Astral Codex Ten

liberty

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liberty

Article

liberty is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 25, 2021 and July 15, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people”; “a new foundation called liberty which is based around freedom from oppression”. It most often appears alongside Marxist, Trump, 2012.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 25, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"
February 25, 2021 · Original source
I hear you're having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success.
Inline links: having a post-Trump identity crisis
Trump didn't win on a platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever. He won on a platform of being anti-establishment. But which establishment? Not rich people. Trump is rich, lots of his Cabinet picks were rich, practically the first thing he did was cut taxes on the rich. Some people thought that contradicted his anti-establishment message, but those people were wrong. Powerful people? Getting warmer, but Mike Pence is a powerful person and Trump wasn't against Mike Pence. Smart people? Now you're burning hot.
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
Haidt clearly struggles with the fairness foundation and its somewhat grab-bag nature. He eventually splits it in two, leaving the free-rider punishment part (which he calls proportionality) in the foundation called fairness, and spinning off a new foundation called liberty which is based around freedom from oppression. The revised political division is then that liberals mostly respond to care, fairness, and liberty, libertarians to liberty above all, and conservatives to all six.
In the initial five foundations (no liberty), the fairness foundation is a complete mess. Haidt defines it as being the urge to punish free riders, which has obvious game-theoretic benefits in policing prisoner’s dilemma situations. But then he also wants it to include equality. He then seems to realise these aren’t the same thing, and tries to chalk this up to the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
I could go on at length about how I think “equality of opportunity” is almost never a useful term, is almost never used consistently, and doesn’t really make sense outside a completely scientifically illiterate blank slate view of human nature. Thankfully, I don’t have to, because this framing then gets abandoned as the fairness foundation is split. Explicit free-rider-punishment gets to keep the name “fairness” and it’s sort of suggested that this is sort of equality of opportunity in some way. A new foundation, liberty, is created, sort of to cover equality of outcome, but it’s operationalised as freedom from oppression, which is then taken to refer to things like racial justice, but also get-off-my-land libertarianism.