I am not very fond of the genre of public spats, but in this case the resulting discussion seemed like a good opportunity to articulate some considerations.
There is a channel called Dobroum, led by the respected Alexander Elesev. It is positioned as philosophical, and a great deal of attention is paid in it to the problem of overcoming adverse childhood experiences.
For a libertarian, everything here is relatively simple. Violence against children is violence against people. No one has the right to initiate violence against people with impunity. From there, one can talk about the specific mechanisms through which violence against one’s own children, not to mention others, becomes a dangerous practice, despite the relative defenselessness of children.
Alexander, however, devotes a lot of attention to demonstrating how adverse childhood experiences negatively affect adult life. I do not know why he chose this particular tactic of dripping into people’s brains, nor am I particularly eager to find out. It does not matter to me whether it is because he lives in a country where therapists are piled on top of therapists, or because he adopted this idea from a book that impressed him, or because something happened in his own childhood that led to this result. I am almost entirely certain that there is no single reason, because life in general is a complex and multifactorial thing where there are no simple cause-and-effect relationships between two isolated events: isolated events are merely conceptual models, whereas life is actually a continuous flow of impressions.
As a result, it turns out that for Alexander, any peculiarities of someone’s behavior begin to signal some childhood traumas. Even an avatar that one of my readers from Bulgaria ordered for me became a reason for him to talk about my childhood experience. I imagine that for a fitness trainer, my condition would be just as ironcladly linked to a training regimen, for a nutritionist to a diet, and for a political scientist to the political regime in the country.
In my book on ancap, I deliberately did not engage in justifying the initial principles upon which all subsequent logic was built. Factually, the principles of libertarianism are such because that is what we want. We like it that way. It seems right to us. Of course, this may correlate with certain facts, certain childhood experiences, books read, a popular streamer heard by chance, and so on.
Yes, narrowly specialized arguments work well on some people, including arguments along the lines of “if a child is beaten in childhood, they will grow up to be a stupid loser.” But that is no reason to obsess and dump these arguments on everyone and everyone, for they will by no means work on everyone.
On my channel, I have my own little “dobroum” named Bitarch, who has also become obsessed with the single theme of the total elimination of violence. Unfortunately, the comments he gathers are more often mocking in nature, and this suggests that his target audience does not overlap much with mine. I seem to be powerless to influence such cases of monomania, and this fills me with sadness.
I hope that if you see signs in my own writing that I have been seized by some single overvalued idea, you will signal this to me.
