on-child abuse ... the age of consent in the UK is 16 years old, and some children aged between 13 and 17 might try experimenting sexually and consensually with people of the same age. At the same time ... taking and sharing indecent images or videos of under 18s is illegal. The data we’ve collected includes reported crimes which may be ‘experimental’ but also critically those with ‘aggravated’ features including rape. Understanding and tracking how many reported offences nationally feature aggravating features compared to experimental is a key focus for future analysis."
And contemporaneously with that upward trend in the age of consent, there's been a downward trend in the age of menarche, so the regulation of pubescent love has increased enormously over the past century or so.
I don't know the background well enough but I know the marriage involving 24yo Charlie Johns and 9yo Eunice Winstead (https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/10ypjoc/9year_old_eunice_winstead_johns_and_her_husband/) also happened in Tennessee in 1937, and from what I've read this was legal as Tennessee didn't have a age of marriage (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/married-young-the-fight-over-child-marriage-in-america/). From what I can tell the marriage involving Homer Peel just became illegal after this case (https://flashbak.com/1937-homer-peel-34-kisses-his-12-year-old-bride-geneva-on-the-steps-of-a-tennessee-courthouse-25710/). As such "To be fair, child marriage was illegal at that time and place, but the judge deciding the case refused to annull the marriage anyway." is probably almost wrong.
Correct, I misread that part. Either way, libertarianism can hardly claim such a case as a victory for unregulated love. Either it was regulated, or it condones child marriage.
Well I think it depends on the libertarian, I know that Yaron Brook dislikes being associated with libertarians because of things like this, and in speaking with Craig Biddle he seemed to also have similar views, despite being more "open". But I think people such as David Friedman have views on such issues more congruent with something like traditional rabbinic law, considering such cases as not even constituting "child marriage".
There is a libertarian holiday, at least in the United States: Independence Day, celebrated every 4 July. The Libertarian Futurist Society has long made it the deadline for our members to return their ballots for the Prometheus Awards.
Scott discussed that being a holiday for nationalists.
Yes, well, I think he's wrong, or at least incomplete. The United States is not just a nation; it's a nation, as Lincoln said, "conceived in liberty." Its central documents, the Constitution and even more the Declaration of Independence, are key sources for, at least, American libertarianism (which I believe is the context for this discussion); and Independence Day is specifically a celebration of the Declaration of Independence, whose central ideas are foundational for us.
Which is gross for him to have said. He's wrong about the MLK being a woke holiday too.
I'm not a libertarian and don't share the same sympathetic view of libertarianism, but that aside ... it seems like the state of love is, in fact, worse these days in many ways. Fewer people are in a relationship or getting married than in the past, and it seems like that's not because they don't want to be in a relationship.
There are subcultures that have basically universal marriage at a young age, like Haredi Jews. I don't think we should copy them ... but it seems like one positive aspect of a system like that, is that people see "getting young people to be paired off into stable relationships" as an important societal function that they put a great deal of effort into.
I don't think you have to go into the realm of arranged marriages and thinking single 23 year olds are weirdos, to think that "have everyone figure it out themselves" isn't the best strategy either and that maybe older people should view it as a community responsibility to help shepherd people into long-term relationships.
How does one measure the "quality" of a marriage? By the Darwinian fitness it results in?
How happy the spouses are...?
This is why I think there's a happy medium. You can find something in between "everyone has to be married off by 20" and "total free for all, a significant portion of people never get married despite wanting to".
I'm from outside the US so I'm not familiar with libertarianism as a concept and how it differs from classical liberalism. Is this a real philosophical difference or just that liberal already has a more popular meaning in America? If the former, does anyone have any recommendations for good books on the history of libertarianism and how it diverged from the schools of classical liberalism?
Classic liberalism as in 19c Britain was fairly close to libertarianism. The US libertarian is more populist though. In Europe where a tiny minority of people held property historically, appeals to libertarianism of that sort falls flat. Europeans probably want to protect their built environment too, the housing stock Paris and Bath (etc) is privately owned but the owners can’t change much externally, and often internally. For obvious reasons.
Scott's own Non-Libertarian FAQ might be a reasonable place to start?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
(Bear in mind I think Scott's own view seems to trend more pro-libertarian over time and he may no longer endorse most of this!)
In my (perhaps not-entirely-unbiased..) mind the distinction is actually pretty simple: Libertarianism is pretty unique in that it's the political philosophy wherein it's actually considered virtuous to stick a dollar sign onto basically every single last thing on this planet, as well as the unique assumptions and mental gymnastics that make this seem like a good idea.
(I do think there's a cultural component here: I'm also not an American and I can't really imagine anybody from my culture/sphere-of-understanding espousing libertarianism except for perhaps a few extreme right-wing anarcho-capitalist types that American libertarians probably wouldn't want to be associated with)
Not remotely true. Even Ayn Rand, who was quite hard core, does not propose dollar prices for a lot of things. See for example Hank Rearden risking his life to save Francisco d'Anconia from falling into molten metal; when d'Anconia says, "You saved my life," Rearden answers, "You saved my furnace." Or Richard Halley playing his compositions for Dagny Taggart, and telling her that she has paid him with her intelligent appreciation. Other example of the concept of "exchange" (returning value for value) in entirely nonmonetary terms could be multiplied.
As a libertarian of very long standing, I would probably state the essential idea as that any relationship, group, or institution that you cannot walk away from is abusive in principle and has the potential to become abusive in fact. The economic part of libertarianism is simply an application of that idea.
The two examples you give, art and human life, are both things that are kind of famous for having dollar signs stuck on them!
I can think of plenty of anti-libertarian structures that try to correct or mitigate this as much as possible, such as free-at-the-point-of-delivery nationalised healthcare, nationalised artistic institutions, government subsidies for the arts, etc. - I don't exactly think of these structures as Randian though, somehow..!
Sure, two individuals might exchange some stuff without using money as an exchange medium - but that has no bearing on whether libertarian social, political and economic structures do or don't place dollar signs on such things. A libertarian presumably expects the furnace chap to pay some definite amount for his own healthcare, and the artist is presumably either in the business of selling his art (or, if a hobbyist rather than a professional, of earning money to fund his art). Families exchanging gifts at Christmas and schoolboys in the playground trading football stickers (are those even still a thing..?) aren't performing some sort of Randian libertarian transaction!
I think the abusive potential/fact thing is basically just self-justifying mental gymnastics:
What does it even /mean/ to be "abusive in principle" - and, whatever it is, why is it a bad thing? Are parent--child relationships automatically bad because they fit the definition of "abusive in principle" (and if so what would a libertarian replace them with?) and are phishing scams and confidence tricks non-abusive because in principle the victim could have walked away? More generally, shouldn't we judge relationships and institutions by their actual (ideally evidence-based) outcomes rather than by labels such as "abusive in principle" that don't seem to contain any information about whether any actual abuse has taken place?
I'd agree that any relationship or institution you can't walk away from has the potential to be abusive [in fact] - but A) so does any relationship or institution you *can* walk away from (eg. all the employees being mistreated and harassed at work despite being able to quit, all the victims of domestic violence despite being able to break off the relationship, all the gambling addicts who have their lives ruined by bookmakers despite being allowed to walk out the door), and B) I don't agree that global capitalism is automatically non-abusive because people could in theory refuse any specific individual exchange - there are externalities, monopolies, information asymmetries, cartels, and a million other problems that all lead to abuse.
P.S. Even though we seem to have a pretty fundamental disagreement here, I appreciate your taking the time to express your position so courteously and I hope you can receive my disagreement in the same spirit!
In point of fact, we do now consider that there is an inherent risk of abuse in parent-child relationships; that's why it's possible for parents to lose the legal right to custody. My own take on this is that the child's body is the child's property, not the parent's, and the parent is acting not as the child's owner, but as their trustee while they are incapable of exercising self-ownership, with the obligations of trusteeship applying to them.
But the fact that there is a natural necessity for someone to exercise trusteeship toward a child does not mean that adults need trustees, or that placing adults under trusteeship is nonabusive.
It's all very well to say that employers, for example, may mistreat their employees. But there is still a profound difference between an employee who has the legal right to quit, and a slave who will be hunted down and forcibly brought back if they attempt to do so. An employee may be abused; slavery as such is abusive.
Blimey, we agree on a great deal of this! I'm just not clear on how much of it clears up any of the issues I have regarding libertarianism.
I agree that there's an inherent risk of abuse in a parent-child relationship, but I don't see A) how that's a specifically libertarian position (like, who /doesn't/ think there's such a risk?), nor B) how "there's a risk of abuse" is the same thing as "there is abuse in principle". If abuse in principle has some specific libertarian meaning I can't figure that out from this example, and if abuse in principle just means a risk of abuse then sure, I'd have to agree, but I don't see how that's a position pertaining to libertarianism (or any particular philosophy, really!)
I agree that the child's body is their property (though I find that phrasing kind of weird!) but I would suppose since we have different conceptions of property rights that probably has different connotations to me than to you.
I agree also with children needing trusteeship (again the phrasing is peculiar to me - "guardianship" seems more the mot juste..) and adults usually not needing it.
I agree that there is a profound difference between an employee and a slave, and that an employee has the risk of being abused whereas a slave is in an abusive situation by default - all perfectly true, but this example and the abusive/nonabusive parent example both seem to me to kind of demonstrate my point that relationships you can walk away from and relationships you can't walk away from can both be abusive or non-abusive under different circumstances, "being able to walk away" doesn't tell us a relationship is good nor "being unable to walk away" that the relationship is bad, and therefore we ought to evaluate/categorise relationships based on their actual outcomes rather than by whether or not the participants can walk away.
(The wider point for libertarianism, I think, is that when we get this far, of course it follows that we ought also to evaluate governments, too, by their actual, evidence-based outcomes rather than by whether or not we can walk away from them...)
I see libertarian as the political opposite of authoritarian. On the political compass, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass
I just wanted to add that I think the 4th Amendment is very libertarian.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Classical liberalism is a general sort of direction, libertarianism is a point.
Classical liberalism says it would be nice if there was more freedom and less regulation, except where that's inconvenient, in which case whatever.
Libertarianism says that freedom must be absolutely optimised for the maximum possible freedom and minimum possible regulation (subject to certain constraints). Libertarians can use FACTS and LOGIC to prove exactly what libertarianism is, and then they spend a lot of time arguing with other libertarians about whether they're real libertarians or not.
Anarcho-capitalism is libertarianism except the optimisation is done without constraints. While a libertarian will grudgingly concede that some form of government is necessary for the protection of property rights, an ancap can dream up a system of private police forces which solves this without the need for government and definitely won't just become a bunch of oppressive local gangs.
I am all three of these, on different days, depending on my mood.
I like to use the metaphor of libertarianism as the direction "north". I think of myself as being somewhere in California and wanting to move north to Seattle, WA. The general range from Portland, OR to Vancouver, BC would be acceptable, but if I ever found myself near the 60th parallel about to cross into the Northwest Territories or the Yukon, I'd know I should have turned south much earlier. And I have no desire to live at the North Pole. But considering where I am, I'm almost always in agreement with libertarians when it comes to taking practical steps to move in a northerly direction, while being uninterested in conversations about igloo construction.
That's not a bad metaphor. I would generally agree (except that I see myself as currently living in a gentoo penguin colony in Patagonia).
I think the operational definition of relationship has merit, especially an operational definition of 'commitment' thats involved in say 'marriage' and the response-abilities required to maintain a 'relationship', or a 'marriage' based on 'love' esp with children and even the relationship after breakup if there is children.....is love changing the incontinence pad of a husband who is 20years older?, is love not cheating if a partner is in the depths of grief or has gained lots of weight on maternity leave and there are 2 toddlers as well in the house. I think young people and immature people regardless of age, see 'love' as admiration or status symbols like conspicious consumption but 'life' can evolve 'love' to mean something very mature and grounding. i think for children and disabilities and everything outside the norm of 'romeo and juliet' love (which is considered psychopathically obsessional in todays world)...what is love....I think its linked to temperance and emotional maturity. Its a pity the myth of 'loving' families remains tho, after 50yrs I honestly wonder where are they?..all I mainly see is jealousy, narcissism, addiction and exhaustion and notions that the grass is greener elsewhere which is a learned ontological view in ex colonised countries arguably.....as relationships require work, and the boss was supposed to get the 'best' of the worker, so the worker is rendered un response- able to family and love. Sad really.
> In every fantasy book, there’s the Magical Hidden Valley with the Mystical Ring Of Protection that means the forces of the Dark Lord can never reach them. Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. The Chosen Hero has to convince the inhabitants of the Magical Hidden Valley to abandon their safety and join the fight to save the rest of the world.
Hmmm.
Mistborn: not present.
Wheel of Time: not present.
The Book of Three: present, though the valley [actually, mountaintop] isn't really occupied by people and no effort is made to get anyone to leave.
The Lord of the Rings: not present.
Sword of Truth: not present.
Magic of Recluce: I've never read this. I tried reading the first book and it came off as contrived.
Discworld: I don't remember anything in specific, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened in one of the books.
Robin Hobb: not present. Also, there's no Dark Lord, which manages to distinguish this series from most of what I've listed above.
Magician (Raymond Feist): not present.
Riddle-Master of Hed: I can't keep the events in Patricia McKillip's stories straight. But I don't think there was any such zone of safety.
Valdemar: not present. Valdemar (the region) is frequently noted as a place of special safety, but that is because they do the fighting that has to be done to keep the forces of darkness at bay.
Am I missing something major? What's an example of a fantasy novel where this happens?
Magic of Recluse is entirely about the Hidden Valley; the world is a Yin and Yang balance, and the Hidden Valley has stolen all the Yin and left everyone else buried in Yang.
Wouldn't that make them the Dark Lord, and not the Hidden Valley? Does the protagonist convince everyone there to rise up against themselves?
Maybe! I stopped reading after Book 2.
The Hidden Valley was turned into Dark Seoul and the rest was turned into Pyeongyang. :^)
Well, their enemies sometimes see it that way, although most of the world either doesn't have any idea that anything like that is happening or else is perfectly fine with it, because Order and Chaos energies tend to grow to balance each other: the island of Recluce being a bastion of Order founded by refugees from a Chaos-fueled empire just means that there's more Chaos around to empower the Chaos mages that rule the remnants of said empire. As it happens, the first two books are something of a case of Early Installment Weirdness, and when the protagonist of Book 1 returns in a much later book, he solves the magical pollution problem by taking pretty much all the readily accessible order and chaos power in the world and turning it into a mixed-up and unusable mess locked inside some huge rocks, leaving order and chaos mages both mostly powerless and the world stuck using only the technology that can run on mundane physics.
Obviously it's an exaggeration, especially that it's always by the same mechanism, but there are a few. In most cases the safe zone *could* be breached, so that's going to happen if the author takes the series on long enough.
LoTR: Lothlórien is the classic example, protected by the ring Nenya
Valdemar: you could count Iftel. Although no-one goes there so it's a bit useless
Discworld: you could count time valley and possibly Death's domain.
Shanarra: King of the Silver River's place
The Dreaming Tree: Gruagach's Valley
> LoTR: Lothlórien is the classic example, protected by the ring Nenya
Sidethread, Deiseach has managed to pull quotes exhaustively documenting that Nenya provides no protection from Sauron as support for the same claim you make here.
Is the lesson just that when people read something, the description they form in their mind is unrelated to what it says on the page?
A less controversial example is Tom Bombadil's place. The council briefly considers sending the Ring there but decide against it because the rest of the world would still eventually go to shit.
There is also the place beyond the sea, where the elves and Frodo go at the end at the books.
A more metaphorical example is the Shire, where the hobbits live. Kept in relative stasis under the protection of the rangers, who are keeping the peace while the hobbits don't even realize it. When the rangers leave to help defend the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor and so on, the Shire quickly goes to shit.
Come to think of it, Tolkien sure loves that trope.
The council rejects the idea of giving the ring to Tom Bombadil on the grounds that he wouldn't care about it, and, without Tom being willing/able to keep track of it, it would find its way back to Sauron.
They reject sending it to Valinor on the grounds that the gods wouldn't be willing to take it. This is part of Tolkien's general theme of magic passing out of the world.
The Shire is ravaged by Saruman after he's kicked out of Isengard; if the Rangers had still been there, they would have been able to do nothing about that. Aragorn states explicitly that without the Rangers' guardianship, the region would be ravaged by the forces of Mordor, but that doesn't happen at any point.
"The Lord of the Rings: not present."
You're wrong there, Imladris/Rivendell protected by Vilya, Ring of Air for Elrond. And Lothlórien with Nenya for Galadriel.
"Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!'
She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its rays glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Evenstar had come down to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood.
'Yes,' she said, divining his thought, 'it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.
'He suspects, but he does not know — not yet. Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.'"
> You're wrong there, Imladris/Rivendell protected by Vilya, Ring of Air for Elrond. And Lothlórien with Nenya for Galadriel.
But this is about as wrong as it's possible to be. Vilya and Nenya don't represent protection from Sauron -- they represent special vulnerability. It's only possible to use them at all because Sauron has lost the Master Ring.
What Vilya and Nenya are protecting the elves from isn't the forces of darkness, it's the (unrelated) sense of ennui that drives them into the West.
It's not mere (or merely) ennui; let's quote from the Letters. They had a purpose that was partly good, to heal the damages wrought by the wars in Middle-earth, and partly selfish, to arrest the fast pace of changing time in the mortal lands and make their own little enclaves copies of the beautiful lands they had left behind in Valinor. The Three Elven Rings were made before the One Ring and had power of their own, but Sauron's master ring does wield influence over them. Because it is now a war time situation (even if a Cold War), Elrond and Galadriel are using their rings as defensive abilities and not merely as aids to preserving beauty:
1951
"The Elves of Eregion made Three supremely beautiful and powerful rings, almost solely of their own imagination, and directed to the preservation of beauty: they did not confer invisibility. But secretly in the subterranean Fire, in his own Black Land, Sauron made One Ring, the Ruling Ring that contained the powers of all the others, and controlled them, so that its wearer could see the thoughts of all those that used the lesser rings, could govern all that they did, and in the end could utterly enslave them. He reckoned, however, without the wisdom and subtle perceptions of the Elves. The moment he assumed the One, they were aware of it, and of his secret purpose, and were afraid. They hid the Three Rings, so that not even Sauron ever discovered where they were and they remained unsullied.
The Ring is lost, for ever it is hoped; and the Three Rings of the Elves, wielded by secret guardians, are operative in preserving the memory of the beauty of old, maintaining enchanted enclaves of peace where Time seems to stand still and decay is restrained, a semblance of the bliss of the True West."
1954
"Those who lingered were those who were enamoured of Middle-earth and yet desired the unchanging beauty of the Land of the Valar. Hence the making of the Rings; for the Three Rings were precisely endowed with the power of preservation, not of birth. Though unsullied, because they were not made by Sauron nor touched by him, they were nonetheless partly products of his instruction, and ultimately under the control of the One. Thus, as you will see, when the One goes, the last defenders of High-elven lore and beauty are shorn of power to hold back time, and depart."
1956
"But the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter. Hence they fell in a measure to Sauron's deceits: they desired some 'power' over things as they are (which is quite distinct from art), to make their particular will to preservation effective: to arrest change, and keep things always fresh and fair. The 'Three Rings' were 'unsullied', because this object was in a limited way good, it included the healing of the real damages of malice, as well as the mere arrest of change; and the Elves did not desire to dominate other wills, nor to usurp all the world to their particular pleasure. But with the downfall of 'Power' their little efforts at preserving the past fell to bits. There was nothing more in Middle-earth for them, but weariness. So Elrond and Galadriel depart. Gandalf is a special case. He was not the maker or original holder of the Ring – but it was surrendered to him by Círdan, to assist him in his task. Gandalf was returning, his labour and errand finished, to his home, the land of the Valar."
Are you disagreeing with something I said?
- The Elven Rings do not have the power to resist the Dark Lord.
- In fact, they introduce a vulnerability to him that would not exist in their absence.
- Their use lets the high elves tolerate life in the mortal world, which they cannot otherwise do regardless of the activities of Sauron.
They are protective against the elves' inborn sense of ennui, and not against Sauron. All of that is documented in the quotes you pulled:
1, 2. Sauron made One Ring, the Ruling Ring that contained the powers of all the others, and controlled them, so that its wearer could see the thoughts of all those that used the lesser rings, could govern all that they did, and in the end could utterly enslave them.
3. the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter. [...] But with the downfall of 'Power' their little efforts at preserving the past fell to bits. There was nothing more in Middle-earth for them, but weariness. So Elrond and Galadriel depart.
These aren't hidden enclaves protected from the Dark Lord, they are hidden enclaves that get automatically wiped out whenever the Dark Lord becomes active. They aren't hiding from him -- anyone wearing a ring has their location automatically revealed to Sauron -- they're hiding from their own world-weariness.
I think the whole point of the trope is that the hidden vally isn't really protected from the bad guy of the story. It's only protected from everything else, and that makes them complacent, and then the good guys have to persuade them that they are not in fact protected from the latest bad guys and therefore they need to actually fight the bad guys this time.
In LOTR, this convincing started in a background conversation in the Hobbit, and ended in the Council of Elrond when they decided to sacrifice the magic that protected the hidden valleys from everything except the Big Bad, in order to finally defeat the Big Bad.
Turgon of Gondolin marching out against Morgoth at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears counts as LOTR.
> Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. The Chosen Hero has to convince the inhabitants of the Magical Hidden Valley to abandon their safety and join the fight to save the rest of the world.
Gondolin was physically hidden, that's true, though it had no protections other than its secret location.
It was swiftly defeated after Morgoth corrupted a local aristocrat who told him where it was.
And this is unlikely to contribute to anyone's impression of what happens in fantasy stories, since it's material from the Silmarillion. Relatedly, not being part of a storyline, Gondolin is never visited by a Chosen Hero. It's just one of the bad things that happened in the past that proves that the forces of evil are in fact evil.
I would think that both Lothlorien and Rivendell, while not literally meeting the somewhat hyperbolic standard that is given, still qualify as examples... to say nothing of Gondolin
Why? They don't satisfy any of the mentioned points. They remain as safe from the forces of the Dark Lord as the entire rest of the world, unless he finds his ring, in which case they are uniquely vulnerable. Corruption is not creeping over anything, including them. They are not persuaded to join any battles, nor does anyone think it would be a good idea for them to try.
What are they examples of?
>Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday.
And having one would be distinctly non-Libertarian. They should instead all individually pick a holiday and celebrate it on their own decentralized terms.
>through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills,
...bad social skills are through fault of their own.
I don't remember signing up for the Bad Social Skills package before my birth.
Do you remember choosing not to?
Bad Social Skill #1: failing to remember important events. Always keep a diary, recording reference details like what you ate on the last date. Write it during the date, women love that.
I did. It was in the fine print when I started playing D&D.
For some of us, it's the "buy one get one free" option! 'Yes, here's Crappy Maths Skills as your base feature *and* Social Anxiety as today's free mystery gift!'
But you got the "Warrior-Poet" gift to compensate :-)
Very suspicious denial there from the incredibly successful celebrated polymath inventor of MinMaxing Hercules...
Absolutely not. That's like saying it's the fault of poor people that they're poor. There are probably ways out of it if you really know what you're doing and you work hard enough, but if you're born without natural social skills and don't have the environment to develop them, that's not your fault.
"It's no shame to be poor... but it's no great honor either." ~ Tevye (The Fiddler on the Roof)
> That's like saying it's the fault of poor people that they're poor.
...People say that all the time.
Are you saying you agree with them?
If you don't have the environment to develop social skills, then THAT'S what's stopping you from dating.
That's true about every non-inherently genetic problem then. In other words, an utterly worthless and redundant fact in this context.
Okay, but the common idea of romantic love is also holistic, non-legible and selfless. The only contract you sign is optional, not legally binding and isn't carefully worded. You're supposed to constantly make sloppy economic decisions. You're supposed to treat your partner as an unfathomable miraculous entity while correctly guessing what they want. More than anything it feels rather like anarchism.
Are there libertarians who are like that? From what I've seen, when libertarians approach love the way they approach everything else, they become Red Pillers.
> Nobody is allowed to date without a license.
Age of concent.
> Dating licenses can be revoked
Restraining orders.
> Three month waiting period for marriage
I think there is such a thing in Russia? Or may it be just the natural queues?
> Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom
Marriage registry
I don't know about Russia, but lots of other European countries have or have had a mandatory waiting period between the banns and the wedding, during which objections to the marriage may be raised.
In Italy we have to wait 8 days (with the goal of including two Sundays) between the public announcement of the intention to marry and the wedding
Oh, howdy neighbour 👋 We've got the same system here in Malta. But then there's also the marriage application that has to be done at least six weeks before the wedding, so that's the minimum waiting period here if one is a local, and if one is a foreigner, it's even longer than that, as one needs to get various documents from one's country of origin. We ended up eloping to a country where getting married is easier.
In my case I had set aside a month for getting married (we used to live in a different country for years, and my bride was a national of a third country). We barely made it. It took a while to get an appointment (rigorously in person) with the civil servant who would record our intention to get married and set the process in motion. She even tried to postpone our appointment last minute and I had to beg her over the phone not to, as this would waste a valuable week of time.
There is no waiting period in Russia. Maybe there was in Soviet times (but I don't remember anyone telling me about this; queues for marriage registration, on the other hand, were a thing. These days, you can reserve a slot through online system, and the whole process then takes about an hour or less, unless you want a ceremony), or it was elsewhere.
Seems like we could almost trivially come up with a better set of dating-license criteria than just issuing it automatically based on age. To get a driver's license, you generally need to pass a test involving demonstration of driving-related skills.
This sounds like it could be part of the casting couch genre
There is a waiting period in Russia. It's short though, 1 month only. Yes, it's easy to get married and you can apply online but the first available slot will be delayed.
Thank's for the confirmation.
I must say the fact that it exists absolutely doesn't make me feel like less than fully human.
I get the vibe behind this essay, but I think it's really unfortunate because there is a negative stereotype of libertarians supporting statutory rape. A libertarian saying loudly and proudly that love between any two consenting individuals should not be regulated plays straight into it. I know Scott doesn't mean it this way, but people will hear dog whistles anyway.
Also, I do think that love historically has been regulated and should continue to be regulated, and not in the way you might think. Arranged marriages have been mentioned by others, but these are not examples of regulation. Quite the opposite. In fact, it is government regulation that broke the tyranny of arranged marriages in Westernized countries, by making various methods of enforcing them illegal, e.g. honour killings, disinheritance, etc. The free exercise of love Scott celebrates in this essay is in fact a product of government regulation. This is yet another fine example of government regulation bringing freedom, by crushing the actual main source of oppression in the world: other private individuals. If you are capable of acting without your family, employer, creditors, etc. controlling you unduly, it's generally because government applied its iron fist in your favour. So I support continuing government regulation in love, because that's what keeps it free.
Very well put.
Interesting -- I didn't expect my mind to be changed on this, but you just did. Thank you.
Indeed. Straight to the heart of the matter wrt libertarianism. And not just freeing you from oppression but a host of other life-limiting forces like polluted air and water, unsafe workplaces and built environment, unmitigated hazards like fire, foreign invaders and injury and disease.
Interestingly I recently asked David Friedman about the "Ancap meme", and despite him making such arguments/points for at least the past 10 years now, he didn't seem to know what it was.
Yep. "What is the Libertarian position on government regulation of love?" is absolutely a query that returns a hit, and Scott doesn't go near it. If this paean can survive age of consent laws, I'm skeptical of how much it depends on liberty being this ideologically pure thing divorced from social consensus. And "I don't like the social consensus", while defensible, isn't pretty.
I'd be increasingly interested in Scott writing a more substantive rebuttal to the Anti-Libertarian FAQ; his thinking has clearly shifted (and maybe not just after moving to CA, ha) but I'm still not sure there are any substantive factual disagreements.
I don't think Scott has very favourable views regarding "age of consent reform", here is him in Contra Kirkegaard "But I would - making a value judgment - call pedophilia a mental illness: it’s bad for patients, bad for their potential victims, and bad for society." Given he later seems to think ephebophilia is a mental illness he probably also thinks the same of ephebophilic relationships.
Sure, and I wouldn't accuse him otherwise. Let me put it this way:
1) Most of what the law sees when it comes to love consists of marriage or sex. Both of those things have been firmly regulated by many societies at many times.
1.5) If we're exclusively considering "love" and "liberty" in a way that has no overlap with those, I'm not sure what any of this cashes out as in practice.
2) There has been a decisive loosening of the laws in both those categories in the US over the past decades, centuries. This is a good thing IMO, and a win for libertarian principles!
3) Despite that, there *are* still laws in both of those categories, and it's odd to speak as though the libertarian triumph has been total. Compare freedom of speech, and whether a similar paean would work there.
4) Going a step further, it is unclear whether further victories along libertarian lines would be a good thing - especially for sex. We can argue whether the man is weak, but he *isn't* straw.
5) In fact, this is a particularly bad optics area for capital-L Libertarianism. I appreciate the distinction, but anything in the ballpark of "what I really like about Libertarians is their strong grasp of sexual ethics" needs a *lot* of context.
I'm not sure I understand your argument, but are you familiar with the excesses of the sexual revolution, particularly in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands during the 70s.
More than some, less than others. Why would that be relevant?
One can speculate as to the effect of increasing the degree to which a society is libertarian on the margin, or one could try to look at historical examples of societies that already made such changes at various margins.
I think it was actually Germanic norms which undermined arranged marriages. The Romans had the norm of monogamy, but with arranged marriages. It was the combination of the two with the collapse of the Roman empire that resulted in the modern western norm.
https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/children
When were arranged marriages enforced by honor killings ever a thing in Westernized countries?
All the way from at least ancient Rome until the present day. In the European cultural context, honour killing typically falls under the institution of "blood feud" (or vendetta in Corsica specifically). Feuding still goes on in places like Greece or Italy. (And this is not honour killing among immigrants.) When the menfolk of two clans kill each other because the honour of one of their women has been outraged (i.e. they eloped instead of marrying as the clan elders decreed), and restoring the family honour demands blood, that's honour killing.
This is a famous enough trope that I'm surprised you don't know it. Romeo and Juliet, for example?
Recently, I tried explaining elsewhere were the "negative stereotype of libertarians supporting statutory rape" came from, and a quick googling threw up four or five different examples of LP candidates supporting abolishing or at least considerably lowering the age of consent, and none of them were even the candidate that I was thinking of but couldn't quite remember.
However, I'd say the stereotype mostly comes from even earlier - the golden age of online forums, when you have a couple of libertarians in most every American forum and almost without fail one of them would bring up the age of consent issue at *some* point.
I think you are thinking of GMU graduate and former LP member Nathan Larson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Larson_(criminal)). Also (https://open.substack.com/pub/daviddfriedman/p/abused-words?r=1eio29&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=48415648)
Larson was one of the four or five that came up (four or five since I'm not even sure if to include Larson, he's *that* fringe and seems genuinely insane). The one I was thinking of was a woman, but I cannot exactly remember her name.
Mary Ruwart maybe
Yes, that's it! The female libertarian I was first thinking of was Carla Howell, but she doesn't appear to have said anything of this sort.
Classical case of
"...if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches."
Few know this today, but in the Gilded Age the age of consent was 12, 13 across most states. It wasn't that people approved of it, it's just that they believed it was the responsibility of parents to prevent it.
Making regulation illegal is consistent with libertarianism. For example, the US Constitution is a powerful regulation that prevents less powerful regulators from regulating stuff that people at the time believed should not be regulated in the future. Such as speech and religion and guns and so on.
No libertarian wants to get rid of that particular regulation.
This is essentially the basic story behind the so-called welfare states in Scandinavia - which US people in general, and libertarians in particular, do not get. The Scandinavian states have historically been used to free the individual from the family. That is why "state individualism" is the best way to describe these societies. (Best English-language reference for the telling of this story is Lars Trägårdh (2010) Rethinking the Nordic welfare state through a neo-Hegelian theory of state and civil society. Journal of Political Ideologies, 15:3, 227-239, DOI:
10.1080/13569317.2010.513853)
You say that like it's a good thing. US people in general, including most libertarians, have a generally positive view of families. There are exceptions, of course, but nothing even close to a consensus that a paternalistic state should be the default replacement for, well, parents.
It was ment as an anthropological observation, for those interested in comparative studies of the relationship between individuals and collectives. I mentioned it since the "state-ness" of these societies is often misunderstood as some sort of communitarianism. Whether the rulers of a state or the parents or the clan leaders or the religious leaders or employers or anyone else are the best de facto main patriarchs in a society , can always be discussed. There will always be power structures, the question is which, plus how they share control. Scandinavian cultures are very individualistic, for better or worse, and for historical reasons the state has been seen as the lesser suppressor of the individual, so to speak. I added the comment to complicate/nuance simplistic dichotomies between individuals and collectives, as a further elaboration of Khoos original point.
If you're replacing the family with an institution where the entire community, organized by the state, provides the support that used to come from the family, that seems like "communitariansim" and "state-ness" might be appropriate terms.
Let me give some illustrations of "state- individualism": Sweden was the first country to make it illegal for parents til corporally punish their children. It was also among the first to outlaw rape within marriage (1965).
So now the state is in charge of corporally punishing children who exceed the bounds of tolerable misbehavior, as defined by the state. Me, I'd rather take a spanking by my father than a stint in juvenile hall or whatever else you all use.
I understand that sentiment isn't universal, and fine, there's room for people to disagree and for nations to do their own thing. But I'd like you to understand that the reason we disagree is not because we don't understand your system, but because we *do*.
Isn't this what religion is for? No sex without marriage, marriage must be approved by a priest, no divorces unless you have a very good reason, no cheating on your spouse, etc, etc?
As one of the eternal losers on this topic, I still agree with the idea that it's good for this to be free, with the important caveat that it sure does /suck/ to be on the wrong side of this particular bell curve. Maybe I should finally bite the bullet and try one of those [dry heave]dating apps[/dry heave], even though I only ever hear bad things about them and my inherent disdain for it.
They are what you make of them. If your profile is low effort or totally generic, you will get no responses or responses from people who aren’t suited to you. Be unafraid to be more niche in what you portray about yourself, and try to be a little vulnerable. As a woman who picked several relationships on these apps- the last of which is four years in and going strong- what I looked for was any spark of individuality, and a lack of defensive ego. Hard to find in male profiles, which are all either deliberately desultory (“I don’t care, this is beneath me so if I get rejected it’s because women are the problem”) or very template generated (“me at the bar with the lads/me at the gym/me with a fancy car/me with a scary animal”). If you want to attract the kind of woman who would be interested in that profile I don’t know what to say to you, but when I picked someone it was because they showed something personal about themselves without defence or anxiety.
It's not really the "profile" that matters, but how good you look in the pictures, which is very strongly correlated with how good-looking you are
Are there numbers for profiles that just have straight up cartoon characters in the pictures? There might be workarounds available.
I’m going to be real with you only furries do this so it’s a bit of a red flag for normie women.
I don’t know what to tell you John- there is a kind of girl who’s only going to click on hot guys, and if she’s who you’re after then… it is what it is. If you want someone whose interests and personality are similar to yours, be honest in your profile. If you’re so insecure you’re already cooking up the rationalisation for your failure, then maybe deal with the source of your insecurity. If you’re overweight, go on a diet. If you’re unkempt, shave and get a haircut. Most women’s standards are not that high for what they accept as passable.
The vast majority of girls want hot, high status guys, and on dating apps at least, their standards are definitely that high. Being unattractive is also often not a personal or moral failing, as even Scott pointed out once. Human sexuality doesn't really care about morality or stuff like that more than it cares about signs of good genetic quality and high status.
The vast majority of the girls who STAY on the app want that. If you want those girls by all means, be shallow. Fish with shallow bait and catch shallow fish and don’t complain when all they want from you is dinner and Instagram shots- that’s what you asked for.
I don’t know why guys don’t get this to be honest. I feel like you know that if a girl puts pics of herself in a bikini on her profile she’s only going to draw the attention of guys who want quick hookups and nothing else- did you not think there was a male equivalent? If you put out a profile that generic it makes it obvious you are trawling desperately with a wide net to the point you genuinely don’t care what you catch. Only one kind of person responds to that signal… you’ll get used and have a terrible time and blame the women and the apps when they gave you what you asked for….
Insecurity is kind of the product of having to deal with reality. Your advice about weight is great though.
This seems about right.
Thanks for the reply. I honestly have no idea what kind of pictures I could use for something like that, in general I don't have many pictures of just myself (I'm not on any social media (despise the whole lot of 'em) so can't just take from there). Only genres I could think off you already indicated are generic so would need to think on it, hmm. Maybe a hanging-upside-down-by-the-toes one while giving thumbs down (so it becomes thumbs up) at the climbing gym would at least be funny, hah.
"Love isn’t a numbers game."
To an extent it is though, isn't it? You yourself said you went through multiple attempts before one of them stuck, so clearly getting more rolls of the dice (or having better dice!) improves one's odds. Hell, one of the standard pieces of advice is to just get out there and meet new people, and what is that but giving yourself more rolls of the dice?
My advice would be if possible to put a shot in that wasn’t taken for the specific purpose of being a dating profile pic- at least one or two of them, anyway. Try and find a picture of a moment when you were truly happy, a picture that when you see it brings back a smile. Those are the kinds of pictures that show others who you truly are in your best moments, even if the picture isn’t “perfect” in terms of looks maxxing or whatever dumb things men tell each other about what women like. It was pictures like that which drew me to my current partner.
Guess it's a personal failure that I don't have any pictures like that. No one takes pictures of me or with me, and I certainly don't take them of myself. Am I screwed?
No! But I would say that if you want a relationship because you feel lonely and unfulfilled at the moment, you probably won’t get what you need from just one other person. It’s a lot to ask of a romantic relationship. Rather than trying to fill an emotional deficit on dating apps it would be good to first build a life you find engaging, then bring that to a potential partner. Going up to a woman and saying “date me I’m sad” is not usually a winning strategy… or I don’t know you’d want the prize it would win you.
If you’ve gotten into a lonely solitary rut, change that first.
"stop being lonely. That's how you stop being lonely."
I feel like there's another layer to Echo Tracer's picture advice here - I'm actually pretty successful at dating (like when I decided to do Optimal Stopping a la the Secretary Problem, I was able to get on average 2 dates a week for 1.5 years continuously).
I'm successful because I did a decade of A/B testing and optimization, more or less, over an otherwise normal "high status man" dating career.
Pictures are literally THE most important element of a profile, and people give a lot of bad advice. I know this, because I use data - use Photofeeler or a similar service to have your pictures actually rated on attractiveness and trustworthiness. I've rated more than thirty of mine. Pictures that I *love,* pictures that my friends love, pictures that show me at my most "me," all do relatively terribly.
Generic pictures of me outside in front of a landscape, or stereotypical travel pictures of "lol, me and my friend in front of the Arc de Triomphe" or whatever? They get the highest possible ratings. And there is a *significant* difference in who will swipe or message you back when headlining or having mostly highly rated ones vs the idiosyncratic ones.
By all means, include one idiosyncratic, "most me" picture. The last one. I've had a few confirmations they made a difference in deciding to message from dates and exes. But in terms of getting that response to begin with, the overall gestalt needs to weight heavily on actually higher ranked pictures via data, even if they're horrific cliches that make you question the people responding to you's tastes in general.
Because without that response, you can't ever even evaluate match quality, it's like the necessary foot in the door.
And I've found plenty of weird, niche people who responded to the bland consensus-rated pictures, it's not a strong filter for weirdness, it's a strong filter for being responded to at all.
So my advice would be to take a lot of pictures in a lot of different lights and settings, and have them empirically rated by a service like Photofeeler. Only with actual data from the demographic you're targeting can you begin making informed changes to better your chances.
You’re still on the app tho? Like… I’m not out here trying to help guys get laid with women they don’t care about lol I think that’s actually bad for your soul and your capacity for love on a fundamental level. Call me old fashioned but if you use people you become a user.
Thanks. Just gotta take more pictures, I guess.
If you are not romantically succesful already, dating apps are not gonna do it for you, they never do it for males that are not like top 30 percent of attractiveness according to all evidence.
Love isn’t a numbers game.
Maybe « love » is not, but finding a partner is. This guy needs to find at least one partner. Better yet a few potential partners so he may choose the one that suits him best. Every interaction yields either a NO with probability 1-p or a YES with probability p. Have N interactions, be always rejected with probability (1-p)^N, succeed in getting at least one YES with probability 1-(1-p)^N. He can either work on p (go to the gym, dress better, etc) or on N (try to have more dates). Both increase his probability of success and both demand an investment of resources.
Did you ever think that this mindset might be a bit of an obstacle to real love, which is at its best totally irrational?
Mario's logic seems to be that no matter how good is "mindset" is for real love, it doesn't do him any good if he never finds a partner.
But it seems in response to this men choose a mindset that makes anything other than a transactional relationship very unlikely…
Right? If OP never tries to date anyone (small N) what difference does his mindset make? You may argue that lowering p can select for more compatible partners, but certainly you need to go out and meet people in the first place if you want to find a partner! It strikes me as a bit hypocritical to argue that _other people_ should behave irrationally. (e.g. by denying the objective characteristics of reality that limit their realm of action). Irrational behavior has a cost and you may be prepared to bear that cost if you can afford it. That is a huge privilege! If OP cannot bear the cost of irrationality, suggesting that he does anyway is counterproductive. This is similar to the rich guy that says you should quit your job and travel the world because you will always find something when you come back (Tim Ferriss I am looking at you). That works if you can afford to find a job through connections and the like so that the gap in your CV does not matter. The regular dude who has no connections better stick to his cubicle.
Do you happen to be calling « real love » the kind of temporary infatuation celebrated by Hollywood movies? The one that lasts a year at bests and then either dissipates or morphs into something else? If that’s the case, it’s no surprise that it is at odds with a rational outlook on life. But the person who started this thread seemed to be looking for a stable partner so I suspect he can do without the hormonal storm.
Yes I’m talking about that love lol. The one that humans have been talking and writing about since humans could talk and write, because it is real and it is a necessary component- not the ONLY component, but a necessary one- for the kind of optimal relationship which is rare but does exist.
If you’re skeptical about it, you haven’t had it, and I know because I was a skeptic once too. Accept that it exists, it is worth it, and try to find it.
Любовь это когда любят оба ,они выбирают место для образа, в данном контексте цифры на рынке ,а люди никак не поймут деяние в полезной форме
They did it for me. I've had virtually no success outside dating apps, and now I'm married.
Have you tried manifold.love?
Here's what worked for me: game. The first couple years is very superficial, and you probably have a lot of inner demons to work through, as most men who get into game do. But it will get you partners and experience.
Once you have a couple years of that, you will mature, emotionally mentally and physically. You'll burn out on the game.
Then when you find the actual romantic partner that's perfect for you (almost completely by chance) you will have the internal focus to do it right and not chase her away with inexperienced hooves all over the fine china.
I do not recommend dating apps on any level. They are a complete waste of time. Yes there are unicorns on there, but they have 1000 other men per week to choose from. In real life, women only can choose from the men who approach them, which is way less than 1000 per week.
You know, I learned about it back in the late 2000s, and it was really interesting intellectually. One of those Matrix-like 'everything you know is wrong' moments (I'm sure this influenced the redpill metaphor). The passive personality I had adopted throughout the last 20 years basically to protect myself from HR was exactly 180 degrees away from the person I was supposed to be. A total Nietzschean 'transvaluation of ethics'--good is bad, bad is good, black is white, white is black. I never went all the way with it but it was interesting to read about, and the small amounts I felt safe applying were genuinely helpful. (I sided with the game people morally but still acted mostly like a feminist coward, because I knew I wasn't perceptive enough to do most of the stuff they recommended.)
I would bet it has to be calibrated differently with the increased risks from #metoo these days.
You should join the "Optimized Dating" Discord channel. 99% of men are not hopeless.
Those apps are probably a bad idea
FWIW I met my wife on EHarmony, so they worked for at least two people.
For what little it's worth, one of my closest friends and I both have a pretty major complex about dating apps:
I have never used dating apps and have had a long series of unsuccessful relationships; I worry that the lack of dating apps is causing my dating pool to be too small and that in turn is causing me to date people who I'm not really right for (and vice-versa).
Meanwhile my friend has *exclusively* used dating apps, like he's literally never dated anybody he's met in any other way, and has had a long series of unsuccessful relationships; he worries that there's some critical fundamental aspect of the meet-spontaneously-in-real-life dating p̶i̶p̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ process that dating apps fail to reproduce(*) or capture, and want of this hypothetical unknown aspect of real-life dating is causing him to date people whom he's not really right for etc. etc.
(* pun fully intended..)
My friend does not think my dating pool is too small and he wishes he could meet people spontaneously like I seem to have. I do not think there's some invisible thing missing from the way my friend dates people using his apps and I wish I had the luxury of being even a fraction as selective as he is in the people he dates.
So I guess what I'm saying is, please don't discount dating apps out-of-hand! Lots of the instinctive aversion to them seems to be pretty arbitrary, not really a good match for people's actual experiences, and often part of a category of weird hang-ups that people think are somehow a problem but which even their closest friends can't seem to detect in their lives.
(The data privacy and ethics of the dating app companies, of course, that's another matter..)
Also wanted to say that - and apologies if you know all this stuff already! - Scott's writing on micromarriages feels pertinent and hopefully maybe a bit motivating/encouraging: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone
(Scott doesn't explicitly mention them, but dating apps do rather strike me as an efficient way to accrue micromarriages)
Hope this helps - and hang in there, mon brave!
You should look into the recent regulations put in India against live-in relationships. It's some license Raj shit
From what I can tell whilst most countries around the world are trying to increase their age of consent, India seems interested in lowering it, with the claim usually being that parents use it to control their children too much.
I have never heard about this. From what I know the age of consent for men is 21 and for women is 18.
Does anybody know how free peasants were to marry in medieval Europe? Arranged marriages don’t seem to be the norm there from what I read - there were matchmakers but that wasn’t obligatory. Love songs abound but that doesn’t mean people married for love.
I don't think peasants in medieval Europe got formally married at all, at least not in general.
They did. Marriage has been very firmly a sacrament in Western Christianity since the 12th Century.
Back the day they got married, but getting married was as simple as both parties agreeing verbally. Or, alternatively, one giving the other a "wed" gift (like a ring, or a hankerchief) and the other consenting to the wedding by accepting it. So marriage was a thing, but not a government thing.
A true libertarian society wouldn't happen even if *everyone was a libertarian*. Here's why:
1) Being a libertarian means you believe there is at most a small set of things which it is essential for society to regulate by force, eg killing
2) Libertarians are human
3) Humans don't agree on anything
4) Therefore, libertarians don't agree on the set of things which it is essential for society to regulate
5) Therefore, it's necessary to reach a compromise on which things to regulate
6) No-one will willingly compromise by giving up something they regard as essential
7) Therefore, the only compromise possible is to agree to the regulation of things you don't think are essential to regulate
8) Therefore, the result will be most people living under regulations they don't believe are essential
QED
It would happen if it maximized the profit incentive, which would be the case if taxation were technically really hard to do. Like, say enforcing the tax code was impossible because everyone started hiding their assets In cryptocurrencies. Then, governments would have to be voluntarily funded, which would force fiscal austerity. Fiscal austerity would necessarily limit the scope of regulation. So all it would take to make libertarianism the norm would be some new technology that made large scale taxation easy for people to evade, plus possible some soft rebellion of people hating the government and just quiet quitting citizenship.
This is one of the geoist arguments for land value tax and Pigouvian taxes; can't hide your acreage or pollution in the cloud; heh.
> So all it would take to make libertarianism the norm would be some new technology that made large scale taxation easy for people to evade, plus possible some soft rebellion of people hating the government and just quiet quitting citizenship.
Never bet against state capacity in developed countries. If everybody switched to crypto, it would still be illegal to not pay your taxes, and crypto's ledger is public info. It would be trivial for the government to, e.g., require various brick-and-mortar companies accepting crypto to provide information on who bought what, which meant they could track down your wallets and arrest you for tax noncompliance.
> Never bet against state capacity in developed countries
Cannabis is de-facto legal because enforcing it is too expensive. Same with illegal immigration: when enough people decide to break the law, the state doesn’t have the budget (either financial or, in the case of democratic states, political capital) to prosecute all the offenders.
No, cannibas is de facto legal because it is not being enforced because many states have legalized it.
You are also talking about "the state having no money," not "people smoke weed."
They have the resources, they just don't have the incentive. Same with illegal immigration; they absolutely do have the resources to go around busting companies that are obviously exploiting illegal immigrant labor, but they don't. Because it's really good for the economy.
I dunno arranged marriages in the formal and informal sense used to be more common, right? And divorce had huge social stigma?
Perhaps the non-regulation you see is a more recent thing as regulation by the Church and social stigma has receded?
Also the laws against marrying cousins are not universal, and come out of the Church too?
Even libertarians regulate negative externalities; dealing with those has nothing to do with fairness per se. It's at least arguable that there are pervasive, chronic externalities that have gone unaddressed, and you don't have to be "woke" to admit that.
"Love is unfair. Some people go on dozens of dates with supermodels, then have happy marriages with their perfect partner. Other people die alone, through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills, or with less money, or disconnected from the social networks that would allow them to meet good partners. Usually when things are this unfair, we demand some attempt to restore fairness, maybe through redistribution. In love, nobody demands this - except incels, who are universally loathed for it."
I think one reason for the exception love is given from authoritarian tendencies in (Western) people's mind is that the inequality Scott describes here is still much less stark than in other areas of life. It is reigned in by the biological fact that there is roughly parity between the sexes and the social fact that most people are mostly monogamous.
For this reason most people end up finding someone eventually, even if it is not the person of their dreams. Harems, polyarmory etc. are still rare in Western societies and usually decay over time (most hippies ended up settling down with one partner only), ensuring this limit on inequality. Even most incels (in the non-ideological sense) will eventually find someone.
It seems to me that cultures with wide-spread polygamy (for one gender) also regulate love more. In some African societies with polygamy for men, men cannot marry unless they pay bride price. This limits the inequality rampant one-sided polygamy would otherwise entail. In practice, due to value conflicts induced by superficial christianization and rampant poverty that precludes many men from ever being able to pay bride price, the system has broken down completely. What happens now instead is that people often live together long term but unmarried (in Kenya this type of relationship is called the "come-we-stay") and both genders are polyamorous: men are often not able to support a family, so by necessity women end up acquiring multiple breadwinners in turn increasing the opportunities for men, etc. The only difference is that men will brag about it while women will deny it. I think this can be described as a system of love-anarchy instead of a system of love-liberty. As far as I can tell, pretty much nobody likes this state of affairs and it is especially deleterious for children growing up in a setting of constant material and relational instability.
Note also the controversial view that refusing to have sex with or date trans-people is transphobic: if the gender maths change with more genders with different dating preferences emerging and the numerical proportions between genders getting out of balance, the calls for redistribution or regulation may well increase.
Conservatives will decry such change but libertarians should be indifferent towards it. What the heart wants, the heart wants. However, we may then have to face the dilemma between calls for increased regulation and calls for increased redistribution. For some reason, right-libertarians are obsessed with taxes. As a left-libertarian I think taxes are much less severe restrictions on freedom than hard bans on things (would you rather see polyarmory banned or taxed, if you had to choose one?). If the alternative is the system collapsing into either love-authoritarianism or love-anarchy, I would be quite happy to have more love-redistribution.
Even now I am in favor of some love-redistribution, e.g. covering assisted sexuality services for disabled people via public health insurance. In the future we may need more of it, if we wish to preserve love-liberty, so maybe let's rethink society's loathing of those incel ideas.
Happy Love-Liberty Day, everyone!
If the current problem in Kenya is substantially a result of poverty, probably ought to fix the poverty first and then check whether other complications clear up on their own.
More societies have been polygamous and monogamous. It's just that the latter have been fantastically successful. Some of the reason seems to be that wealthy societies have extremely high wealth inequality, and there's no way someone like Bill Gates is going to be permitted to have as many wives as he can afford.
> there's no way someone like Bill Gates is going to be permitted to have as many wives as he can afford.
If parallel is prohibited, a technical workaround could be serial with rapid context switching. Hot-swappable wives. Er, so to speak.
LOL! Many Thanks!
This didn't go in the direction I suspected: state encouragement or discouragement of having children. Since the 1950s, in the U.S., everyone has had an opinion about overpopulation or low birth rates but not much has been done about it, leaving the choice completely up to individual couples, on this basis of "it's no one else's business."
I guess maybe in your culture (San Francisco) love has less to do with having kids than it does in my culture (Mormon).
Can't wait until the US has its Shinzo Abe moment.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/891/655/65f.jpg
o_O
I love that you said your wife is objectively the best person. I’ve said the same about my husband many times as an example of how you can hold a belief while also acknowledging its irrationality. Sometimes people push back. ‘You mean he’s the best match for you?’ No, I think he is truly the best. Consider the alternative. If he isn’t, I might someday meet someone and realize they are better. I can’t imagine how this could be possible. (Except maybe his almost exact clone that didn’t leave caps loose on soda bottles so that they go flat.) So I really do think he’s the best. But I can do math. I’m not oblivious to the statistical ridiculousness of that statement.
Absolutely. It's very sweet from Scott, but not an example of rationality.
Tim Minchin's attempt to thread this particular needle is his song "If Didn't Have You". (Video: https://youtu.be/LAzodf69rfk Extended audio-only version: https://youtu.be/jHCKCzjVAMs )
In my experience, libertarians are all about freedom until some one brings up immigration. Then suddenly it's different.
i think y’all are talking past each other.
@Vashashash is saying “most libertarians are against free immigration.” @Dawmol is saying “most of those in favor of immigration are libertarian.”
both of these things can be true at once.
Libertarians support unlimited immigration under the condition of the government not paying a penny to support new immigrants, as well as enforcing laws against occupying public property to ensure that new immigrants don't just all become homeless.
Since the government does (unfortunately) waste money on helping immigrants, libertarians are in favor of a regulated border.
I would say: open borders, a welfare state, fiscal solvency: choose two. It rather appears that cities such as New York and Chicago are in fact being faced with that choice right now.
So I'm curious, since we're (almost) all nerds here: in your experience (personal or otherwise), what type winds up settling for nerds?
Why "settle" for nerds? Nerds make great partners!
* They usually have some technical aptitude, so get a good job.
* They are insecure, so highly unlikely to cheat.
Having a very insecure partner can backfire in other ways though, at least if you are in it for the long haul.
I mean insecure in the sense that the nerd thinks they won't get another partner. They are surely secure in the domain in which they are classified as a nerd, for example.
The distribution of attractiveness of nerds isn't that different from the distribution among the rest of the population. So, 3/10 women marry 3/10 nerds. 8/10 women marry 8/10 nerds. There's no settling going on, people still match each other based off looks. Nerds have an introverted personality but plenty of women are introverted as well or don't mind an introverted partner.
How would one regulate dating; specifically, how would you detect whether two people are dating ? Regulating e.g. driving is easy: it's pretty obvious when someone is driving a car, vs. when he isn't. But it seems like in order to reliably regulate dating, you'd have to regulate basically every human interaction, which is impractical (though I'm sure China is working on it).
It was done by ensuring that all unmarried women were chaperoned. See also Saudi Arabia.
Right, this does work, but arguably this is what I mean by "impractical". At the very least, Saudi Arabia *eliminates* dating, it does not regulate it.
<mild snark - not wholly joking>
Robot chaperones for everyone?
</mild snark - not wholly joking>
edit: More to the point (in the west, where more of the problem is that the various options for dating have acquired a bunch of pathologies e.g. the sex ratio imbalance in dating apps), if the suggestion (earlier in the comments to this post) to have Google use its vast surveillance information on us to actually _help_ dating worked, that would be useful.
First possibility: DMV notes new shared address. Lotta false positives, of course.
Post Offices Hosting Mass Orgies, DMV Determines.
Same as lots of other laws: let people report "unsanctioned" dating to the government, the cops then follow up on the report.
You could rely on informants, as they are proposing to do in India:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/2/9/why-is-an-indian-state-punishing-live-in-relationships
See also "common law marriage" in many Western countries.
>Am I joking? The last one yes, but I don’t know about the others. Probably some of these policies would make the world a better place overall, at least as a first-order effect.
I'd rather not, precisely because that's been one of my primary way to wedge the idea that wealth redistribution is wrong amongst normal people. Not to great success, I'll admit, but at least it get awkward aknowledgment instead of me being kicked from polite statist society.
The person I thought was objectively the best one in the world abused me into severe depression and serious PTSD. Right now I'd happily sign up for more regulated love.
печально, может он сам имеет маниакальное расстройство ,это похоже дефицит или предательство в его жизни или вокруг
да, я предполагаю, что у нее такая проблема.
У всех наверно последствия истории и её функции , движение жизнь , а не преднамеренные наказания
Hang in there. You're not alone.
Any country with below-replacement fertility can no longer regard the status quo as working well enough.
I can think of one other area of life I’ve been involved in that still operates on the libertarian principle, and where there remain opportunities for unregulated adventure: basic research in theoretical computer science, theoretical physics, and math. (Well, until one gets old enough that one is regularly dealing with funding agencies.) In that case, a plausible explanation is that (1) success and failure are at least somewhat objective (thus setting the stage for adventure) and (2) no one cares enough to regulate the adventure away. Maybe sports and chess feel similar for those immersed in them.
Seems like we could count the 28% of people who aren't in a relationship as also not satisfied with the current system. (The 95% statistic above is restricted to people who are in a relationship.)
"Maybe it’s not just that love resists regulation, but that it’s becoming progressively less regulated at the same time the economy etc becomes progressively more regulated."
(Epistemic status: Intuition) My immediate response to this is that the state wants to regulate avenues of power. For the majority of human history, Love (marriage, specifically) was substantially important for the transfer of wealth and status not just across generations, but between familial power groups. In the modern (Western) world this feels less true, in fact it's considered generally unseemly to give unfair preference to a member of your family. It's more effective to pull the levers of the economy than to pull the levers of (literal) tribal/familial politics in the present historical moment.
Love gets to be free because the powers that be have nothing to gain by restraining it.
...With one exception. Fertility rates falling is a major concern for pretty much every developed country, and any country able to maintain or even grow their population will have a massive advantage. Right now, countries like the US are relying on immigration for this, but that well is eventually going to dry up as well. Unfortunately, there's no easy alternatives; forcing people to have children is going to be a very hard sell, especially in a country like the US.
>any country able to maintain or even grow their population will have a massive advantage
I respectfully disagree. Here is a list of nations by TFR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate . The most fertile ones, Niger, Chad, DR Congo, Somalia, are poor, in the case of Somalia, is the classic example of a failed state, and generally have bad infrastructure and access to technology. I think that for them to have an advantage in most terms (economic, military, global influence), they (if possible! this has usually failed) need to become developed nations.
Or am I misunderstanding, and are you speaking only of countries _among_ _the_ _developed_ _ones_ that are able to grow their populations?
> This process came for [every freedom] your grandparents held dear...
I'm drawing a blank here. What are some dearly-held freedoms that my grandparents would have had taken away from them, say 30-70 years ago?
- freedom of smoking anywhere except public hospitals
- freedom of public speech without fear of cancellation
- not having to wear a seatbelt or use a car seat for children
- being able to drive after drinking
- you could let your kids play outside or go anywhere without CPS being called on you
- freedom to make modifications of your house without asking for a permit from the government (I think?)
- freedom to decide who you're doing business with, without fear of discrimination accusations
The threat of cancellation has always been present, albeit about different things in each time and place.
That's a good point.
"Bless you!"
"Merry Christmas!"
"Where do you go to church?"
"Don't you believe in God?"
Think fast.
"without fear of cancellation"
I'm sorry but I kind of think the appropriate response to that turn of phrase is a chuckle rather than a gasp of horror
The possibility of losing one's livelihood because a rabid Twitter mob thinks some comment was insufficiently woke and bashes at one's employer till one is fired is hardly a humorous matter for the victim.
No doubt our grandparents cherished the ability to, e.g., espouse socialism during Red Scare and the McCarthy era without the slightest fear of it affecting their employment.
Max Chaplin had a good point to that effect. _Your_ "chuckle" on the other hand, is a miserable denial of empathy to the cancel victims of today. When the shifting winds of politics turn against you, I wish you the same fear and hardship that the twitter mobs impose on their victims today.
And a joyous St. Swithin's Day to you too, good sir!
>- being able to drive after drinking
I would question just how many of our grandparents actually held this "freedom" particularly dear, assuming they even had it. (How many of them took advantage of it in times and places where it existed de facto is, of course, a quite different question)
A bunch of admittedly minor ones to add to the list:
- freedom to purchase incandescent light bulbs
- freedom to purchase oil of bitter almonds (the DEA got its panties in a knot over some chemists using benzaldehyde as a feedstock for some recreational drug)
- freedom to drive without a seatbelt (more than 30 years but less than 70)
( There are actually a wide variety of chemicals the DEA doesn't like, including two _elements_, iodine and phosphorous. )
> Maybe this is an overly simple story. There were more regulations on love until very recently - bans on interracial marriage, bans on gay marriage, etc. Maybe it’s not just that love resists regulation, but that it’s becoming progressively less regulated at the same time the economy etc becomes progressively more regulated.
It is an overly simple story. It's actually pretty much the opposite of correct. Sex used to be illegal outside the confines of PIV in marriage, with crimes such as adultery, sodomy, fornication, obscenity, etc, used to control virtually everyone's sexuality in one way or another. You couldn't even send racy letters in the post, thanks to the Comstock laws.
This. Not to mention that marriage was a legal and economic arrangement that was made by spouses' families, not the spouses themselves, for most of human history and in much of the world still today. Especially women were forced into marriages they did not want, but this happened for some men, too. And of course, classically, adultery was a death penalty offense, especially for women.
"It is an overly simple story. It's actually pretty much the opposite of correct. Sex used to be illegal outside the confines of PIV in marriage, with crimes such as adultery, sodomy, fornication, obscenity, etc, used to control virtually everyone's sexuality in one way or another."
In America laws against fornication were basically never enforced. And while laws against adultery are technically "control over people's sexuality," they only apply to those who have voluntarily agreed to get married.
Bans on interracial marriage went away in the 1960s, about when I started college. In fact, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress came out then, and showed its viewpoint character getting sent to prison in the US for being in a multiracial marriage on Luna, among other things, in the year 2076; then two years later the Supreme Court did away with miscegenation laws.
Beautiful essay, thanks Scott
Happy VD Day!!!
Thalidomide was never approved for pregnant women by the US Food and Drug Administration. (It was approved as a cancer treatment--for which it can be quite effective--in 1998, with a black box warning about pregnancy.) Thalidomide was approved by the in Europe and Australia, where it was used widely in pregnancy and resulted in birth defects. Almost all those photos of the kids with the tiny limbs are from Europe, and mainly the United Kingdom, where it was approved early and used quite a lot. The thalidomide babies born in the USA were born to mothers who were not taking a FDA-approved drug, but an import from Europe.
So, um, @Scott Alexander, this is not a great example to use to make your point about the badness of regulation and especially not a great example to use of the badness of the FDA approval process.
Some references here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal#:~:text=United%20States,-1962%3A%20FDA%20pharmacologist&text=In%20the%20U.S.%2C%20the%20FDA,the%20Richardson%2DMerrell%20Pharmaceuticals%20Co.
https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history-exhibits/frances-oldham-kelsey-medical-reviewer-famous-averting-public-health-tragedy#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20first%20applications,with%20her%20major%20professor%2C%20E.%20M.%20K.
I disagree with Scott on this, but that's his point. The FDA avoided the damage caused by Thalidomide, but was overly restrictive generally and therefore did more harm than good. I don't think that's correct, but that's his consistent position.
He knows, he's saying that medical regulations should be loosened even if it meant that Thalidomide would have been approved. Can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.
I think reproduction is the other huge thing that's a huge deal and is largely unregulated - if it were invented today, you wouldn't just be allowed combine DNA with another person through a sexual encounter and create a new human life in your abdomen. It would never get past a medical ethics board.
Wealthy Americans won’t be procreating naturally by 2030.
You're *much* more optimistic than I am, if you think we'll have gengineering for designer kids by 2030 in the US.
I'd buy that a a good chunk of wealthy *people,* some of whom are Americans, will be using IVF to create gengineered kids by 2030, but I would definitely bet against it being in the US, and for it being in somewhere more like Thailand, Prospera, or Russia / Eastern Europe (new tourist and income opportunity!).
I know a lot of non wealthy people that have done IVF. Freezing sperm and getting snipped is a no-brainer right now because you get to find out if you have good sperm at 22 AND 22 year old sperm is better than 40 year old sperm AND you don’t have to worry about birth control. And everyone knows 22 year old eggs are far superior to 35 year old eggs.
Interestingly, my most recent ending rant on my podcast was about how love should be *more* libertarian https://livingwithinreason.com/p/prenups-should-be-mandatory
"To a first approximation, the only rule is that you may not seize it by force."
Except people have also tried to get love potions to work, in order to compel the one they love/are attracted to, to return their feelings. There's spells and everything for this, did you ever hear of The Spancel of Death?
Even Wikipedia has a short article on this!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibella_Cottle
"Sibella Cottle was the mistress of Sir Henry Lynch-Blosse, 7th Baronet (popularly known as Sir Harry; 1749–88) of Balla, County Mayo, Ireland.
...Sir Harry was urged to abandon Cottle and marry a woman of his own class and religion. Cottle reputedly responded by commissioning a powerful love charm, the spancel of death (Irish: an buarach bháis). The spancel has been described as "an unbroken hoop of skin cut with incantations from a corpse across the entire body from shoulder to footsole and wrapped in silk of the colours of the rainbow and used as a spancel to tie the legs of a person to produce certain effects of witchcraft." According to Nally, the love charm was made by Judy Holian, an bhean feasa (a woman of knowledge and wisdom), from the corpse of Harry's illegitimate daughter by another woman. Holian, reputedly a local witch, guaranteed that Sir Harry would be spellbound for life should Cottle apply the spancel to him
It's supposed to be an entire hoop of skin, cut from a corpse in one unbroken round, which with the proper incantations will then bind your lover (or the one you want to be your lover) to you. Other versions say you don't need an entire loop, just a piece of corpse skin and tie it on the person you want.
From Lady Wilde's collection of Irish folklore:
https://www.libraryireland.com/AncientLegendsSuperstitions/Fatal-Love-Charm.php
"A potent love-charm used by women is a piece of skin taken from the arm of a corpse and tied on the person while sleeping whose love is sought. The skin is then removed after some time, and carefully put away before the sleeper awakes or has any consciousness of the transaction. And as long as it remains in the woman's possession the love of her lover will be unchanged. Or the strip of skin is placed under the head to dream on, in the name of the Evil One, when the future husband will appear in the dream."
Didn't that make an appearance in "The One and Future King"?
It might have done, T.H. White lived in Ireland for a while and collected some folklore or customs.
Ah, it was used by Morgause on Arthur in part 2, "The Queen of Air and Darkness". It seemed an extremely weird and creepy bit of detail, and I'd never run across it before or since, so I'm glad to finally learn whence it came from. Thanks!
A great many marriages are arranged. I believe there's selective pressure for people to be good negotiators. While being a good negotiator is valuable in many ways, it's very important for your grandchildren to have good chances. What exactly might be getting selected for?
The reason why romantic relationships are one of the last places where "libertarian" ideals remain is because it's one of the few places where coordination of private actors to engage in antisocial behavior doesn't really work. In business, for example, we have extensive antitrust regulations because we saw first-hard what happens with monopolist corporations. Stable relationships are generally one-on-one. Incidentally, this is one of the arguments against polyamory--because all of a sudden you have introduced coordination problems in to romance.
I enjoyed this post very much overall, but the idea that prostitution has anything to do with love is absurd.
Well, I've never been in love and never wanted to be in love or in a relationship, so good luck to all you people with this odd impulse for Valentine's Day, but since it's also Ash Wednesday today I'm sticking with that one!
"Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life."
Given the amount of people cheating, I'm sure they'd lie to the government database as well. Some people may not know their partner is married/in a relationship and so would honestly (as they think) answer that they're in a relationship of two single people, and unless you start a federal bureau of snoops, how are you going to be sure about A is seeing B and also C?
There's an entire sub-reddit for women who are in adulterous relationships, and bewailing that the guy lying to his wife is - shock, horror! - also lying to them about "one day I'll get that divorce and marry you, honey". Some of them are aware that this is a side thing and happy with that, but the amount of "if he doesn't make a decision for definite soon, I'm leaving him" is astonishing. Why be surprised that someone willing to deceive and lie in one intimate relationship is also willing to do the same in another intimate relationship?
It would also be amazing how those with the best technical computer skills never cheat, and have relationships with the most admirable people.
The modest proposal concerning the regulation of dating sounds a bit like the sex that some incels believe that they are entitled to.
Except the incels seem to treat it as the world's problem that they aren't getting any action, while your proposal would make something that the loveless need to get fixed.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails...
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
As with all libertarian consensuses it does ignore the bottom 10%, we probably should provide courses on how to spot domestic violence in high school though with a high level of scepticism about whether they work.
It isn't a huge problem but it isn't negligible there are men with long records of violence against women who continue to date and make people miserable and society should probably intervene to stop that.
Victims should be ignored when it comes removing restraining ordres, it is clear that people frequently make bad choices, that create negative utility for them and people around them.
That would absolutely backfire. Lots of stories of early medical students jumping to declare things as rare deadly diseases when they're in fact the much more common diseases with the same symptoms. Those are the people smart enough to get into medical school, how much worse would the average high-schooler be.
Agreed, high false positive rates on something that destroys lives and reputations (accusations of abuse / violence) is NOT the way to go.
> we probably should provide courses on how to spot domestic violence in high school though with a high level of scepticism about whether they work.
"High level of skepticism" means the false positive rate is going to be really high, and you're going to ruin lots of lives and careers for basically no reason.
Is it state-level regulations or regulations period that is a problem for libertarians? The amount of non-state level regulation on love and relationships in societies where most human beings live (India, China, other south and southeast asian countries, some African tribal societies), is enormous, with parents given authorization to kidnap, drug, and beat their adult children in countries for violating established cultural norms surrounding how to couple up, marry, procreate, have sex, everything in this domain. Countries that implemented any of these very serious constraints and then used the state to protect adult children from the violence of their parents would be an improvement, from the point of view of absolute liberty, but worse, from the point of view of state-level liberty. Which type of society does a libertarian prefer?
Свободу надо искать не вне себя, а внутри.
В окружающем мире ее нет и быть не может. Она все равно будет лишь иллюзией.
That the FDA’s perverse over-regulation is hastening the death of the person I love most makes that an apt example.
Любовь это когда любят оба ,они выбирают место для образа, в данном контексте цифры на рынке ,а люди никак не поймут деяние в полезной форме
It's a shame tax free day varies by person and country, or that might make an ideal Libertarian Day.
As a smoker and moderate drinker, and with taxes in the UK at record levels when we haven't even fought in a World War recently, I'm looking forward to my tax free day some time in November!
(In case anyone is not familiar with the notion, tax free day is the date in the year after which one starts working for oneself rather than the state! )
But it's pretty much impossible to calculate an individual's tax burden, so one might as well make it a collective holiday. https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/getting-tax-burden-wrong
I'm not sure that the best day to celebrate "non-aggression" is the one named after a guy who was beaten, tortured, beheaded, buried in secret, dug up again, had his remains paraded around, etc...
A very nice sentiment, but it also seems cruel to give "the faction with the highest concentration of single men" the holiday associated with relationships.
If I wasn't dating a libertarian girl I've met recently, I'd be filled with cynicism!! haha
My Brazilian friends swears thay Brazil is so progressive (Id say Woke) that racism even in dating is illegal. And litigable.
I thought the Woke holiday was Juneteenth (June 19th) rather than MLK Day. Messaging around the latter doesn't seem as woke.
mlk is woke Christmas, juneteen is woke Easter. The former is domesticated, has something for everyone under popular interpretation (winter solstice slash gifts; colorblindness). The latter is more hard core to the Faith (crucifix and resurrection; trans historical guilt for America’s original sin(TM), just about blacks, even the name is in Ebonics)
I always felt the opposite, because of the prohibition of polygamy. Not polyamory, where everyone is presumably fully happy with the arrangement, or non-consensual polygamy, where a repressive culture forces a woman into a marriage, but consensual polygamy, where, eg, each wife would prefer to have the husband to herself, but is choosing this as the best option because she gets a higher status husband. With modern norms about love, as a person gets higher status, they get to have more desirable partners, but there's a ceiling where you get the most desirable partner, and that's it. If you apply the normal logic of capitalism, you should be able to trade your status for whatever arrangement the other parties will freely agree to, based on what each party can offer and what other options are available. Monogamy is like a salary cap for love.
Rare W for feminism. We take sexual autonomy much more seriously now (spousal rape is a thing, marriage alliances aren’t). And thankfully women really care about sexual (and reproductive) autonomy! Too bad they don’t feel the same about other kinds of freedom.
Guns are a net negative for women by any metric. It is absolutely rational for women to oppose their free distribution. If that’s what you’re talking about.
How do you figure? I would think the physically weaker sex is the bigger beneficiary from force-equalizers like guns.
You would figure but actually it turns out men use guns against women as well as fists and women are just generally less disposed to violence, so anything that makes violence easier, benefits men more than women. The number of women shot, outnumbers the number of women who do defensive shootings, by a factor of thousands in one of the most gun happy nations on earth. That tells it all.
A gun really isn't even that useful in close quarters anyways when they can just wrestle it out of your hand. Also, shooting people is still illegal.
I’m sure all the murdered women are consoled by that fact. And the women who live in fear of violent exes they know have guns, or just like any random guy on the street who can alll have guns, I’m sure women are so much more free, in a society where like any guy can have a gun. That’s a great position for women to be in. Much safer. So rational for women to support that.
...No, I meant for self-defense.
Not in self-defense, it's not.
Incidentally, regarding libertarianism, the Libertarian Party seems to have split: https://thirdpartywatch.com/2024/02/13/1489/ (that particular story doesn't say it, but these appear to be all former LP state organizations, to my understanding representing the moderates who didn't agree with the Mises Caucus takeover.)
Anyone know more?
One of my favorite posts of yours.
You reminded me of how fucking lucky I am. Thanks.
How long has love had this property? Because as I understand it, for most of history, much/most of the world has/had arranged marriages, where choice was at least strongly constrained. Not necessarily by the state, but still by institutions with significant coercive power.
My understanding is that the rise of Liberalism in the West is mostly responsible, though it only started gaining momentum about a hundred years ago. Modern liberal governments are generally pragmatic enough that they won't die on hills like banning interracial or gay marriage. Those are completely inconsquential issues compared to stuff like foreign policy.
Same approach could and should be made about having kids. Marriage mistakes can not only ruin the partners’ lives, it most definitely has negative impact to children. So, let’s make some rules about having kids:
•Nobody is allowed to produce children without a permit. Take several classes and pass a test showing that you understand basic child-rearing and have the minimum resources to do it.
•Six month waiting period after getting the permit.
•Centralized government database of children you have produced.
•Kid licenses can be revoked for serious crimes – e.g., abuse, persistent alcoholism/drug use, violent convictions, neglect, etc.
•If you produce children without permit, then you are subject to sterilization so you can’t keep foisting your mistakes onto society.
Am I joking? No. Having children is a privilege and responsibility; it is not a “right”. I'm sure many will say how cold or unfeeling this is. But because almost everyone reproduce doesn't mean that they should. Take a hard look at the foster system if you'd like some evidence.
I'm childfree myself, so my ox isn't gored by this, but I still think it is a bad idea. Coercive sterilization has been abused (both in the USA, which is where I'm writing from, and elsewhere). This wasn't a hypothetical, it happened.
In general, for the people who want kids, my understanding is that this is a major life project, comparable to their career or education, and that putting it under government control would be putting a major leash around their necks.
I think most of the benefits of your proposal could be had without the coercion, simply by making sterilization a prerequisite for welfare payments.
I think most of the world still thinks of love as a magical thing. Like, literally a magic force, operating far beyond petty laws and regulations. If you tried to ban love, it would only become stronger.
Well, it is a magical force in the same sense that cocaine is a magical force. And you can still buy cocaine pretty easily.
I love this post.
- An explicitly freedom-oriented holiday seems great.
- Romance does indeed stand out as especially free in the ways you pointed out.
- I really like the candor about the gut feeling, and I applaud you for saying it loud and clear.
- I think you displayed the virtues of Lightness and Evenness superlatively well here.
- From Wikipedia: "The influence of pederasty on Greek culture of these periods was so pervasive that it has been called 'the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens.'" Hm. Maybe Libertarian Love Day should come with a "ok but don't repeal all the age-of-consent laws" disclaimer.
Ha. Your “except prostitution” completely blew up the libertarian analogy. And you further blew it up by the suggestion that some additional regulation would be in order. You are not wrong. Congratulations on your graduation from Libertarian to Conservative!
I don't have a response to any very specific part of this essay, but I have a lot of feelings about the general vibe of it since I often struggle with the idea that the way I'm fundamentally inclined (and perhaps socialized) to think about love involves a making decisions according to a far higher standard of honesty and truth and... organicness?... than other major things I seek in life, including (and particularly) my professional career. For instance, I can make a decision to take a particular job -- and be very open about the decision, possibly even to the people who hire me -- based on the fact that the harshness of the job market makes it most strategic for me to settle for that particular job. Something deep within me dictates that I can't make love live decisions this way, much less admit to a partner (or even myself) that I settled for them, even if deciding to settle in my love life is equally rational to deciding to settle in my professional life.
I have a theory that if a famous person’s tinder activity leaked, and the data showed they always swiped left on a particular race, there would in fact be some attempts to get them cancelled. I don’t think love is a safe space from cancel mobs.
OK, but it isn't a SCIENTIFIC theory unless we can test it by experiment. Now to hack some famous people's Tinder accounts...
Taylor Swift has never dated a black guy.
Marriage is easy to regulate, since we don't count it as "marriage" unless the state signs off on it for property rights and child custody and taxes and such.
Sex is difficult to regulate since you have to do an awful lot of invasion of privacy, but it can be managed and has been.
"Relationships" and "dating" are almost impossible to regulate without enormous control over freedom of association to the level of "women are not allowed to hang out with unrelated men without a male relative present". You can't control them without control the ability of people to interact.
"Love" is an emotion. You can only prevent people from expressing it, not prevent them from feeling it.
This has nothing to do with adhering to some magical conception of "love". It's just that some of the things you're talking about are very hard to regulate!
In the U.S. army bans on soldiers porking each other are common and mostly non-controversial.
Michel Houllebecq famously made this comparison in making the exact opposite point:
"In our societies, sex represents a second system of differentiation, independent from money. It behaves as a system of differentiation at least as merciless as money. The impacts of these two systems are actually equivalent. Sexual liberalism creates a phenomenon of acute pauperization, just like wild liberalism does. Some make love everyday; some five or six times in their life or never. Some make love to dozens of women, some never do. It is called “market law”.
In an economic system where lay-offs are prohibited, everyone more or less finds their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, everyone more or less manages to find a bed partner. In a liberal economic system, some build huge fortunes; some endure unemployment and misery. In a perfect liberal sex system, some have a varied and exciting erotic life; some are reduced to masturbation and loneliness. Economic liberalism is broadening the field of struggle, broadening it to all the stages of life and to all social classes"
...I was looking for that quote. One of Houllebecq's most penetrating insights.
Did this guy ever manage to penetrate the idea (on the economic side) that a system where lay-offs are prohibited (several have existed and ) results in substantially more unemployment, misery and pauperisation than a 'wildly liberal' one?
His point, well made, is about sex rather than economics,
The sexual analogy would be.... "dead bedrooms" with no possibility of divorce? But on paper, almost everyone is married, yay! But also, most marriages do not have kids, and the ones that do usually only have one child, so the society goes extinct in a few generations?
Hehe
Marriage is regulated, and courtship and dating have strong informal social norms associated with them. These have all changed fairly significantly over the past 80 years.
I don't have a girlfriend. Every mention of valentines day makes me sad :(
In one seven day stretch, we have a Chiefs Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day. Those are all drinking holidays for me... not sure my liver can take it
Save some liver for St Patrick’s Day.
😩
Are you sure on the "Most female murder victims are killed by their romantic partners" thing? I swear I saw stats for the UK in which like 40% of female murder victims were killed by a partner or ex-partner, and it was only a majority if you ignored those where the killer wasn't known. While this sounds reasonable I think the police are aware that romantic partners are a good bet to demand alibis of, and the unsolved are disproportionately likely to be people who weren't so obvious to law enforcement.
The closest I could find quickly on Google was https://aoav.org.uk/2023/london-murder-capital-a-year-of-violent-deaths-examined/ which says 31% of women murdered in London in 2023 were killed by a partner or ex partner (n=29, so 9 killed by an (ex)partner).
I admit this tweak is hardly fatal to your overall hypothesis.
Thanks for the link. It finds 55% by including 'other kinds of victims' which based on its clarifications appears to mean 'if your partner kills your brother for trying to protect you then we counted that as an example of a women being killed by their partner'. It contains the paragraph "Worldwide, the World Health Organization says a partner or spouse is the killer in 38 percent of women's homicides. Previous research in the U.S. suggested that intimate partners carried out more than 40 percent of homicides of women."
>Three month waiting period for marriage.
FIY, Russia (and maybe other post-soviet countries) has form of this - one-month period between making official petition for marriage and actual marriage conclusion
Isn't regulation for marriage and relationships a core function of most religious organizations and churches? Almost literally the rules for love/relationship regulation above
Mitt Romney’s family fled America over polygamy because the federal government persecuted polygamists. Oh, and remember SF QB Steve Young being asked about his ancestor Brigham Young’s quote about unwed 30 year old men being nuisances?? That’s because BY had over 50 wives and could divorce them easily…and pretty much every Mormon is related to BY because he had so many offspring.
This reminded me of G. K. Chesterton, from his book Orthodoxy:
>This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately...Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.
> The woke have MLK’s birthday.
This is a little out of touch I think. Woke people nowadays tend to quietly downplay and ignore MLK, as his support for nonviolence and colorbind policies runs counter to what wokism advocates. The woke holidays would be things like Juneteenth, black history month, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, and "Conspicuously Not Celebrating Columbus Day" day.
They could own Valentine's Day by putting a different slant on it: My Heart Is Bigger than Yours Day.
They’re mere months away from declaring MLK a racist.
In Australia, you *do* need to give one month's notice before marrying (https://www.ag.gov.au/families-and-marriage/marriage/get-married). 1n 1984, the Australian government waived this requirement for Elton John.
As many others have pointed out, it's only recently that love has been deregulated, and only in the West among the non-religious. The consequences have been disastrous. Cheating is rampant, with 20% admitting to having cheated on a partner. 58% of black American children live without their fathers. Half of first marriages end in divorce, with even higher rates for second and third marriages. This serial monogamy severely worsens inequality: the hottest people keep dating the hottest people of the other gender (why settle for someone uglier if all the beautiful people will be single again in a year?), instead of settling down and allowing everyone else to have a shot. It's hardly a surprise that people are marrying and having children later, and that more people are involuntarily celibate.
Yes, serial monogamy is on the rise, also thanks to increased life-spans. It is arguably the functional equivalent to polygamy. Both polygamy and serial monogamy serve to limit fatherhood to a more select groups of fathers.
....In countries that allow polygamy among men (some countries in the Middle East for example), prostitution has traditionally been the way the other - and younger - men get some sex. Now the internet is taking over that role.
...a difference though is that while male polygamy is associated with arranged marriages and patriarchal family structures, serial monogamy is arguably more an effect of increased female choice in the mating process. Thus the type of men that are selected for breeding (so to speak) might be somewhat different in polygamous and serial monogamy-cultures, concerning their personality traits; although in both cases the males are likely to be high-status in their societies.
In pretty much every sex binary species I've seen, females have the ultimate say in their choice of mate, effectively acting as gatekeepers to procreation. The ability to rape seems to be selected against, presumably due to its dysgenic effects. A particularly hilarious example of this is ducks, where the females developed corkscrew-shaped vaginas in order to avoid getting fertilized by unwanted males... and the males evolved corkscrew penises in response.
Of course, humanity is unique in that females have almost zero protection against rape. Maybe it's because the sexual dimorphism was so necessary for whatever reason that this was an affordable sacrifice to make. ...Or maybe it just means that humanity is a doomed species.
>>This serial monogamy severely worsens inequality: the hottest people keep dating the hottest people of the other gender (why settle for someone uglier if all the beautiful people will be single again in a year?),
How does this make sense? All the ugly people can date each other while the beautiful people are playing musical chairs
I think it was a mistake to put it in a gender-neutral way. It's probably more like this -- the hot women are at home taking care of their babies, the divorced hot men are out there again ruining the dating market for the average men. (Also for the average women, if their long-term goal is to start a family, because the number and quality of men willing to have sex with them exceeds the number and quality of men willing to start a family with them.)
If the situation was symmetric with regards to genders, then I suppose the society would stratify, and the behavior of one layer would have little impact on the behavior of another layer.
I'm a temporary resident on a partner visa, so I'm subject to regulations very similar to the ones you describe. This article makes me more envious than I can describe, and I hope you appreciate your good fortune.
Parent-child relationships are very unregulated too, and I think the case for having "parenting licenses" is much better than the one for Scott's imagined licenses to date. There's no restriction at all on who can father or become pregnant with a child, and it's really not hard to get out from under the requirement that kids attend school. I homeschooled my daughter thru 7th grade, and it was quite easy to get permission to do that, and nobody ever checked up on me. All states have required vaxes for kids, but if you child doesn't go to school or camp it's easy to get away with not getting them (though I have no objections to vaxes for kids, and my daughter got them all.)
I've always agreed with the idea of "parenting licenses" as a good idea in spirit, but of course, the West already has a fertility problem.
Pace Zvi's "carseats as contraceptive" post, the more barriers you throw up around having (more) children, the worse the negative impact on fertility rates.
Not to mention the enforcement would be an ethical, logistical, and philosophical nightmare - by what means are you going to ensure *default infertility?*
I'm not really in favor of parenting licenses, although all of us therapists hear some terrible stories about parents, and that's enough to at least make us daydream about somehow forbidding certain people to become parents. Another group that's in the running for parenting license forfeiture in my mind is alcoholic or drug-addicted women who continue the use the drug during pregnancy.
Can you not forcibly take these pregnant women and put them in a locked institution until they give birth? That's a legal option in Scandinavia. It is not often used since there obviously is a high treshold plus the need for solid evidence, but it is used.
>I'm not really in favor of parenting licenses
Many Thanks! While I'm childfree, and my ox would not be gored even if parenting were licensed, I think it would be a bad idea.
My understanding is that, for people who want a child, this is a major life project, of comparable importance to a career, or to their education. Putting it under state control would put a very major additional leash around the necks of potential parents. I would expect this major power to be abused very quickly.
Parent-child relationships unregulated? Nor after the child is born. Mandatory education is now universal the world over, and increased efforts to trace absent partners and make them pay child support is a worldwide trend. Child protection agencies are also being strengthened, also likely to be a worldwide trend (although so far the tendency is probably strongest in Northern Europe and North America). Related: The type of parenting the state allows, is gradually narrowed. Witness the diffusion of the legal prohibition of parents to corporally punish their children. Sweden was the innovator, and this legal innovation is gradually diffusing worldwide.
Education is mandatory in the US, but parents are allowed to homeschool their kids, and there is no active checking on the quality of the education kids are getting at home. I don't know whether their have been bills in the U S strengthening child protection, but I continue to hear and read about cases of badly abused and neglected kids with the state agency, overloaded with cases, not doing a decent job. Corporal punishment is legal in all 50 states, although there are guidelines about the point at which corporal punishment shades into abuse. But old-fashioned spanking is definitely allowed here.
<mild snark>
>But old-fashioned spanking is definitely allowed here.
Traditionally, the state to watch to see which trend the USA imports from Sweden is California. :-)
</mild snark>
Yes, this legal innovation has not reached the US yet. But notice that the legal practice is spreading. And, equally important: No country that has introduced legal prohibitions against parents to corporally punish their children, has ever reversed this legislation - despite the forever-ongoing shifts in the ideologies of the ruling parties. That's why I think this is likely to be one-way affair, i.e. a diffusion process.
Wiki has a good page on the diffusion so far, if you write "corporal punishment of children". Most European (including Israel) and Latin American countries are in the bag already, as is Japan, New Zealand, Scotland(!) and several others.
...since the US is a big place and states to my knowledge have juristiction in this policy area, my bet/prediction is that in the US the process will start in California, first diffuse to other Blue states, and later to Red states. With Mississippi and Alabama probably being the last holdouts of the old order. But eventually even they will succumb...You heard it here first:-)!
Here was I, all prepared to be shocked, and then it tells me (and as a sidenote, it reads like it was written by AI):
"These are the recorded incest rates by state.
They are the percentage of marriages involving second cousins or family members."
Your second cousin, which means you are both the children of first cousins, which means that you are the grandchildren of siblings, and your nearest common ancestors are your great-grandparents, one set of whom are the same for both of you.
Oh gosh. Incest between descendants of one particular set of great-grandparents. How truly horrifying. Bear in mind, as well, that "family members" also includes people who are not blood relatives, e.g. in-laws and relatives by marriage - so if your aunt by blood divorces her husband, and then 'Uncle Ernie' takes up with you, that's technically incest but you're not blood-related.
I'll tell you what is absolutely horrifying: whatever thing wrote that article. It flails about for a term and tries "incestual" and "incest marriage". No, idiot AI, the word you want is "incestuous". It also contradicts itself all over the place:
"- incest between brother and sister is second most likely
- incest between mother and son is second most likely"
Well, which is it? Sibling incest or Oedipal incest?
The shock, horror headline ("17 Scary And Startling Incest Statistics") is clickbait and does not live up to the billing; it conflates incest and sex abuse, and goes all out about "these states permit incest" and "it is a crime in these states" but doesn't notice that there are a lot of the same states in both lists.
California is not a red state, so far as I know, yet it has a 0.2% incest rate, which puts it in the middle. Here's what that awful article tells us:
"Yes, incest is a criminal offense in all 50 states.
California: felony, 3 years in prison, and up to $10,000 in fines."
But also:
"The states that allow incest relationships are:
California [picked out from list]
They do not allow incestual marriages.
But they are relaxed about incest relationships.
And these relationships are not criminal offenses."
So again, which is it? A criminal offence or not? And if you want advice on "can I have an incest relationship which is not an incestual marriage in this state?", good luck with figuring it out from this:
"The rules for these incest relationships are:
- both parties must be consenting adults
- both parties must be related by marriage (more on this below)
- both parties must be blood relatives
- no sexual relationship of any kind is allowed (i.e., sexual intercourse)
- the relationship must be consensual
- both parties must provide full disclosure of the relationships to any partners
Being related by blood or marriage includes:
- siblings
- half-siblings
- first cousins
- aunts or uncles
- nieces or nephews
- sons and daughters with parents
Inbred families can include kids with a parental figure."
So do I have to related by both blood *and* marriage to my putative incest partner? And if we can't have sex, does that mean a romantic relationship instead of an erotic one?
It then swerves into inbreeding, and if you're going to poke the bear about red state people having intercourse with their blood relatives, you may wish to treat carefully, because:
"African Americans have the most inbreeding of any racial group in America.
African Americans have the highest rate of intermarriage within their own race."
Well, you awful racist you, accusing African-Americans of all being incestuous!
But maybe you only mean red state white people, hmmm?
Okay, this site got you covered:
"The most inbred state in America is West Virginia.
This is according to a study by the University of Washington.
West Virginia had the highest rate of inbreeding in the United States.
Approximately 4.1% of all births in West Virginia were the result of inbreeding.
This is much higher than the national average of 1.2%.
The inbreeding rate of West Virginia is largely due to its:
- geography
- small population
The state is isolated and has a large rural population.
As a result, many West Virginians are related to each other."
Oh darn, it turns out that it's not because they're all sister-fuckers, it's because in a small, isolated area people tend to intermarry within their community and so end up with common ancestry.
And my final word on this trash is that the layout of the page is *abominable*.
Yikes, I'm an idiot. I sent that link in the middle of the night when I was having a snack to help me get back to sleep. Googled "US incest per capita by state," and when the first link gratified my craving for stats showing more sister-fucking in red states I just posted the link here without even reading the whole article. Anyhow, you are totally right and I deleted that shit.
Parenting licenses are one of those topics that's perennially thought up under different names until someone brings up the magic hate-word "eugenics."
How does it get to eugenics -- is it via the idea that if we had eugenics-based regulations lots of abusive parents would never have been allowed to reproduce because they would not be up to standard in measures of intelligence and/or mental health? I'm actually not sure how many abusers-to-be that would strain out. The three worst abuse histories I've heard from patients of mine all involved parents who would not have shown up as defective pre-parenthood using the big, obvious measures. Two parents had advanced degrees, and were almost certainly of above-average intelligence. The third did not have even an undergrad. degree, but judging by her employment history and such she was of at least average intelligence. And none was obviously mentally ill before they became parents. Of course my sample is tiny, but I also worked for several years in a psychiatric hospital and heard lots of patient's histories, and came away with the same impression: prior to becoming parents, most people who are going to flunk parenthood are not obviously defective.
Oh you could not give licensees to undesirables, drug addicts, gamblers and whatever really. It’s only eugenics though if you stop the procreation rather than foster out the children after birth.
I found the right woman (or rather she found me, picked me up out of the gutter, cleaned me up, and cares for me for the past 37 years) on the second go-round. My brother swung and missed twice and is unwilling to swing a third time for fear of striking out. I figure you win some, you lose some, you get rained out once in a while, but you have to suit up and play every day.
Anyway, love is weird at best and only mildly truly describable. (I knew a guy who fell in love and got married 7 times by the time he was 35. Seriously. Died at age 50, I think from natural causes.)
After thinking about it for a while, I had an epiphany. It's obvious what the libertarian holiday is: 4/20, the holiday not recognized by any government which exists to honor of an intoxicating plant-derived substance of dubious legality.
That's Hitler's birthday though, makes it an uncomfortable holiday for political movements.
Dude, even the word "high" has two 'h's in it!
They probably called him "high Hitler" for a reason.
Yeah, at some point during the war Hitler's doctor started giving him all sorts of crazy shit: oxycodone, cocaine, methamphetamine...
>Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life.
Isn't this basically describing marriage records? When I got married, we had to go to the County Probate Court, and sign a document saying that we weren't already married, weren't first cousins, weren't infected with syphilis, and a few other things that seemed very quaint but were probably significant hazards in the 1800s or whatever. You're free to love whoever you want, but as soon as you want to attach any legal or economic meaning to your love, we regulate the shit out of it.
Scott's in a polygamy bubble so it doesn't occur to him that we already have this and it's describing (monogamous) marriage.
Right, but it used to be the case that you *weren't* free to love whoever you wanted, because loving (in the sense of "making love") anyone who wasn't listed as your One Acceptable Lover in the official records was a serious social and often legal offense.
So, in this case, Scott is right that we have seen a broadly popular increase in personal liberty.
"Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. 95% of people describe themselves as at least “satisfied” with their romantic relationship, and 60% as “extremely satisfied”.
...Scott, let me boost your pessimism: You are forgetting the selection effect. The unsatisfied have divorced their partners and are not any longer in the institution. Divorce rates approach 50 percent, and not only in the US. Plus, cohabitation is increasingly replacing marriage in many countries. And cohabitation has an even higher break-up rate than marriage (although data on this is wobbly and not as good as on marriage break-ups).
Yes, it’s like a statistic saying that 90% of religious people were happy in their church. Of course. If they weren’t they would be in a different church, or none.
For the longest time, I've wanted to write a story about a couple that gets their marriage license revoked.
I wanted some sort of gut-punch ending, but I still haven't managed to figure out what that should look like.
We have this strong modern Western taboo against regulating people's love lives. But... what happens if that taboo is violated? There seems to have been a long history of arranged marriages in some cultures, and marriages were seen as a coming together of families, not just of individuals. Prioritizing love in marriage is a very time and culture specific value. So maybe nothing beyond an increased feeling of quiet desperation would be the result of such a shift. Or an increase in non-marital romances, akin to courtly love.
I agree that some people's beliefs about consent in romance seems to contrast sharply with some people's understanding of consent in economic transactions.
>I wanted some sort of gut-punch ending, but I still haven't managed to figure out what that should look like.
"Ordered to 6 months of remedial marriage with a faculty member, at which time your readiness for independent marrying can be reassessed."
Haha. That does sound very bureaucratic! Yeah, maybe they're assigned a supervisor and decide that's too much and it destroys the relationship.
I don't think MLK day is a woke holiday. Juneteenth feels much more like a woke holiday.
Another domain in which Western thinking tends to be very libertarian is religious self-determination. Even if we knew we could increase utility by 1,000,000 hedons by imposing a limitation on the number of hours people can spend worshipping in order to divert them into more economically productive activities, we still wouldn't do it. Imagine that we could save an extra 10,000 lives in the third world over the next five years by simply forcing the Catholics to practice one fewer of their 12 (or whatever it is) rites, or attending worship services for five fewer minutes. Maybe, in the aggregate, that would create enough economic value in productive labor hours that it would generate a big enough foreign aid budget to save another several thousand lives per year (or even if it wouldn't, just stipulate for the purposes of this hypothetical example that it would). But nonetheless, on the altar of religion, we sacrifice humanity. How very human.
(Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this: many Muslim-majority countries make some or all non-Islamic religious practices illegal. But by the same token, love has its exceptions too: gay and interracial marriage once was illegal, and in many countries will cause you to be murdered.)
"Imagine that we could save an extra 10,000 lives in the third world over the next five years by simply forcing the Catholics to practice one fewer of their 12 (or whatever it is) rites, or attending worship services for five fewer minutes."
I'm rolling around on the floor here at the notion that modern, Western, Catholics spend *too much* time on practicing our religion. "Attending Mass for five fewer minutes"? The people who rush out the door once it's time for communion would be leaving at the Gospel, if they could. Three-quarters of an hour for Mass once a week is considered "long".
Yeah, I'm sure the ninety seconds I spent today saying the Angelus at my work desk would have been better employed doing - what? An extra ninety seconds clicking on my emails isn't that much, really.
And, as we've seen from relaxed Sunday religious obligations, if people stop going to church services, they are not spending that time being "economically productive" - they either use it for leisure, or they work on jobs around the house, or they go out and spend money shopping. Depending on their job, they might even spend that Sunday working (people have to staff the shops and restaurants and pubs that you go out to, after all).
As for "12 rites", do you mean the seven sacraments? Yes, ban Shrove Tuesday (New Orleans tourist trade will love you for that) and instead make everyone do an extra hour of work! The economy is all, Mammon is our god now!
If you're just trying to do the usual "religion bad and dumb", only from the angle of "instead of praying, just work extra hours to earn more money to give to charity", then I think you're coming at it the wrong way round. You're entitled to go "religion bad and dumb" but please, don't dress it up as "I am just thinking of the children!"
Lol obviously it was a hypothetical intended to test the moral theory of utilitarianism (and evoke pluralistic/deontological intuitions about religious freedom), not an attempt at an empirical description/prediction of what would happen if XYZ law was passed with what probability. Have you ever done philosophy? If the issue is that you don't accept hypothetical idea-testing of abstract ideas (like moral theories), I recommend checking out this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Thought Experiments:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwj3v8OU-a2EAxWe3skDHZf9Ao4QFnoECBIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2FEntries%2Fthought-experiment%2F&usg=AOvVaw1zEb4JUugtS5Md0625mZtz&opi=89978449
If instead you're objecting to deontology from some other line of reasoning I haven't been able to extract from the above, check out:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjL2L29-a2EAxWh4ckDHZmSDMMQFnoECBcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffakenous.substack.com%2Fp%2Fwhy-i-am-not-a-utilitarian&usg=AOvVaw1ZeCAPc14Hxu6aZgopEPKt&opi=89978449
Not that it matters, but the hypothetical could actually happen in the real world more realistically if we were to just make being Amish illegal, resulting in an extra ~400,000 productive US citizens (which would become millions of extra civilian workers within a few generations, because their yet-to-exist future children would also not be diverted into less-economically-productive lives).
"Lol obviously it was a hypothetical"
You say that *now*. As for "do you even philosophy, bro?" No, not particularly. And the only way to test the hypothetical is take the argument to a real application and see what falls out. And what fell out is that you sound indistinguishable from Fedora Euphoric. "Let's force everyone to be cogs in the economic machine, even though the push is on to automate away manual labour and replace even white collar work with AI". Yeah, that's going to "result in extra productive US citizens" when you take farmers and, what? 'learn to code' them? If you do force the Amish to become secular Americans, you can't count on those extra millions of children because, as has been pointed out in discussion before, secularisation and the modern Western lifestyle causes fertility to crater.
Besides, what do you think the Amish *do* all day, sit around reading the Bible? What do you think non-Amish farmers and small tradesmen do? If your notion is "get them all working in offices", isn't there a whole book about Bullshit Jobs and how those aren't really productive?
You have a ton of unexamined assumptions there, friend, and I think instead of LOLing at me, you should go back to your priors and give them a good shake to see how firmly planted they are.
It was clearly hypothetical, it was also clearly an easy target.
I could put up a lot of blah blah blah words and scientific evidence to demonstrate this point, but I think really you either want to come to the pool to drink water for enormous benefit or don't and I'm not going to convince anyone that technology writ large is in fact the actual problem.
and not *just* a problem for relationships, but the reason cities themselves don't work, the reason we have no place for the 70 IQs, the reason we have homeless problems that are only getting worse, the reason the environment is starting to not just break down but create extreme human interaction so forth.
And while yes, some advancements have been great particularly some in the medical fields and some have been great in creating solves, it's become incredibly irresponsible, blame whomever or what you like but the glaring pattern to me on a multitude of different social and health problems comes down to this man's simple advice.
So, I'll just let this guy state what is obvious in my mind.
https://youtu.be/wN6qPJm1hmg?si=tSj-0OndMupOEwip
Best Valentine's day post ever, not much else to add.
Thank you for that harrowing look at a hypothetical regulated dating market.
Looking for a perfect someone to love is backwards. Thankfully most people jump into relationships based on proximity and then learn to show love best for that partner.
I *am* fascinated by the Consent Warriors on the left who so passionately argue for the importance of explicit and detailed consent in this one area, while otherwise default to "just do what you're told!".
"In every fantasy book, there’s the Magical Hidden Valley with the Mystical Ring Of Protection that means the forces of the Dark Lord can never reach them. Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. "
Oh! You mean like New Hampshire!
Off topic, I know, but
"The woke have MLK’s birthday."
MLK was a liberal - the exact opposite of woke. He opposed the woke of his time (ie denouncing the Nation of Islam in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, and making speeches against riots), and his program was in favor of racial reconciliation rather than conflict. In general, I don't think the woke should have any of the other days - not Juneteenth, not Susan B. Anthony day, nor any other liberal holiday.
(end rant)
I used to believe this, but MLK did expressly state that differing rates of white vs. black achievement, even in the absence of explicit discrimination, must be taken as de facto evidence of racism. If Ibram X Kendi is woke, so was MLK.
Did he really state that, including the case where there is no explicit discrimination? I find it hard to believe, especially since most of his work was about fighting explicit discrimination.
Also, even if he did make such a statement, he did not go nearly as far as Kendi (ie, he did not advocate for an all-powerful "Department of Anti-Racism"), and he was still against everything else woke.
> lots of dictatorial countries regulate what kinds of art are permissible in a way even they don’t try to regulate love
Uh, what? Gay marriage is illegal in 160 countries. Incest is illegal in basically all of them. In many countries you can be executed just for having gay sex.
Well, only in six countries...Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Mauritania, Iran, Nigeria (in some of the Northern provinces that use Sharia law) and Yemen.
In most of the post you seem to talk about restrictions on liberty, but in the first footnote you also mention other interventions, such as subsidies. The big one is marriage. We do have that database. You can just hold a wedding and demand that your social circle treat you as married, but virtually everyone allows the state to define marriage. It has always seemed weird to me that there was a campaign for the state to allow gay marriage, rather than for the state to recognize something that precedes the state.
Kontextmaschine on other interventions:
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/163815392913/so-the-government-issued-gfs-thing-going-around
Sure I won’t be the first to point out that mlk’s birthday is the opposite of woke. Juneteenth is more like it.
Excuse me, but I feel like you have the timeline on love and its regulation completely backwards.
You paint the picture that most everything used to be free and unregulated until the arrival of the modern state introduced all these legal regulations and ruined it all. I think this is false and ahistorical on almost every dimension but maybe most obviously when it comes to romantic love. As you know – but decided to omit – many forms of love used to be strongly regulated just a couple decades ago. In the not-so-distant past even the most classically-liberal states spent centuries outlawing for example homosexual love, persecuting and imprisoning lovers for the crime of infringing on the regulations on love. The same is true for interracial love. In the US the criminalization of interracial love was only slowly lifted after WWII.
And those are just some of the most blatant examples of the “written” law. There are also social conventions on love that used to be so strong that in their effects they were almost as binding as legal conventions. For example love between different religions or denominations. As a good catholic your spouse was supposed to be catholic – and vice-versa as a good protestant – otherwise your family might have disinherited and your community expelled you. Similarly regarding social class.
In general, romantic love historically never used to be particularly important when it comes to forming social relationships. Institutions like marriage used to be purely economic affairs. As far as I know, romantic love used to be a luxury afforded only to aristocracy, and for the masses, even in the West, romantic love only became a relevant qualification for relationships after WWII – i.e. when the masses became economically secure enough to afford such luxuries themselves.
So no, romantic love did not use to be this unregulated utopia that everyone freely engaged in. For most people for most of the time romantic love used to be almost irrelevant. And whenever it was relevant, it was heavily regulated, regarding heterosexuality, race, denomination and class. So historically, love used to be unfree and highly regulated, and ironically only the advance of the modern state liberated love throughout the 20th century.
This may seem contradictory but I don’t think it is; it can be explained sociologically. Premodern societies ran on all kinds of interpersonal differentiations (social classes, trades, religions etc.). Modern societies with their modern states, however, run on “functional” differentiations, which – among other things – heavily rely on the distinction between the private and the public. Romantic love is therefore considered private and thus non-public and thus shouldn’t be concerned by the functions of the state. So empirically one might say: the more modern the state, the freer the love. (And by the way, it takes quite a strong state to stop a community from lynching its members for impeding on their "communal regulations" on love.)
I know your post wasn’t meant as a history class, but rather itself as a romantic reflection on the concept of romantic love. But still, I feel like your post, in order to work, presupposes a very ahistorical version of history.
This is a very accurate and interesting comment that deserves some attention.
The issuance of marriage licenses, and regulations involving divorce and child support are designed to make the whole thing safer and fairer: you can't get left in the lurch with a child; you're committing yourself in marriage in a way that is complicated to get out of. Adultery laws are still on the books.
It's true that we don't assign a woman to every man, or vice versa, out of an effort to make things fair; but laws against polygamy go a long way toward bringing about fairness. Beyond a certain point, there isn't much that the state can do, as there is no way to make sure that everyone ends up with, say, one of the 50% most desirable partners. The institution that traditionally did the regulating was the family, but their job was to insure the most desirable partners for their own offspring, not to insure society-wide optimization.
I also don't think it's true that everything else has gotten less free as love has gotten more free. We used to have a military draft, and Harry Truman threatened to draft striking workers into the army. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/125/special-message-congress-urging-legislation-industrial-peace. That would be way off the Overton Window now, similar to the love regulations Scott suggested.
Driving by 80-year-olds is dangerous, but we mostly leave it to the family level to decide when the patriarch needs to give up the keys. Guns are legal, although regulated.
I'm pretty sure that waiting periods for marriages are the global standard, and the US is an outlier in allowing you to marry someone on a whim during a drunken Vegas night.
At least *my* gut instinct doesn't tell me that these waiting times are encroaching on our humanity.
If you'd talked about waiting times to date, that would be a different story
It occurs to me that happiness/mental health, physical beauty, and non-monetary accomplishment are other areas where we largely leave people to their own devices. On reflection, would we say that anything not mediated by money is left largely unregulated and un-redistributed? It seems like all the advocacy for regulation on the left has focused on the economy, and thus we haven't had a need for fairness on other fronts drummed into us for the last several hundred years.
Cosmetic surgery is just as closely regulated an industry as any other medical profession. Certain cosmetic procedures are banned outright.
That's true. I consider that to be about medicine rather than about looks.
This is probably not a new suggestion at all, but I've never seen it, so...
Wouldn't it be possible to combine dating docs and matchmakers (like in the orthodox Jewish system described in the describable dating preferences post)? Like, if a community has a dating doc directory, then there would also be one or more people in the community who read all the dating docs and suggest people to each other.
(I think this might work best if there's also a strong social norm that if you've been suggested a match, you should at least go on one date.)
FWIW I wish this were a thing
Let's say we did implement those laws in the US. Will it increase the number of happy relationships, lower divorce rates, increase TFR?
Great post, thank you!
This is my first time commenting on substack, I hope this level of "necroposting" is fine.
Love is not a disaster, it just has a high amplitude. Regulating things because of low lows is how you destroy the high highs in life.
To be honest, I think love is on the way out as well, due to a hedonic approach to existence, people increasingly evaluate things by the extent which they make them feel good. Did this kind of thinking not infect you a little when you started pointing out the negatives of love?
Recently I hear that dating apps feel like "job interviews", and that people want relationships "without bullshit", and that one should "run away" at the sign of any red flags. Now hear me out, what if this change is caused by indifference? Sex is no longer sacred, and dating is not emotional connection but rather a trade. This would explain the support for sexual freedom and the casual reactions to cheating and polyamory. It seems like we're lacking emotional depth, as if people are becoming more simple in a way that I can only describe as apathetic or nihilistic.
Love is great because it's real, it makes myself feel alive, at least. I'm afraid that superstimuli are beginning to exhaust not only sexual drives but the concept of love as well (and the difference between the two is no longer recognized by many?). We like reactivity (think "reaction videos" on Youtube, or trolls in online comments getting an reaction out of people), but if we get our reactions from shock humor, brutal videos, oversexualized animations, ASMR, and 3D dating games, then I'm afraid everything most things in life might lose their emotional impact (and that those who don't consume these things will be put off by the vulgarity of those who require strong stimuli)
"Three month waiting period for marriage."
Seems like there is not such a long delay but there are still some places having adopted the idea in principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banns_of_marriage
the difference between driving and love in your framing is the externalities
and even love can have externalities, that's why for example:
- you can't have sex in public
- parenthood/education is subsidized
there are even social norms codified as laws like what contracts for gamete donation or asset allocation between parents is legally enforceable even if all parties agreed to it (which my libertarian intuitions say that it seems bad)
I'm leaning towards libertarianism a lot (except post-AGI), but I think a negative externality is an aggression (and mayyybe freeriding is stealing or something???)
Es ist interessant, dass der Autor vorschlägt, dass der Valentinstag die Feier für Libertäre sein könnte. Er argumentiert, dass die Art und Weise, wie Menschen über Liebe denken, das letzte Überbleibsel dessen ist, wie Libertäre über alles denken. Liebe funktioniert nach dem Prinzip der Nichtaggression, wobei die einzige Regel ist, dass man sie nicht mit Gewalt ergreifen darf. Der Autor diskutiert auch die Ungerechtigkeit und Unsicherheit der Liebe und schlägt vor, dass gewisse Regulierungen, ähnlich wie beim Führerschein, in Betracht gezogen werden könnten. Übrigens wollte ich eine Seite zur Bewertung von Online-Glücksspielen empfehlen: https://maichn.com/bonus/
Eva Illouz in "Why Love Hurts: a Sociological Explanation" makes an interesting case for how rituals around getting together were socially regulated and how the loosening of those traditions (or the fall of mesalliance as a concept), while liberating, opened the way for experiencing heartbreak as all the more painful.
Scott Alexander's "Love And Liberty" makes a compelling case for why love should be considered a bastion of libertarian values, untouched by the regulatory and redistributive impulses that govern other aspects of our lives. Through humorous yet thought-provoking hypothetical regulations on love, Alexander illustrates the absurdity of applying the same principles we accept in other domains to our romantic lives, thereby underscoring the unique position love occupies in human society. By the way, I wanted to recommend a site for you to play Gates of Olympus: https://gatesofolympus.app/.
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Als jemand, der Freiheit und Liebe schätzt, finde ich die Verbindung zwischen diesen beiden Konzepten sehr bedeutungsvoll. Liebe und Freiheit ergänzen sich gegenseitig und schaffen Raum für persönliches Wachstum, Selbstentfaltung und gegenseitigen https://spielautomatenechtgeld.de Respekt. Die Freiheit, sich selbst zu sein und Liebe zu erfahren, sind grundlegende Bedürfnisse jedes Menschen und bilden die Grundlage für eine erfüllte und authentische Lebensweise.
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May Day is not a "communist holiday" LOL. It originated in none other than the United States of America, from which it spread to the labor movements of other countries before it was abolished in the US at the zenith of the robber barons. Our current Labor Day in early September is a revival of the May Day spirit.