The Free State Project and Bears

Vox published an article yesterday describing the failure of the Free State Project, a program I remember people recruiting for back in the early 2000s. Apparently a major part of its downfall was its relationship with the black bear.

The experiment was called the “Free Town Project” (it later became the “Free State Project”), and the goal was simple: take over Grafton’s local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did! 

Well, actually, they're making more of that than they should because it's an interesting part of the story. The real problem was that it drew a bunch of unmarried, unemployed young men who wanted -- well, they wanted what Plato said that the Athenians wanted, i.e., to live a life unregulated by government authority. They were apparently fairly obnoxious about their lawsuits to try to break the hold of local government on their lives.

Initially they ran into another very predictable sort of trouble, which is that people reliably hate other people who move into town and try to take over. There is a very good reason for this. Most human meaning comes from relationships. We have these relationships in a community of people we know, who live and work together in what we call a "culture," i.e., a way of life. Outsiders moving in who disrupt a community are thus attacking the source of meaning and happiness for those already there. It doesn't matter if this is 'immigration,' or 'gentrification,' or the Free State Project: there will always be friction when lots of people move into town and start changing things.

However, the Free Staters found that many of the existing folks were persuadable on at least some of their designs. This is the part that harmonizes with Plato's Laws:

By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.

So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.

This actually sounds a lot like the "anarchist" free zones from last summer: more violence, more sex offenders, fewer police to deal with them, and those having their funding cut. We are seeing something like this play out outside of outright anarchist zones: Minneapolis is continuing to slash is police force even though their violent crime is way up. 

It could be that Plato has more of a point here than those of us with an anarchist or libertarian strain might like to believe. Those ideologies are quite different but aligned in their rejection of formal authority, and they have both led to the same sort of results. 

The author being interviewed in the Vox piece oddly reasons that the real problem is philosophy itself:

Sean Illing

There’s a lesson in this for anyone interested in seeing it, which is that if you try to make the world fit neatly into an ideological box, you’ll have to distort or ignore reality to do it — usually with terrible consequences.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Yeah, I think that’s true for libertarianism and really all philosophies of life. 

It's certainly not true of pragmatism, that most American of philosophies, which judges the worth of projects (and even the truth of claims) by how well they work out practically in the world. Really, though, I think that the older philosophies are stronger on this score as well. Plato may be wrong about some things (both you, dear reader, and I have said that he is quite wrong in places); even Aristotle may be wrong at times. They're robust, though, in being willing to criticize approaches based on practical results. As we've seen, Plato sharply criticizes both Persia and Athens -- two highly successful societies by some measures -- based on pragmatic concerns.