Libertarian Culture

In How Jordan Peterson’s Suits Taught Me Fashion, CJ the X talks about libertarianism in a way I haven’t seen before. The video is about how fashion works as a means of communication, specifically how it communicates what groups you belong to. To overly simplify, it chronicles a history of fashion in the west (based on Derek Guy’s account) in three stages. In the first stage there is an objective understanding of beauty, the elites and nobles have an innate sense of beauty that the masses just don’t have. The closer you are able to dress like the nobles, the better you are at fashion. Fashion is used to signal proximity to the nobles. The second stage is the modern stage, where there are many groups, and fashion is here used to communicate which groups you have allegiances with (think greasers, punks, goths, hippies, but also college professor, tech bro, CEO etc.). Each group dresses according to a unspoken rule set, dictated by the prominent members of the group. The third stage, the postmodern stage, says that the modern fashion didn’t go far enough in liberating people. Being dictated by which group you belong to is still to be in chains. Postmodern fashion is an example of libertarian culture that puts the individual on a pedestal over everything else.

It sort of treats norms and groups as authoritarian, chains that you should cast off. In a way it makes sense, being stuck in a conservative social sphere can be very suffocating, and the norms are there to restrain you so that you fit the mold. The natural response to this is to focus on the individual. Freedom is to cast off the norms and groups around you, to define yourself — not in terms of other people, but in terms of your own true self.(sidenote: Whatever that means. I have personally not really understood what people mean when they talk about “their true self”. I wonder if it is like a Christian/dualistic thing about the body and the soul, where “true self” is a new word for soul.¹ ) Instead of fitting in with a group, libertarian fashion is about expressing the true you from the entire spectrum of all combinations of clothing, to be unique to you.

CJ describes post-modern (or libertarian) fashion as confused art pieces that fail at communication. Instead of this confused communication, they want fashion to be more about communicating who you are based on a shared language. In practice this means something that is closer to modern fashion that center group allegiances. Of course, CJ is queer and understand that being stuck in a shitty community sucks, so what they want instead is a world where there are clear communities, but where there is also great freedom to leave and join them.

This maps neatly onto some of what my favourite philosopher C. Thi Nguyen says. Nguyen is a philosopher of games, much of what he writes and talks about is about understanding games — and understanding society through that understanding of games. In the podcast episode Seeing like a Game, he talks about the differences and similarities between games and bureaucracies. One big question he is investigating is why games are so fun while bureaucracies suck, when both are governed by hard rules that you have to follow. The libertarian might say that we should not let the rules rule us, that they chain us down and make us unfree. Dismantling states and bureaucracies is all well and good, but the point of a game is to have fun, and the game can’t really exist without the rules. The answer Nguyen gives is that it is not the rules that make bureaucracies bad, it is the fact that you can’t leave. With a game, you voluntarily choose to enter the magic circle where the rules apply, and you can step out of it whenever. With the bureaucracies you typically can’t. You are stuck with the rules you were given.

For example, Cory Doctorow argues that the social media platforms’ ability to enforce rules aren’t necessarily a problem per se. What he focuses on instead is the freedom to leave a platform without losing your connections to other people. When it is too hard to leave a platform, the platform owners gain a form of impunity and are able to get away with rules that are much worse for the users. Bluesky might be good for now, but as long as you can’t migrate your account to other platforms he won’t use it, because that allows it to become a trap in the future.

If we apply the Nguyen’s theory on the discussion of communities above, we arrive at the conclusion that it’s not necessarily community — or the rules of a community — that are bad, but rather the difficulty with which it is hard to leave.