The Antisocial Socialist

I promise I would not link you to an hour-long BreadTube video that is mainly a guy talking unless it was really, really good. But like, I also can't be the only person in my friend group to watch this really fascinating video that links Enzo Traverso and Mark Fisher to Ruth Levitas and Ernst Bloch by way of Jackson Galaxy. The cat guy, I mean. This is a rambling tour through the contemporary left, depression and despair, nostalgia and utopianism, and it absolutely made my day. Also at some point in the video an orange cat gets buttered but it's not what you think.

For some reason, I've got libertarianism on the brain today. I blame The Daily Show for interviewing that one Republican senator who believed in cutting all government spending except for the military. And Eye Weekly's surprisingly good editorial that suggested, among other things, renaming Councillor Doug Holyday's Ward 3 Always Ultra Maxi Pads with Flexi-Wings for Heavy Flow Days Centre. (I'm for renaming Holyday himself that, come of think of it.)

Anyway, nostalgia_lj pointed out awhile back that the basic difference between a libertarian and a socialist is that the libertarian refuses to see himself as anything other than part of the 0.01% of brilliant, healthy, wonderful people who will be amazingly successful, whereas the socialist can easily picture herself as part of the unlucky majority. (Actually, she phrased it better. That post never gets old, seriously.)

So I was thinking of how a libertarian/Objectivist utopia could actually work. I anticipate a certain level of government fascism needed to, say, preserve the institutions of Rush (the band, not the pundit) and bad Objectivist art, as very few people actually like these things and thus they might become extinct in a completely free market. But beyond that? Would it look like Land of the Dead, with businesspeople paying the military to shoot at the rampaging hordes of poor people storming the gates? Would it last only a few decades because food poisoning and unchecked pollution would quickly kill all of us? Would everyone look like a NASCAR driver, forced to wear as many different corporate logos as physically possible?

Amuse me, people. Hit me with your cool sci-fi projections.

Also, does anyone see a similarity in the romantic realism preferred by Objectivists and the mockeries of classic realism preferred by various totalitarian regimes?