Starlets, mental illness, and autonomy

Cathy Reisenwitz at Sex and the State has a post on the call for a conservatorship for Amanda Bynes (who appears to be the latest controversial starlet). Conservatorship is normally used to take control from patients suffering from severe dementia or Alzheimer's, but is better known for giving control of Britney Spears' money and life to her father.

I'm not sure this special treatment is being suggested for Bynes because she is a woman acting without propriety as Reisenwitz suggests, but if that's why it's being suggested, it's been made possible by growing acceptance of the ideas that people who act differently should be explained through diagnosis of mental illness, and that anyone who is mentally ill is unfit to make their own decisions.

Thomas Szasz was a controversial figure because of his belief that all mental illness is manufactured. That's too strong an assertion,* but cases like Bynes' make it more understandable. This young woman may benefit from counseling if she's serious about changing her life. She may find that she prefers to be on some sort of medication. But these are choices she should make - there is no evidence that she needs to have her decision-making ability taken away on what may become a long-term basis. If she's breaking the law then punish her, but it should end there. It's unfortunate that Szasz pushed his assertions about mental illness as far as he did, because his arguments for patient autonomy should be taken very seriously.

Those concerned with individual liberty in particular would do well to call forward Szasz's main concern - that unusual or inconvenient behaviour diagnosed as mental illness (justly or not) is used to strip people of autonomy, dignity, and responsibility. It's a mistake to treat someone acting irresponsibly as an invalid - a mistake rooted in unwillingness to accept decisions that we don't agree with.

This is dangerous to autonomy. It trivializes the plight of those who are truly debilitated by mental illness. It may be becoming dangerous to women's rights. It deserves our attention and discussion.


---
*Before this devolves into a fight about me denying the existence of mental illness, I want to make it clear that I do believe that mental illness exists, but that we would do better starting with the assumption that patients can help themselves with assistance through highly personalized treatment than we do with the blanket assumption attached to many diagnoses of an inability to improve or manage one's life at all or without mandatory prescription of (often debilitating) medication as first-round, permanent treatment.

These are assertions I make based on close personal relationships with people struggling through the mental health system and not as a trained psychological or psychiatric professional. 

The unknowable future and Girls

Like the author of One Good Thing, whose blog post inspired this one, I like Girls. For those not familiar with the show, it is:

created, written, and directed by New Yorks’s current wunderkind, Lena Dunham [...] Touted on release as the new Sex and the City, Girls observes the lives of four tightly-involved 20-something-year-old women carving out their existences post-college in Brooklyn, New York. I should point out that any similarities drawn between SATC and Girls were obviously made by reviewers who had either not seen the former or the latter show, because they are nothing alike whatsoever. Both shows include four female friends in New York City. Same same different. The end.

One of the most interesting things about Girls is that it demonstrates the polarizing nature of the shift into the world the show's characters are fumbling through, learning to live in. When I say that I love Girls I've received exasperated looks accompanied by demands for an explanation of my tastes and I've received expressions of affinity so enthusiastic they seem cathartic.

A lot of the show's appeal lies in the viewer's ability to relate viscerally to its characters, but the concerns it raises are more broadly based. It's aimed at a generation for whom the world has changed so dramatically that we can't look to our parents to see what to do next. This has made our parents (and a lot of us) apprehensive about the future: 

As Dunham explains in Yen magazine (Issue 61): ‘We are the first generation that has been totally raised on the internet and social media, IM-ing and Twitter and communication like that — trying to learn email manners, that kind of communication, plus the torture of waiting for a text message, and I think that also my generation all graduated from college — or not — during a recession, so, as my dad once said, which made me sad but felt true, “This is the first time in America that you can see that my kids are not going to do as well as I did.”‘

Unlike Dunham, I don't think we're going to be worse off than our parents, but we will have to build and discover a future that we don't totally understand yet. It's new and it's different and it's scary to people who grew up believing (and raising us to believe) that you go to school, you graduate from university, you get a job (with a pension!) and then you're basically set. Many of us are so nostalgic for the knowable past that we ignore its flaws, hoping for a future we feel we can foresee. And it's no wonder when we're so often told that the absence of the opportunities of the past is the same as the absence of opportunity.

There are plenty of opportunities, but they are new, less planned and many of them are still unknown. To conclude that because our generation faces such a rapidly changing future we will be worse off than our parents requires forgetting to see that the processes and outcomes of human interaction are astonishing. There's destruction of old ways because room is being made for creation. Perhaps this is why second-wave libertarianism is such an overwhelmingly optimistic movement: we haven't forgotten to wonder at the potential of human interaction. In the uncertainty around us we see not danger, but opportunity. In certainty we see stagnation.

We cannot look to previous generations - and especially not to politicians, who are incentivised to enforce the status-quo - to make our futures all they can be. Our changing world is sometimes scary, but it's an amazing, amazing time to be alive. That's worth the rest of it.

No more second chances in immigration?

Sandra Sanchez has a touching post at Thoughts on Liberty about her parents' immigration from Nicaragua to the United States in 1983; a plea to not let the Boston Marathon bombing turn Americans against immigration because of the terrible acts of two young immigrants. She writes:

My mother and father were newly married because my father needed to flee Nicaragua. He was a soldier for the Sandinistas. After realizing that the ideals that the Sandinistas were preaching did not match reality, he wanted out. Fearing persecution due to his political opposition, he felt there was no way to live but to leave.

They came to the United States and were granted asylum. My parents were immigrants to this country and they’ve been here for 30 years. In those 30 years they moved to the Northern Virginia area, got jobs, ended up having three lovely children, built their own American dream, and never asked for government assistance. This story is not odd or rare, but simply ignored.

The final sentiment (emphasis mine) is beautifully put and more true than it ought to be. People notice the immigrants who reinforce their beliefs, whatever those may be, while immigrants who don't get filed in with "everyone else." A more complete picture of immigration could help Americans to make less emotionally charged decisions about policy.

But there's something more telling in their story: When her father became disillusioned with the Sandinistas, a brutal political movement in Nicaragua, he was able to leave them by coming to the United States to start again, and, as his story shows, he was successful in many ways.

It breaks my heart that I'm almost certain no such second chance exists today for people from the Middle East who have been caught up with Al-Qaeda or similar groups but want to start a new life in the West. Immigration policy is in danger of negative changes as a result of the Boston bombing in part because the idea of immigration as a second chance has been eroded by the American security state. It's not a new phenomena, but it's becoming more pronounced. One way to push back is to make sure that stories like the Sanchez family's are not ignored.

Boston

We are not less safe than we were yesterday, but it's been shown, again, that there are thousands and thousands of us ready and willing to help and to care for one another when we're needed.

Remember that and always be grateful for your friends and family and you won't give whoever has terrorized Boston today what they're looking for.

Update: Stories of kindness after the bombing from The Atlantic.

Reports of Marathon Runners that crossed finish line and continued to run to Mass General Hospital to give blood to victims #PrayforBoston
— NBC Sports Network (@NBCSN) April 15, 2013

Out of sight...

A chilling visual representation of the human cost of America's drone strikes.

Link grab bag

I'm swamped in paper writing, but here are some things I would blog about at length if I had time, but will not have time to blog about at length until they're not timely. That's a mouthful.

Matt Zwolinski has presented six reasons for libertarians to abandon the absolute application of the Non-Aggression Principle as the single fundamental tenant of libertarianism. My personal favourite is number five: the NAP is parasitic on a theory of property - I just don't think the NAP is capable of standing on its own. Once you accept that, it's time to start wondering what else matters.

The best response I've seen so far is from Isaac Morehouse, though I'm not sure I'm convinced - it merits more thought. Taken from a Facebook comment:

"Another entirely tenable position is that the NAP is a sound and true moral principle, but that determining what counts as a violation of it is, on the moral level, a subjective and nuanced thing, and on the social level - in terms of justice - also difficult to determine. Therefore, the process by which violations are defined, determined, and dealt with must be an open and evolving process (i.e. market-based, common-law, open to competition and evolution, etc.) , even though the belief that a violation is always wrong is maintained. It is always wrong to murder, but we need flexible institutions that help us to discover what is an is not murder in each particular case.

There is no need to abandon the NAP as a sound basic principle, or even as precisely the reason that we need flexible and nuanced institutions. NAP does not, on it's own, lead to black and white all or nothing across the board definitions of what constitutes aggression in every case."

Speaking of Isaac, he's posted an interview with his eight-year old son. Give it a read, it's delightful. 

Andrew Coyne presents a case for a minimum income over a minimum wage that captures most of the problems with legislating wages.

And here is a photo of the bassist and drummer of the Avett Brothers rocking a Bleeding Heart Libertarians guitar strap. And yes, that's what it is.

UPDATE: Gina Luttrell at Libertarian Republic a great blog on defining rape culture as something that shouldn't be scary to libertarians and defending slut walks that I also do not have time to write about. 

Markets can mean survival.

"Ohai, fellas!" - Elinor

This is Elinor Ostrom. She is my pet gecko, named (in case you don't know) for the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. She's a delightful and low-maintenance critter.

Elinor is a crested gecko - one of the most widely owned geckos in the world, but thought to be extinct in the wild until they were rediscovered in 1994. Their natural habitat has been reduced and changed by the introduction of a fire ant, and they're less likely to survive in the wild than they once were. But so long as they are legal to own as pets it is unlikely that the crested gecko will be in danger of extinction.

So when I read an article answering the (incredibly important) question, "Can I have a pet fox?" I had to shake my head at lines like these:

"When the internet sees a video of a red panda, the internet wants a red panda. Even though a red panda is endangered and a wild animal.*"

 "Even more insane is that Indiana provides no law preventing you from owning an endangered species."

This is the common attitude towards owning or otherwise commodifying endangered species. China floated the idea years ago of farming tigers for fur, traditional medicine and trophy hunting to move the supply away from isolated wild populations currently subject to poaching. The pushback was predictable and called for more of the same failing policy. More recently, South Africa has talked about legalizing the trade of ivory from white rhinos to try to bring it under control and save the species, again, to the protestations of preservationists.

There is one endangered species - perhaps the most symbolic one - which has successfully been commodified: Giant pandas.

Captive giant pandas do not live natural lives. They're outrageously expensive side-shows at zoos around the world. And everyone who has them (Sigh.) pays an enormous price for the privilege.

"By 1984, however, pandas were no longer given as gifts. Instead, the PRC began to offer pandas to other nations only on 10-year loans, under terms including a fee of up to US$1,000,000 per year and a provision that any cubs born during the loan are the property of the PRC"

Giant pandas are silly creatures that seem to be incapable of replacing themselves in the wild. But due to their role first as diplomatic tools and now as revenue sources (and also because they are fluffy), they are going to be around pretty much forever.

Nothing that looks like this will be allowed to go extinct.

This is based on a simple idea that most people understand when it's applied to policies they're more receptive toward: The best way to control trade in anything is not to ban it, but to bring it into the formal market and, if needed, regulate it. It seems we're too squeamish to do this with endangered species - even though the price they pay for our moral indignation may be extinction.

It's a damn shame.

The slow loris is a threatened species because of deforestation and habitat destruction. Their eyes are also an ingredient in Chinese medicine. Unfortunately, wildlife trade is seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution - and because it's trapped in the black market, that may be true. 

Tell me you couldn't sell millions of these in the West at almost any price.

--------

*The "wild animal" thing is a separate problem - domestication for pet animals is important, but not an insurmountable challenge.

Principles in a tote bag

"I think breaking from ideology to face reality and make decisions outside of any familiar framework is hugely difficult and risky and admirable."

This quote by my friend Meredith was in response to a question I asked after reading Matt Zwoklinski's post on whether the fact that there are exceptions for the rule "lying is wrong" in the real world could be transferable to to the rule "coercion is wrong": What would the implications be for libertarians?*

It got me thinking.

Breaking away from what seemed to be foregone conclusions of my beliefs is something I've been struggling through/playing with. When I was first considering whether a guaranteed minimum income might be "just," or at least OK, I would sort of punt the issue when it came up, suggesting that we deal first with problems that are obviously harmful and then argue about things that might be OK. But I think that discomfort with dismissing an idea outright is indicative of a certain level of comfort with that idea.

I bring up guaranteed minimum incomes as an example because when it is suggested that they are libertarian-compatible policy I see responses like “The author has forgotten her first principles. A guaranteed minimum income requires coercion!” That's a bit silly. We mustn't forget or discard the tenets of our philosophies to consider different conclusions. Far from it! I think you need to have a great deal of faith in your "first principles" to start testing them in earnest to see where they hold up.

It's not that I want to throw away my beliefs. It's just that I'd rather sling them over my shoulder than clutch them, white-knuckled, close to my heart. Even if it aches a bit sometimes, I want my hands free to play with other ideas. I don't think it would be such a bad thing if more of us gave that a shot.


*For the record, I think the implication is that there might be something other than coercion that we ought to weigh when determining what's OK, but that doesn't automatically lead to any particular conclusion.

Thoughtful debate...

Further to Sarah's post and my response, here is a great piece by Eric Dixon on his thoughts about libertarians and rape culture.

Rape, Autonomy, Respect, and Liberty

Sarah Skwire has a great post on rape culture over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians that has triggered the latest round of Internet libertarian backlash against the suggestion that we consider paying particular attention to rape and rape culture in the way that we call attention to things like drone strikes or drug war raids.

Libertarianism deals strictly with the role of government and does not prescribe which moral stands we ought to take individually.

In spite of this I'll join Sarah and argue that rape culture, though there is not a libertarian position, is an issue that ought to become a more common concern for libertarians (and anarchists, objectivists, classical liberals, etc.).

There is a reason that Adam Smith devoted a book to morality, and that Larry Reed speaks about the importance of character. Respect for one another's autonomy and dignity is crucial to the flourishing of a free society. Taken to the extreme, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

We can't be angels. That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for a freer society, but the further we drift from ideals like respect for one another the more government becomes not just necessary, but expansive. We make possible laws like those that allow people who "know better" to lock us in a cage for choosing to put a substance they disagree with into our body. If we want smaller government, we need to push for values like respect. We ought to strive for the good.

Rape culture gets called "anti-woman." The use of the term leads to accusations of being "anti-man." Rape culture, though, is neither. It is anti-victim. It is anti-autonomy. It is anti-dignity. It is a dark, ugly pattern. It is the recurrence of a failure to show mutual respect. That it is not only perpetuated by government does not mean libertarians shouldn't see that there's work to do building the respect for autonomy generally that's needed to maintain a free enough society to allow for autonomy in other ways we believe are important. 

"Rape culture" is, some have argued, too loaded a term - a claim also made about "feminism." (I'll suggest making a distinction: these words have been abused, but are not (yet) loaded.) But the labels are beside the point - libertarians cling to loaded words like "capitalism" and "selfishness" and tolerate abused words like "liberal," "discrimination," and "rights" all the time. We have the capacity to determine when they are misused. Tossing an idea because of its label is a mistake.

There are horrifying examples of  government and government funded institutions that protect rapists and cause more rape. These abuses of government power ought to be a concern for libertarians, who care about the consequences of broken, incompetent, and abusive government, as well as for anyone who cares about civil liberties and human dignity. This is an issue on which libertarians were not first movers and don't stand alone. That doesn't mean it's not important - it may even mean it's more important.

The issue of rape culture goes beyond the scope of government and as such it is not, strictly speaking, a libertarian issue. But libertarians sure ought to care about its causes. Rape culture doesn't have to replace our other issues, it's just a new one. To echo Sarah, each libertarian need not make this their issue, but it's time to accept it as a valid concern for libertarians. Why has the response seemed so much like reflexive pushback against something that's grounded in respect for the autonomy and dignity of the individual?

Sarah's asked it before. I'll ask now: Why aren't we angrier?

Politics and Civility

Further to my earlier post, as Leonard Read wrote in his beautiful book, Anything That's Peaceful (pages 69-70):

... observe two persons, with somewhat
different views, rationally discussing some subject of common
interest. Each offers the other his most intelligent
ideas, thus encouraging friendship and mutual confidence.
This setting, plus the privacy of the occasion, combine to
elicit from each the best that he has to offer. The exchange
of intellectual energies is mutually beneficial, and the
awareness of this fact encourages thinking and understanding.

Now, place these same two individuals on a stage before
a multitude, or place a microphone between them and announce
that 50 million people are listening in. Instantly,
their mental processes will change. Thoughtfulness and the
desire to understand each other will all but cease. No
longer will they function as receiving sets, drawing on the
expansible capacities of their own and each other's intellects.
They will become only sending stations; outgoing will
take the place of intaking. And what they say will be influenced
by how they think they sound to their audience
and by their competition for applause. In short, they will
become different persons because their psychological directives
have changed. Those who forego self-improvement
for the sake of directing the lives of others experience
changes in their drives no less profound than the above illustration.
The authoritarian act is always directed outward
at other persons.

This is what politics does to people.

This past weekend I attended the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa. It is a meeting of conservatives, not libertarians, but Institute for Liberal Studies executive director (disclosure: the boyfriend) Matt Bufton was invited to debate whether the government ought to get involved in "supporting the family," the ILS held three ideas-based talks, and I share Alexander McCobin's optimism that libertarians can work alongside the conservative movement on many issues (and social democrats/progressives on many others). So there we were, with bells on.

On Sunday morning after the conference had wrapped up, I noticed I'd been tagged in the following tweet:

DamanyDONTFAKEdaFUNK ‏@TheRealDamany

@AmandaAchtman @jneilson42 @petermjaworski @Liberal_Studies How was Dr Rape Ron Paul? Great conservative gun toting crazy values #MNC2013

Note: Perhaps because it was early on the first day of daylight savings time but I did NOT see the use of "Rape" in the initial tweet or I would not have responded at all. 

After a weekend of outreach to people I typically find myself disagreeing with (and having missed the "rape" comment), I tried extending an olive branch by offering that while Ron Paul's speech was fairly standard, I had been happy to see an anti-war message presented at all at a conservative conference.

Obviously I hadn't read anything else by him - this guy is obviously just trying to troll conservatives, as evidenced here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here so maybe I shouldn't have responded to him at all, but I did a few times (you can see my responses in the conversations). I purposely did not look at the replies after I stopped responding.

That is, until today. When someone else tagged me I accidentally saw his last tweet. It was:

DamanyDONTFAKEdaFUNK ‏@TheRealDamany
@jneilson42 ← Gun Supporting Crazy Conservaitive who does not mind getting raped By Ron Paul @AmandaAchtman @petermjaworski

Clicking on the image will take you to a link to the conversation.

This time I did not miss the much more direct rape reference. As many readers of this blog know, I have very strong feelings about contribution to rape culture. Rape is not a joke. I don't care that he doesn't like Ron Paul. I don't like Ron Paul. I don't care that he said this to me. But I do care that he think it's OK to have said something like this at all.

And I care that politics drives people to this point.

I don't know anything about "TheRealDamany," but I assume that in real life he's more or less a well-meaning guy. He seems to care about important issues that need caring about. He shares my displeasure with the Harper government. Glenn Greenwald as a mutual follow suggests we are both worried about issues like the drug war, torture, and the war on terror's effects on civil liberties. We're both concerned about institutionalized discrimination and poverty. I'll even bet in spite of it all we're both anti-war.

Sure, we disagree on some things, too, but I'd be willing to bet we agree on almost all the ends we're after. We only differ on the means.

But the tribal nature of politics makes us forget what's important. Politics allows and encourages us to dehumanize our opponents, or find other ways to excuse treating them as less than ourselves. Politics leads someone who claims to (and probably does) care about womens' rights to toss around the word "rape" and suggest his (female) opponents are asking for it.

Politics makes everything worse.


PS - Follow me on twitter! I'm unreasonably civil. ;)

Three Democratic myths used to demean the Paul filibuster

You may not know this, but I am merely weeks from completing the coursework for an MA, and as such I am drowning in work and have little time to write.

Have no fear, though, because Glenn Greenwald has written an excellent piece for you to read on the backlash by progressives and Democrats against Rand Paul's nearly thirteen hour long filibuster last week. He claims there are three main reasons progressives are failing to hold Obama to account for the massive expansion of executive power at the cost of American civil liberties and the lives of thousands of people abroad:

1. An "empathy gap" by largely white, middle-class American voters for those who are least likely to be impacted by these policies at this time,
2. A focus on the nonexistent claim that the reason to be worried is that an attack is imminent, and
3. A false belief that the letter from Attorney General Eric Holder has put to bed the notion that assassination orders could be used on American citizens in a troubling way.

Read the whole thing here. 

I, Coke

Everyone ought to be familiar with Leonard Read's I, Pencil, the story of the incredibly complex web of human interaction and knowledge that goes into something as mundane as an ordinary #2 pencil.

I say everybody ought to read it because the world is more beautiful and people are more awe-inspiring when we recognize the everyday objects and occurrences that are, frankly, miracles (or as Steve Horwitz would put it, "marvels") given how many ideas and goals of people all over the world have gone into them.

Medium.com has published a similar story for a can of Coca-Cola that beautifully captures once again the global interconnectedness that we experience every day through the use and consumption of everyday objects. From the piece:

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

Even if you choose to shut your eyes and see nothing of the magic of market coordination in it, the story of how a can of Coke gets to a grocery store is pretty cool. (Though in Canada we don't suffer from protectionism in our sugar industry and our pop would not generally contain high-fructose corn syrup.)

I was part of the problem: Why I am a proud and passionate bleeding heart libertarian and libertarian feminist

I think we all go through stages of political identity, and that our friends and experiences make all the difference in how we see the world.

I started out political and conservative. I was what I now recognize to be a pretty standard partisan. And I was angry. When you are a political person, the world is zero-sum. For you to win someone must lose. If you are heavily involved enough the adversarial nature of politics can pervade everything in your life – down to your dearest friendships. I remember lashing out at my best friend because she wouldn’t help me on a campaign. My brain just couldn’t square the circle of her being someone I like and respect and also being someone with whom I disagreed. She wasn’t against me, but she wasn’t with me. In my black and white world, it didn’t compute. I should never have lashed out at her for something so trivial. We were - and are - so close.  But it wasn't enough to protect her from partisanship.

The one good thing about politics is that it is where I met the love of my life. We both had this crazy preoccupation with policy, and he was something called a libertarian. He gave me Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do to read. I devoured it. He started reading Atlas Shrugged. I read his copy when he put it down. I read Anthem, The Fountainhead, We the Living. He attended an IHS seminar. We attended a Fraser Institute student seminar. We attended our very first Liberty Summer Seminar. We were addicted to ideas.

Meanwhile, that same friend was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and told by a doctor that she would never be able to take care of herself. She had to go on social assistance. I am deeply, deeply ashamed to admit it, but I accused her of leeching off of the system. I think I told her she was part of the problem. In those words. I made her ashamed of herself for needing help – and she really did need help. I had become one of those libertarians. I was part of the problem.

I wasn’t done with politics yet, but it was coming. First, we won! We took a man who had quit politics out of principle to head up a small-government pressure group and who wrote his Masters’ thesis against Keynesian stimulus spending, and we made him Prime Minister. But things didn’t get better, and the longer they stayed the same the more I saw the rottenness and futility of politics. So I quit.

I don’t know if it’s because I’d read so much Rand, because I was trapped in the adversarial mindset of politics, or if I was just young with a hefty dose of Type-A personality, but after I was an angry young politico I was an angry young libertarian. People who disagreed with me hated freedom. They were "commies!" They were everywhere I looked!

But I was beginning to soften. I apologized to my friend, who I think had forgiven me already, for treating her like a villain. I told her that if she needed help, she should take it. After all, there was nowhere else to get it. Private charity in mental health has been all but crowded out by government programs.

I have written elsewhere about breaking free from angry-libertarianism, for which I credit Dr. James Buchanan and public choice theory. When this happened, it happened all at once. I felt as though someone had been pressing on my chest, crushing the air out of me, and that their hands had been pulled away and I could finally breathe. Anger is a terrible, debilitating thing to carry and I am grateful every day that I was able to overcome it.

I became understanding of alternative points of view. People weren’t mystifying any more. I didn’t have to square the circles. I took this new perspective on the world and I threw myself into it. I attended seminars and I refined my ideas through blogging. I helped to found The Institute for Liberal Studies, an educational charity that holds seminars on university campuses in Canada to bring a classically liberal perspective to campus, and through this organization I have met brilliant, inspiring people.  

But I overdid it. I got liberty fatigue. I had to take a step back. You see, there was something missing from the liberty movement: its heart. To find it, I had to step away from the books and the blogs and look at real life.  

All this time my friend and I supported one another the way that friends do. She is an inspiring person who has worked harder for what she has than most of us ever will. But in spite of being heavily medicated she would periodically suffer breakdowns or bouts of depression that the medication didn’t seem to help. Being there for her while she worked so hard further softened my outlook on the world.

Like it or not, libertarians, it’s not as simple as “Poor people just need to get a job, they're not my problem.” I found I was in favour of a social safety net in the form of a guaranteed minimum income – taboo for many libertarians. The more I looked at the real world, the more I gravitated toward issues on which the arguments for liberty were grounded in sympathy and dignity, such as the drug war, and away from harder economic topics on which I found the standard libertarian line too abrasive or simply less relevant.

I can’t remember if I stumbled upon it or if someone gave me a heads up that there was this new thing, “bleeding heart libertarianism.”

I looked into it, and I felt a way I hadn’t felt since I first picked up Atlas Shrugged. They were right. They were so right!

They were writing what I already knew: we ought to judge the systems in society on how they take care of the very worst off. The strongest always find a way, but those who need support can be ground down by a bad system. And they are. I’ve seen it. In being sympathetic, in being helpful, in preserving the dignity of the very worst off, government has failed miserably.  But there’s another way, and it’s taking problems away from government and giving them back to people to solve.

Heck, some of them were even on board with the minimum income thing.

Yes, yes, yes. This was it. This was what had been missing.

But there was more.

In January of 2012, my friend mentioned something she had told me years before but just hadn’t sunk in – a story that’s not mine to tell.  She was just rambling, letting thoughts out, but I stopped her. I made her explain again, to be sure I understood.

“Oh my god. You realize that that’s rape, right?”

She actually argued with me, said that couldn’t have been what it was. But I could tell it was sinking in. She started hyperventilating. She started crying. She went to sleep because she didn’t know what else to do. I told her I would learn what kind of help she could get in the meantime. I had to do something. When I started asking around, that same night, another friend confessed to me that she, too, had been raped.

If realizing the world wasn’t filled with evil people was a weight pulled from my chest, this was a bucket of ice water in the face. I didn’t know what to think, only that something was deeply wrong with the way I had been looking at the world. To be honest, I sort of panicked - or maybe I was just angry. My heart was racing. I was shaking.

I admit that I used to be one of those libertarians, the ones who say things like “Well obviously I believe in the OLD kind of feminism, from when women weren’t equal. But we pretty much have equal rights now and the movement has just been taken over by socialists.” Again, I was part of the problem.

My friend had spent ten years not realizing that her rights had been severely violated. On some level she blamed herself. She thought she was just “easy,” that she had put herself into a bad situation and that’s just what happens sometimes. But no. No! There is absolutely no excuse for sexual assault. It is never the fault of someone who has had their rights violated.  Not even partly. Not even on some level. Never.

Her life has changed dramatically since this realization. The debilitating, stigmatizing bipolar diagnosis was made in error – she has had post-traumatic stress syndrome since her rape a decade ago. PTSD, though sometimes so severe it can be mistaken for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, is something from which a person can recover, and I know she’ll pull through. But the fact remains that she lost almost a third of her life so far to a social environment that supports the idea that rape can be anything other than what it is.

Ten years lost to a societal preconception of women, of how we ought to behave and why we deviate from it, that is not benign.

The fact that “No means no” campaigns seem cheesy instead of intensely  serious, that a woman can spend a decade not realizing that she’s been raped, that you probably know someone who has been the victim of sexual assault even if you don’t realize it. That that people laugh at rape jokes when it’s happened to their friends. These are signs that something is terribly wrong.

Once you realize this, you see it everywhere. It’s amazing and scary that it’s not obvious to everyone. The only reason I can think of to explain why more people don’t, and I didn’t, see it is that we assume that somehow changing the laws has fixed this. But like so many important problems, government can’t solve this, and yet it seemed even libertarians hadn’t seen it! Somebody has to speak up.

But some already were. Through my new bleeding heart connections I found the Association of Libertarian Feminists, and I found that it is growing. It is growing not just because there are more women in the movement, but because so many libertarians are concerned about real-world problems, not just economics and philosophy – important though they may be.

There is real-world discrimination - against women, the LGBQT community, against minorities, against the chronically poor, the mentally ill. Against so many marginalized groups. The fact that government action has been the primary tool for confronting this discrimination has made libertarians hesitant to acknowledge there's a problem at all. But there is. There is. "Corrective" government action has created the mindset that's told us we've already done all we can do to help these people and the remaining failings are their own. Because the government has acted, employing force, libertarians think we've done too much for them. 

Are you a libertarian, and do you believe this? Think about what you're saying. If government has done too much, it implies that it's succeeded in fixing the problem, then gone to far. But the problem was never fixed! Government has failed, again, as it always has and always will, to provide meaningful, compassionate, human solutions to problems that have to come from all of us. The government's "solutions" have dehumanized and institutionalized intensely human problems. This is not acceptable.  

We don't have to agree on the solutions, but we absolutely must acknowledge that there is a problem.

Poverty. Discrimination. War. These real, human problems are, as Magatte Wade said in her keynote address to the International Students for Liberty Conference this month, the low-hanging fruit for people who understand why liberty is so important.

I believe that a presumption of liberty acts as a starting point for solving these and so many problems. I am filled with optimism because I am part of a movement that cares about not just prosperity, but dignity. We have become a more human movement. We are waking up.

I am grateful for all of the experiences and people who helped me find this branch in the fight for freedom. I am fiercely proud to be a part of it.