Cultural Darwinism and The Dominance of Conservatism in the Natural Order

But without government who would regulate morality? Surely libertarianism just allows for the unchecked spread of degeneracy? How can you call yourself a traditionalist if you believe in the concept of anarcho-capitalism?

These questions or variations of them are often peddled by statist traditionalists who view libertarianism as a social position rather than the theory of law that it is. This has much to do with the influence of the thick libertarians and their socially leftist libertinism and culturally egalitarian values. They view as anti-libertarian anybody who has differing opinions to them on issues of drug use, homosexuality, hedonism, prostitution and so on. The US Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson even went to the extent of advocating for forcing Christian bakers to bake gay wedding cakes. Such a stance is in fact inherently un-libertarian and attacks one of the core concepts of libertarian political theory: freedom of association. Indeed it is this idea of freedom of association, which we will use to answer the questions posed at the start.

However, first I would like to give a brief history of libertarianism in order to help understand what libertarianism actually is. It is not a simple task to pinpoint the start of the libertarian ideology so to speak since this depends on what one considers as the start and what one considers as libertarianism. The ‘classical liberals' had been promoting the ideology of liberty since before the term libertarian was popularised (and even coined) and the very idea of liberty itself is ancient. The word libertarian was first used in the context of metaphysics (to describe the opposite of determinism) but it later came to also mean a defender of liberty in the political sense. While the term was occasionally used in the 18th and the 19th centuries, and a French equivalent (libertaire) was used by those who would nowadays be known as left-libertarians, the term really began to be popularised in the 20th Century and this time by those nowadays referred to as right-libertarians. These libertarians had previously been known as liberals but the term had evolved into what is now called ‘social liberalism' and described an ideology that extended the role of the government to state welfare and taking care of the poor. This evolved even further into modern ‘liberalism' which has little to no regard for the concept of limited government. Therefore the classical liberals began to change their name to distinguish themselves from their adversaries. In the latter half of the 20th century, one of these American libertarians coined the term ‘anarcho-capitalism.' His name was Murray Rothbard and his ideology went one step further than those of his predecessors, advocating not just a night-watchman state but the abolition of the state (that is as Rothbard defined the state).

The state in Rothbard's view was a coercive monopoly, which relied on the initiation of force and the transgression of property rights. It was the concept of private property rights or, as Rothbard and others called it, the non-aggression principle that was the root and womb of the idea of liberty in the eyes of these libertarians. The idea is that one should not transgress another's private property rights and one should not have their private property rights transgressed. This is what libertarianism is. Libertarianism is not socially left-wing and it is not libertinism. Rothbardian libertarianism is not a lifestyle or a theory on how to live one's life. Rather it is a theory of law grounded in private property rights and opposition to the initiation of force. In this sense, libertarianism is ‘thin' and so we refer to it as ‘thin libertarianism' to contrast with the ‘thick libertarianism' of many of those in the US Libertarian Party and elsewhere. These cosmopolitan beltway libertarians have infected the libertarian movement with their socially left-wing dogma. They have insisted on making libertarianism be about gay marriage, weed and sexual decadence. As Lew Rockwell puts it "pornographic photography, 'free'-thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architecture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda – no matter how much individual libertarians may revel in them."1 Instead, what Rothbard called anarcho-capitalism was a theory of law and simply that. Any cultural opinion is beyond this theory of law. In a libertarian society, property owners may be pro-homosexuality or they may be anti-homosexuality. They may be pro-cocaine or they may be anti-cocaine. They may make their covenant societies racially homogenous or racially diverse. They may be Catholic or Muslim, Hindu or Jewish. They may be socially conservative or they may be socially left-wing. Indeed, in this article, I will make the case that communities that are conservative will thrive while those that allow decadence and immorality will collapse. This is not by virtue of libertarianism being conservative itself (as we said it is merely a theory of law) but rather it is the dominance of conservative values as a consequence of the workings of the natural order.

Is Rothbard's idea of anarcho-capitalism accurately called anarchism? Personally, I would actually say no. The word ‘anarchism' comes from the Classical Greek ‘ἀναρχος' or ‘anarchos' meaning ‘no ruler.' However, the idea Rothbard called ‘anarcho-capitalism' does not mean the existence of no rulers. Rather it means that each property-owner is the ruler of their own property. It means that rulers should be rulers by way of a mutually agreed contract based on private property rights and not by the initiation of force based on the transgression of private property rights. Hence, I do not think that the term ‘anarcho-capitalism' is actually accurate and instead prefer using the term ‘natural order' and so from now on, I will use this term rather than anarcho-capitalism.

Rothbard's intellectual successor, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is arguably even more brilliant. His contributions to libertarian political theory are impressive and important. In his book Democracy: The God That Failed, he made the case that democracy is, in fact, worse than monarchy and in many ways is a soft form of communism. The book is also known for its account of what Hoppe calls ‘covenant communities.' These are very simply communities established by property owners on their own private property. It is evident that the most economically successful covenant communities will pursue the most efficient economic policies and likewise, the most culturally successful covenant communities will pursue the most beneficial social policies. Also, successful covenant communities will remove threats to their communities. Property owners who undertake these actions are not hindering anybody's liberty since it is their own property. Indeed they are simply using their freedom of association. Freedom of association is one of the most important consequences of private property rights since it allows for the formation of organic and natural societies with rules that are not arbitrarily thought up and enforced by a coercive socialist central planner but by the very individuals who rightfully own the property they are applying their rules to. In contrast to the rulers that the socialist system of statism puts in place, the rulers in the natural order have both the moral right to enforce their rules and a vested interest in making the most efficient and beneficial rules. They also have a vested interest in making sure advocates of subversive behaviour are physically removed. In the words of Hoppe: "There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They–the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centred lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism–will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."2

Libertarianism has often been criticised as being socially Darwinist. Indeed, it was the classical liberal Herbert Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest" in his Principles of Biology.3 A discussion of Social Darwinism on an individual level (and the claim that libertarianism results in it) is beyond the focus of this article. What I would like to discuss instead is what I will term ‘Cultural Darwinism' or survival of the fittest in terms of culture. The idea is that, as I alluded to earlier, property owners can choose whatever cultural rules they wish and the covenant societies with the most beneficial cultural rules will be the most successful and survive, while those with the worst cultural rules will collapse. There will then be, so to speak, a cultural marketplace. Varying degrees of traditionalism and modernism may be attempted in different communities and among communities as a whole, there will be a natural tendency to the most beneficial cultural rules. So far throughout this article, I have focused on libertarianism (this being the theory of law which morally validates the natural order) but now it is necessary to briefly analyse conservatism (this being, as I shall argue, a cultural consequence of the natural order).

Conservatism comes from the verb ‘conserve' and so is about conserving something. When asked the question "What is a conservative?" by Australian Columnist Andrew Bolt on the 11th May 2014, the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton replied that they are people "who are aware of the fact that they've inherited something good…and they want to hold onto it."4 To be a conservative is to realise that traditional morality is important since, in the eyes of conservatives, morality is objective and never changes. Subjective values of society may deviate from objective morality but will never replace its objectivity. For most conservatives, this morality comes from God and God never changes. Scruton also says that conservatism is "a recognition that it's much easier to destroy things than to create them." This is a key point about conservatism. Conservatism is not opposed to progress per se but recognises that over history an order and sets of traditions have developed (standards of beauty, social norms, methods of organisation, shared languages, cultures and heritages) and that these time-tested traditions and values formed the bedrock of great civilisations and that these civilisations (formed on the pillars of these traditions) are much easier to destroy than to create. The modern doctrine of progressivism is not about improvements to society and improvements to society are not what conservatism aims to prevent. Rather, the modern day cult of post-modernism, Cultural Marxism, critical theory, social justice and moral relativism seeks to undermine the very fabric of civilisation. It seeks to replace traditional objective morality with nihilistic relativism and degeneracy. It seeks to replace traditional standards of beauty with the modern rubbish that passes today as art and fashion. It seeks to replace Beethoven and Tchaikovsky with violent and nihilistic gangster culture, electronic pulses, pop pollution and a language of modernist patois. It seeks to remove national pride and any concept of race or brotherhood among fellow countrymen since in the eyes of these people these constitute as hatred and bigotry. It seeks to destroy the system of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman and the unit of the nuclear family and replace such wholesome behaviour with sexual libertinism, hedonism and immorality. Conservatism is opposed to the tyranny of this destructive system. To be a conservative is to revere honour, morality, tradition, beauty, ancestry, heritage and everything good and respectable about civilisation.

The social ideology that is called ‘progressivism' in fact destroys cultures while conservatism preserves cultures by its very definition. It is then the cultural system of conservatism that will dominate the natural order since those covenant communities which accept and promote conservatism will thrive and survive and those that allow immorality, decadence, nihilism and destructive beliefs will undermine themselves and collapse. This is Cultural Darwinism at work. Many right-wingers like to say that Cultural Marxist subversion will be the downfall of society and I quite agree. Due to the forced integrative nature of statism, cultures cannot so easily segregate themselves as they would do in the natural order and so, because of statism, Cultural Marxism has been allowed to become a burden to society as a whole. Statism does not allow for Cultural Darwinism but instead, it allows for cultural leaching, by which I mean the leeching of those who perpetuate left-wing cultural values on civilisation (which conservative cultural values seek to protect and conserve).

Another reason statism does not allow for Cultural Darwinism is the one-size-fits-all nature of statist policies. There is less diversity in rules as there would be in the natural order and instead, states propose rules that are much more arbitrary and are not necessarily the ones which would triumph and out-compete others in the natural order. It is much like economics. In the case of monopolies, since there is less competition in the marketplace, monopolies can get away with a lower standard of goods or higher prices or lower wages for employees. However, in a competitive market, competitors can propose new ideas, lower their prices, have higher standards of goods and raise the wages of their employees. Since consumers and employees now have a lot more options, they can choose the best ones and companies will have more of a tendency to satisfy their demands. In short, a competitive market produces the most beneficial outcomes for consumers and employees while monopolies can get away with producing outcomes that are not as beneficial. Many libertarians are aware of the economic calculation problem proposed by Ludwig Von Mises. Socialist states' pricing systems are necessarily deficient. Central planners cannot allocate available resources efficiently since if all the means of production were publically owned, no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods.5 It is evident that the economic decisions of the state are inferior to those produced by the market mechanism. This is why attempts at, for example, price fixing are always a disaster- because the market works better than the state. The market responds to supply and demand while the democratic state responds either to the arbitrary whim of the majority or most often the arbitrary whim of those who the majority put in power. In a similar way, the social rules of the state are bound to be inferior to those produced by the process of Cultural Darwinism. In the natural order, only the ‘fittest' social rules will prevail- those being, as I have demonstrated, conservative ones.

Luckily in reaction to the hostile leftist takeover of mainstream libertarianism, there is now a promising rise of a younger generation of socially conservative libertarians who uphold the right-wing libertarianism of Rothbard and his successors Rockwell and Hoppe. Among these libertarians are Keir Martland, Rik Storey, Christopher Chase Rachels, myself and many others who I have come across. This resurrection of paleolibertarianism is in part a reaction to the Cultural Marxism of the left and in part a realisation of the importance of traditional values. The conservatism of the paleolibertarian stems from a recognition of the fundamental importance of one's history, heritage, nation and people and of Christianity, family values and morality. Such recognition is not at odds with libertarianism and libertarianism is not at odds with such recognition. As I have demonstrated, a consequence of the culturally Darwinist nature of the natural order is the dominance of conservatism in it and, while states today across the world continue to undermine traditional values and morality, the natural order can preserve them. This is something that the so-called ‘cosmotarians' or ‘beltway libertarians' or ‘Liberallala-Libertarians' (a term coined by Andre Lichtschlag) fail to see. Indeed the cosmotarians, through their Cultural Marxist lenses, fail to understand a lot of things not least the fundamental importance of morality and tradition. Therefore I say down with the cosmotarians and up with the moralitarians!

1. Lew Rockwell, "The Case for Paleo-libertarianism." Liberty (libertarian magazine)(January 1990): 34–38.

2. Democracy The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Transaction Publishers, Rutgers, N.J., 2001, p. 218.

3. Principles of Biology, by Herbert Spencer, 1864, vol. 1, p. 444. He wrote: "This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection', or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.""

4. https://youtu.be/Qa8SzKDyWMk

5. Ludwig Von Mises, Economic calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, 1990