These are some comments I posted on Facebook in November 2016. I had previously talked about these ideas in a podcast and I have since written and talked extensively about them, but this was my first attempt at summarizing them in writing. The original links are broken, so I'm republishing the texts here for future reference, including some comments by others to whom I was replying.
PB: Why is the idea that people should be left free to lead their lives as they see fit, as long as they don’t harm others, so provocative?
Because humans are social animals, descended from chimpanzee-like apes. For such animals the community they live in is everything, hierarchy is paramount and obedience to alpha individuals is not only instinctual but an actual biological need, without which individuals become confused and unhappy. For a chimpanzee, personal territory or property means very little. Far more important is determining one’s place in the hierarchy and being receptive to those above oneself in the pecking order. The other side of this coin is the importance of making sure that everyone else respects the primacy of the group and the hierarchy, in particular putting those with lower rank in their places. Chimpanzees become nervous, agitated and aggressive when someone acts outside these bounds.
Note that this is not the case with all apes. Orangutans are mostly solitary and highly territorial. For them, hierarchy is non-existent or peripheral while territory is central. The most important thing for an orangutan is to delimit and defend a piece of the forest and males even undergo an extensive physiological and hormonal transformation if/when they achieve this (about half of them do and this is why some but not all orangutans have flanges protruding from their faces, they grow out as part of a second puberty of sorts once they manage to defend a piece a territory for an extended time). Orangutans meet to mate but then split up with females rearing children and males going off to find new mates to impregnate using one of two mating strategies. Flanged males attract females to mate with by defending territory (“call-and-wait”) while non-flanged males seek out females and force mating (“sneak-and-rape”).
Humans seem to have the capacity for both sociocentric and territorial behavior. More specifically most people seem to be highly sociocentric while a small minority is also somewhat territorial. So here is the answer to your question: To most people, living as they see fit to a large extent involves controlling others through participating in hierarchical behavior and aggression. For this reason, to say that people are allowed to do anything they want except intervening in the business of others is a bit like saying they can do whatever they want except eating and having babies. It makes perfect sense to an orangutan but no sense at all to a chimpanzee. In other words, the reason that people want to control others is not only rent-seeking, although that is of course a big factor. Another important reason is that controlling others by participating in flock behavior is an instinct and a biological need.
I think this is somewhat parallel to your own pet peeve that poverty, not wealth, is the default, so we should not look for the causes of poverty but rather for the causes of wealth. Similarly, social and hierarchical behavior is the default for chimp-like apes like humans. The interesting question in my mind is rather why a few humans seem drawn to a solitary-territorial behavioral pattern. My best guess is that this is simply a continuum of possibilities, like many other characteristics among all kinds of animals. Perhaps there is also some actual chimpanzees with orangutan-like behaviors – perhaps alpha individuals can be described this way or perhaps just odd ones who are eventually eliminated from groups when they do not behave like proper chimps. Human history indicates that those who are not inclined to conform to groups and hierarchies usually become highly unpopular, are often persecuted etc.
So the problem that libertarianism tries to solve might be a problem of the libertarians themselves and their peculiar personalities. Perhaps libertarians are orangutans in a chimpanzee world. To me this actually seems like the most plausible basic explanation and from this perspective the reasonable solution can hardly be to force chimpanzees to live like orangutans – which demanding they leave others alone would amount to – but rather for those of us who are more orangutan-like to go off in the forest, stake out territories of our own and live as we please with others who have a similar disposition. In other words I am an 100% exit, 0% voice type of guy when it comes to politics and strategy, since I do not believe that most people are biologically suited to a libertarian way of life. The solution is to have sociocentric (democratic/communist) societies on some parts of the planet and territorial (libertarian/capitalistic) societies on other parts of the planet. Since sociocentrics are far more numerous than territorials, the only way for the two groups to live side by side while upholding respect for territory/property would probably be if territorials took charge and implemented a rather authoritarian type of rule which the sociocentrics were not able to resist, e.g. defeating all attempts to implement majority rule with overwhelming military force.
DB: That was the most interesting thing I have read for quite some time! This could be empirically investigated. How are the social/territorial traits distributed in and between sexes, races, cultures? How heritable are they? Is this a stable personality trait or does it change during life
Another important question is how Western civilization came to have somewhat territorial leaning institutions and how they survived for hundreds of years. This knowledge could be used to nudge the world in the happy and prosperous direction you envision.
Territorial societies, being much more economically prosperous, can defend themselves from military aggression from sociocentric societies. The hard part is to keep the territorial societies territorial and, if that is successful, for the territorials to refrain from too badly colonizing the sociocentrics. I guess we need free flow of people between the two types of society to allow everyone to go where they fit in and thus prevent social pressures from building up in either of them.
How the West became relatively territorial is a very interesting and important question but I am afraid that I do not have a solid theory about this. One could point to e.g. classical liberalism but while correct in itself, this would perhaps be too superficial since we then need to explain why such an ideology gained influence here and nowhere else.
As one possible starting point I would point to Christianity being a rather unusual religion, in many ways turning away from sociocentric tribalism and toward individualism and territoriality. At the very least I think Christianity must be said to be much more compatible with territorial morality than most other religions and certainly the decline of Christianity has come hand in hand with the reemergence of sociocentric morality.
Religion in general can be viewed as a check on or countermeasure against sociocentrism since it represents something absolute and thus independent of local group dynamics. Once religion became marginalized, there was – as it was from the beginning – no point of reference for morality beyond group loyalty. With secularism people went back to worshiping the collective, although in modern forms such as the cult of Humanity rather than traditional tribal allegiances. We are now admonished to see the whole of the human species as one enormous tribe and to a large extent the psychological mechanisms behind this are probably the same as in a band of hunter-gatherers.
I would also guess that Europe being split into hundreds of different states fostered a consciousness of territoriality and competition and the same can perhaps be said for feudalism in general. Later on the industrial revolution probably played an important role with entrepreneurs taking center stage and for a couple of hundred years the general trend was to allow exceptional individuals to build companies which can be seen as a new and very powerful form of territory. Of course, that was a long time ago. Beginning in 1789 at the latest, the trend has been the opposite and from 1914 onwards the human species seemingly went all-in on eliminating all remaining traces of territorialism, except a small band of orang… libertarians but we are obviously a highly marginalized group despite being able to make a very strong intellectual case for our position.
Regarding your last comment, about free flow of people, I would not consider this realistic. Relocating to a different place or becoming a member of a new group which conforms with your personal preferences is another thing that seems natural to some, myself included, but deeply unnatural and unpleasant to most. In particular, I do not think sociocentrics can be expected to move. Thus my focus on the territorials and getting them to take matters in their own hands, depend as little as possible on the non-likeminded and put as much distance between themselves and sociocentrics as possible. Colonizing another planet sounds a lot more reassuring than having our own country on the same continent as democratic or socialist states.
However, a related problem is that even if territoriality is hereditary to some extent, it is such a rare phenomenon in its purer forms that most children of territorials would probably be largely sociocentric. You can compare this to a community of people with very high IQs – if you gather the smartest people to start such a group it might be smooth sailing in the first generation but their children, although smarter than average, would not be nearly as smart as their parents. A person with IQ 150 and a person with IQ 160 can not be expected to have a child with IQ 155, but rather perhaps 120 or 130. Much higher than average but not even close to their parents. I would suspect that the same is true for territoriality, but on the other hand there is some historical evidence that e.g. aristocratic and royal families have been able to keep a territorial outlook going for many generations.
DB: Christianity did indeed make a radical break from the prevailing tribalism but, it seems to me, towards universalism/globalism/humanism rather than individualism. Both its scriptures and most of its incarnations emphasized obedience to authority and not upsetting the social order. Protestantism is more individualistic but that is hardly a cause of Western individualism but more likely an effect of it.
I take you point on sociocentrics being reluctant to move. How then to keep distance from them?
The rareness and insufficient heredity of territoriality is discouraging. On the other hand, we do have an existence proof a somewhat territorial society that really did make great things happen. With that to build upon, with greater knowledge and resources we could hope to do even better the second time around.
Regarding the question of authority, it is important to recongize that territoriality also depends on authority and hierarchy. The difference is that these are derived from property rights, i.e. rather than authority being based on being a superior aggressor like in a community of apes or a democratic society, it is based on lawful acquisition of property. This is central to the libertarian stance and the examples are numerous. The normal type of capitalistic businesses are neither democratic or anarchic but rather strict dictatorships, both in legal terms regarding ownership and in more practical terms regarding how a CEO runs a company, i.e. with far more wide-ranging powers than e.g. a prime minster of a country. Another example is microstates run on market-like premises, like Singapore or Liechtenstein. Especially Singapore is illuminating as an example since it is in many ways a model libertarian entity in relation to the rest of the world, but internally there are numerous harsh regulations. I think this would be the case with territorial societies generally, i.e. they would not be hippie-like free-for-alls but instead highly regulated – the difference being control emanating from a private ownership structure and exit being encouraged for dissenters.
Regarding the problem of distance, interference etc, I am a pessimist. I can not see a plausible way forward to create territorial societies in our lifetime, not even with scenarios like space colonization. What I aim for personally and advocate in various context is to implement personal decentralization and this can take many forms. The cost is naturally not zero but it is perfectly possible to “live outside the system” while sharing territory with current nation states. One might have to move to a different country, have multiple residencies, create intricate corporate structures etc to circumvent interference and surveillance, but in my view it is the best we can aim for at the moment and for those who have the stomach for it, it is a lot better than living on the standard terms. So I would suggest that those who are interested in truly living free rather than just talking about freedom in the abstract dispose of all ambitions to affect political change, create new countries etc and instead build small enclaves which co-exist as harmoniously as possible with local communities but have as little as possible to do with local governments.