Group 1: Libertarians
Libertarians are people who don’t want rulers and don’t want other people to have control over them or responsibility for them. They want to be independent and responsible for themselves.
It follows that they don’t
Group 1: Libertarians
Libertarians are people who don’t want rulers and don’t want other people to have control over them or responsibility for them. They want to be independent and responsible for themselves.
It follows that they don’t want to be other peoples rulers; they don’t want control over, or responsibility for, other people. They think other people should be independent and responsible for themselves.
They want to live and let live. Because of that they do not try to force their belief and way of life onto others.
They are a minority.
Group 2: Non-libertarians
Everyone else (collectivists, but most of them would not self identify as collectivists) does want rulers and does want other people to have some control over them and responsibility for them. They want to be dependent and share some responsibility for themselves.
It follows that they do want to be other peoples rulers; they do want control over other people and shared responsibility for other people. They think other people should be dependent and share responsibility for themselves.
They want others to live like them. Because of that they try to force their belief and way of life onto others (most of them are not consciously aware of any of that).
They are a majority.
Liberty will not win that contest
In the above scenario, liberty with its minority of non-forceful people, will not win against collectivism with its majority of forceful people. Collectivism will win with large and expanding government, social “services”, welfare, taxation, restrictive laws, central planning, et cetera. That’s why we have all those things.
A minority libertarian society will not be libertarian.
Most people want collectivism, not liberty
You may wonder if enough people could come around to libertarianism to make them a majority. This will not happen in our lifetime and probably never on a large scale over a long time.
Groups of people tend toward collectivism, this is proven by history and society as it is today. Most people who feel oppressed by tyrannical rulers do not want to have no rulers, they want to replace the tyrants with kinder rulers.
Most people who are unhappy with how their government is using its power, do not seek to reduce the power of government, they seek to make the government use that power in a way they like.
Consider our greatest historical and contemporary symbols of freedom fighting against oppressive rulers.
Braveheart, William Wallace, “They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!” Scottish independence fighters did not fight for individual liberty, they fought to live under Scottish rulers rather than English rulers.
Nelson Mandela and the freedom movement he led did not struggle for minimal government, they struggled to replace a big apartheid government with a big non-apartheid government.
That is normal, people don’t want no rulers to have control over their lives. People want better rulers to have some control over their lives (or to be rulers themselves with control over other peoples lives).
There are many psychological and evolutionary reasons why most people want collectivism not individual liberty. People don’t want full and sole responsibility for themselves, they don’t want to be one mistake or one stroke of bad luck away from falling into poverty with no safety net. That concern extends to other people they care about.
This would not be the case in a libertarian society, there would be charity, insurance, mutual aid groups, et cetera to prevent it. But people fear that it would be the case.
There are also moochers who like that a more collectivist society gives them a better chance to extract value from other people without providing value themselves.
This type of collectivism was better suited to the way people have been organized for the vast majority of human history; tribal groups of around 100 people who all know each-other. The same logic does not work as well when expanded to nation states made up of millions of otherwise disconnected people.
Anyway, a majority of people will not become libertarians. How else could a libertarian society come about?
Try to create a libertarian society
The only alternative is to make a new society out of mostly libertarians, only allow mostly libertarians to enter, and indoctrinate most children born into this society to libertarian beliefs and way of life (I will refer to this society as Liberland).
The way people on earth are currently organized this could only be done as a nation state with a government. Otherwise it would be prevented by the government of whatever nation state it was in.
Many libertarians do not believe nation states with governments should even exist! To create and maintain Liberland would be, in some ways, anti-libertarian.
Libertarians believe it’s fine if someone moves next-door to them who does not share their belief and way of life, no problem. But it would be an existential problem for Liberland. If most of your neighbours are non-libertarian, they will destroy Liberland and you will be back to a collectivist society.
Liberland may be an impossible contradiction because its creation and maintenance would require libertarians to force their belief and way of life onto others. For example, by not allowing some non-libertarians to live where they 