Jonah: Yeah, no real disagreement. Of course, a prickly individualist

might end up anywhere politically — Lenin was pretty prickly, from what

I’ve heard. Still, my statement that “A prickly, don’t-mess-with-me

individualist is more likely to be libertarian that is a docile, unassertive

go-alonger” is, I think, incontrovertible. That person might be something

else; but of the two — the prickly and the docile — the first is much

more likely to be a libertarian than the second.

The, ah, subtext here, though, is the assertion of determinism — that what

we are, WHAT I AM, is not as much a product of my free will as I should

prefer to think it is. All the science on human nature is tugging in that

direction, the determinist direction; all our instincts and preferences and

faith tug in the other direction.

Science will win, of course — it always does. We shall find out that our

cherished beliefs about the Self are largely illusions, and we shall come to

terms with that somehow — but we’ll protest every inch of the way there.

The next couple of decades in the human sciences are going to be real

interesting.