On liberartianism and securitarianism

2026-10-03

In times of instability, one seeks safety. In times of stability, one yearns for adventure. In times of plenty, one tolerates a lot as they think of all the opportunities available to them. In times of scarcity, one becomes suspicious of what they cannot control.

It is how humanity oscillates between extremes, committing mistakes of past generations while also learning something in the process, which it incorporates in philosophical inquiry, religious doctrine, artistic expression, and jurisprudence.

Material conditions and expectations derived therefrom help explain how political movements develop their libertarian and securitarian propensities. Cultural trends exhibit the same tendencies, from an explosion of experimentation and defiance to a want for purity and the concomitant distillation of the essentials.

“Libertarian” here refers to an outlook rather than a specific school of thought which may identify by the same name. It is the view of the world where the individual is above the collective. From there follows the notion of inalienable rights, i.e. those which no group, no body, no authority, can take away from the person.

This is the principle, at least, because in practice there is no such thing as an inalienable right: it is an instituted reality that can always be interpreted anew, given the appropriate triggers or prevailing conditions.

“Securitarian” is the attitude of prioritising the collective over the individual. It consists in the desire for restraint in order to control the factors that contribute to the individual as well as the social experience. At one level this is expressed as a check on the individual’s own patterns of behaviour: to conform to guidelines that are pro-social. At the collective level, it acknowledges the importance of hierarchy, which is how individuals learn to expend their vitality without destroying themselves and their society in the process.

[ Also read: About structure, the little things, and critical thinking (2026-10-01)]

The drift towards self-contradiction

Both libertarianism and securitarianism have manifestations of self-contradiction that results in tyranny.

• Extreme libertarianism will be pushing against its own notion of inalienable rights, because it would be asking for freedom at increasingly fractional scales to the point where no authority can ever be conceived as superior to the individual and thus no right may be instituted as such. Institution presupposes at least some degree of collectivist ethos: to agree, at the very least, on the shared values and on the convention that some rights—and which ones—are inalienable and by whom may they be safeguarded and enforced.
• Extreme securitarianism exhibits the same phenomenon of self-contradiction. Too much control turns into insecurity already at the individual level, where the person is afraid to experience something different out of fear of losing the world they think they have. Collectively, too much security grows so suspicious of the indeterminate that it begins to prosecute people over increasingly trivial things. The analogous of an auto-immune disease.

A common mistake politically minded people make is to think that the “bad ones” coalesce in one specific ideology or spectrum of views. For example, leftists think that only the far-right is the bane of society. Those on the far-right, in turn, will demonise leftists. And so on. The truth is that every view can be taken to its extreme, at which point it degenerates into the opposite of its stated ambition.

This is not a matter of politics alone. It is a fact of life in general, which the Greeks understood as the world of admixture, of there being no pure good or evil but latent expressions of both on a spectrum of degree. Water is the source of life. Drink moderate amounts and you are healthy, ceteris paribus. Drink ridiculous quantities and you will die of poisoning. It is not water that is deleterious though, but the degree of consumption. The same is true for everything we do: too much or too little will be harmful.

Degeneracy, then, and by extension the drift towards tyranny is a matter of degree else application, not category. Too much freedom results in non-freedom the same way too little freedom does. Too much security engenders insecurity exactly how the absense of security does.

A demanding work-in-progress

The other common mistake is to believe that insitutions are inherently robust. A well-defined insittutional arrangement, the thinking goes, will keep the society going along those lines. Having a strong constitutional order which safeguards representative democracy, for example, will supposedly guarantee democratic norms even while people are apolitical and largely ignorant of affairs beyond their particular milieu.

Erosion will thus be ignored or underestimated. It will happen slowly until it accelerates all of a sudden.

No matter the setup, institutions are upheld on a continuous basis by people. They exist and they perform their tutelary function for as long as there is a critical mass of agents of action working in their favour. Put differently, they are true if we believe them to be true and if we behave in accordance with that belief. Else they are nothing but empty promises, waiting to be instrumentalised by ruthless aparatchiks and aspiring overlords.

This is, after all, how the aforementioned degeneracy develops. It is expressed as a zeal for ideological correctness, which becomes a pattern of decision-making that errs on the side of over-correction instead of caution.

Though even with prudent guidance, the fact of the matter remains that the order is a work-in-progress. There will be trials and there will be errors. There will be cases of too little and others of too much. What matters is that the people prioritise common sense over ideological purity.

Once ideology becomes its own goal, it leads to the destruction of what it purports to serve. Ideologies are frameworks to focus minds on a given project, which works towards the preservation or instantiation and subsequent protection of one or more values. It thus is a tool in the hands of a political movement. Absent the values or measurable progress towards that end, which we can understand as the lived experience of people, the tool itself is not worthwhile.

The degeneracy of the opportunist

Among those who commit to overcorrection are the purists of the ideology as well as the neophytes who join ranks on some opportunist premise. Both can push towards extremism. The latter group is especially prone to exaggerate because it does not have the requisite acculturation to appreciate nuances in the views it has espoused. A zealous and capable student will learn all the rules and how they apply, though it is only the master who has an intuition of when to suspend the application of those rules.

To be concrete in the interest of explaining this concept. For roughly the last ten years, the Western world experienced an overcorrection towards libertarianism, of the sort here considered, which was largely carried out by opportunists and liars. It now moves in the opposite extreme of securitarianism.

One can attest to the times when they met, for example, some heterosexual person cosplaying as LGBT+ under the guise of a bisexual identity. That alone is fine: it can make people feel accepted and thus be comfortable in their reality. Though it would not stop there. Those same pretenders would be vociferous about how strongly they protect their LGBT+ friends and would become intolerant of even the most innocuous hesitation and call for careful deliberation. Same for all-white, upper class liberals pretending to defend minorites in abject poverty, while they themselves were enjoying another lavish meal.

Pretenders and wannabees also exist in conservative groups, where some new convert to a religion, for example, is eager for a holy war and has an unchecked propensity for fundamentalism.

The importance of leadership

In all cases, the guardrails come in the form of strong leadership. This is a matter of attitude among those who occupy positions of authority within the given group. One must be able to say “no” and to push back forcefully against the drift towards extremism, in the same way a parent has to be decisive in order to keep their child’s desire for endless sweets in check.

Leadership consists in courage and competence. Competence absent courage is the psychosynthesis of the arivist: the person who will not stand for any principle and who will only tend to their own interest. Courage absent competence devolves into trigger-happiness.

Leaders start from the family and extend outward. If, as a parent, you cannot call out your child’s bullshit, if you give them everything they want and always yield to their capricious tricks, then at the social level we have a situation where an entire generation of entitled people has not developed an intuition of where the boundaries are. It lacks emotional maturity and is incapable of reasonableness. Same if you are not correcting the tendency for bullying in your child. And so on.

[ Also read: About comments that only communicate feelings (2026-10-02) ]

Same goes for teachers, football coaches, priests, and all tutelary figures. If you yourself are not embodying the values you represent or, at the very least, are making real effort towards that end, then you are setting a negative example. You are part of the problem.

You cannot be a health professional who is a smoker and a drunkard, for example. Your deeds contradict your claims. All you communicate is corruption and its attendant unreliability. You cannot be a spiritual leader who advocates frugality yet succumbs to the greed of the moneyman. And so on.

Society will degenerate once its tutelary figures become feeble in their character and ineffectual in their practices. It is a matter of personal responsibility to be excellent and to have a sense of duty towards the commons. Commitment to the highest standard at the level of the singular person is how society as a whole protects against its own degenerative tendencies.

A crisis, then, of institutions falling part and the civilisation declining, necessarily is a crisis of values. The society loses sense of what the common good is and how it may be safeguarded. It is then when ideology takes on a life of its own, to serve its own telos, to create a class of pretenders or professional ideologues, who exploit their respective movement as a vehicle for their own aggrandisement.

“Crisis” comes from the Greek word for “judgement”. It is a moment of discerning what is worthwhile and where one has made mistakes. Such is the time to set aside petty sentimentalities to sternly assess one’s prevailing conditions. Always with the understanding that whatever course of action they commit to, they will have to remain vigilant to course-correct when the prevailing material conditions change without overdoing it. This is the mark of prudence, of common sense in practice.