Is Localism the Goal — or Just a Tool? | Norman & Corcoran Deliberate

So the first proposition we had is localism is the goal and not just a way to get something else. So I I would say no. Um I I see localism as very much a tool, uh, and this gets back to my intro about seeing like a state and meta-utopies and everything. Um localism is uh like enforcing APIs or you know, Docker, uh Docker's a terrible example. Um but uh it is a way to segregate people. Um and you were talking before about externalities. I think this is absolutely the core of it. And you also mentioned NAP. Um, I hate the concept of the NAP because it's simplistic and it puts all of the absolute complexity off stage or off books. And then also the veterans will get uh benefits. Um, but that's going to happen in the future. Uh so that doesn't need to be on the profit and loss statement or on the balance sheet, and that is off book spending.

Um and so you've just taken, you know, the the thing that we really need to get to the bottom to and said, you know, oops, out of bounds, you know, it's like freeze tag or something. You know, no, I got into the safe zone. You can't tag me, you can't look at this. Um, so the problem with the non-aggression principle, Heimlin uh expressed it once. It's so simple. Uh your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Like, well, okay, but we need to define what's a fist and what's a nose. Um is my you know delicate sensibilities a nose? Um are your uh clothing choices um you know a fist. Uh and and either they are or they aren't, but we need um you know some mechanism to discover that. And and this actually, you know, it it's always easy to reason from the most extreme cases where you know someone walking down the street totally nude with all sorts of you know perverse stuff.

Like, yes, it's clearly outside of the bounds. But it's often interesting to think about the much harder cases. Like, what if someone is dressed inappropriately? And um, you might not want your you know, kids to see somebody who is is dressed in this way, but it's not actually obscene. And so this again, I I I think you will never have a society as a whole agree, you know. Um, you know, that that yes, a hundred percent of people agree that you know going without a bra is absolutely terrible and it should never be done, but you will find small groups that can agree on this. And and you know, that even applies here. Uh, you know, Jeremy DM'd me ahead of time and you know, said a nicer version of don't wear your ratty t-shirt. And you know, uh great, you know, here we are in a small society. I should uh conform to expectations.

So, okay, so just to repeat the proposition, uh, localism is the goal and not just a way to get something else. So that was you saying you disagree with that. That's correct. It's not the goal, it's a way to get something else. It's an enabling technology to get what we want, which is sort of a maximization of all sorts of other utility and harmony. Yeah, right. And so, you know, all these props have this kind of quality, where depending on how you might define some of the terms and the assumptions behind them, you could go one way or the other. I we both register disagree on this. Part of the reason I register disagree is because it's not that I don't think it's a goal or the goal in some sense, but actually I think whenever you find um good, really good solutions to things or really the way things could or ought to be in some sense, means and ends actually converge.

So you think of something like really wholesome, like uh playing with your kids. Well, are you playing with your kids because that's a means to an end of them having a nice future and you know getting strong and athletic as you play with them, something like that? Well, yes. But is that the only reason you're playing with them? Well, no, there's like an intrinsic joy to it as well. So for me, localism, it is a meta system. I like that because anything that's a system gets a little bit too rigid and too formalized and will break and will be uh corrupted and all of that. So this sort of meta system conceptual idea, it's for me, it's both a goal, it's a means and an end. It's like uh it's a means insofar as like Travis is talking about, it's a um it's a way of solving certain kinds of problems.

There's a bandwidth problem of central control. They don't know what's going on locally, they have no sensitivity to that. Um they are um, and then so it does like solve certain kinds of very practical problems, but it's also an end in that I do believe that that's uh this sort of way of agreeing to disagree, using space as a tool, location as a tool, is also uh production of a harmonious existence, and then that's a goal, that is a goal. Um so it's both a goal and and uh means and an end, in my opinion. And so that's why it's sort of answered one way or the other. But uh it's it's uh it's a way of solving many, many, many problems. And the challenge is how do you get to that place and how do you get how do you self-sort. Travis brought up this kind of idea of self-sorting. I think we're seeing that in New Hampshire.

We're inviting people in who uh are like-minded in some sense, and we're also maybe uh making it a little bit more uncomfortable for people that we don't really want near us. And so this self-sorting process, I think is very uh important to thinking about how this works. Um what I was gonna say. Sorry, I read the screen and then I I lose it. But um basically means or end, it's both, in my view. And um the trick is how do we get there? And I oh the other thing that came to mind was basically just think about New Hampshire and our place in all of this. Um you see over and over, like uh sort of the Doomer perspective on this New Hampshire project of like, hey, you're surrounded, you got Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, you're fucked. Sorry, kids here's excuse me. So screwed. Um the uh um no, that's not what's going on.

Self-sorting process is the opposite of that. So you have diffusive systems, and that's like a gas diffuses into the room, right? You put some gas here, boop, it's into the room to the whole room. Complex organisms, human beings are not like a gas. We are actively self-sorting. And in some ways, the white pill is that we're surrounded by that, because you can go there and they can come here, and we can self-sort this out. And we don't need to live the way you're insisting we live, and you don't have to live how we want to live. So yeah, just kind of put some sleep. So to follow up on that, and it's off the proposition, but I think it's an important thing. You made a great point, which is that there is a sort of repulsive force near us, which is better for our coherence than if there were not this repulsive force.

And if you, you know, again, think about sort of an endless fluid, and it's positive that life probably, you know, began in primordial oceans where you just have chemicals floating around. And one of the very first things that gets evolved is cell membranes. Um, because once you have a cell membrane, you can you know enforce certain constraints on what happens inside the membrane and sort of you know treat everything else outside it is inherently hostile and then gatekeep. Um, and so I think that the concept of localism uh absolutely implies sort of boundaries, whether hard or soft, the act of gatekeeping, the act of both attracting what you want and also repelling what you don't. Yes, yes. And I think so. This is one of the things that uh this particular free state party, part of the thing that seems to be bringing us together is a uh an acknowledgement of that reality.

It's biological, it's from the beginning. It's obvious it's biological and everything that's built on biological, social, spiritual, all of that. Jamie, can you bring up that wolf map? Everyone loves the wolf map. And so uh so I I like to think of it as selective permeability, right? There's some kind of selection logic, and you are letting certain things in, certain things out, other things are bounded, and without that, you have no life, you have nothing. And you certainly cannot create the conditions for homeostasis for a sort of internal logic to persist without such a boundary. And um if what the internal system you want to be is to something that looks like liberty, looks like libertarianism, you absolutely need that membrane to hold those conditions steady for that to unfold. Without that, not gonna happen.

So I think this is like a really this is like a very practical distinction that uh a lot of libertarians don't get. And you know, they'll never get what they claim they want.