Haman Nature: Why Libertarians Struggle to Convince Normies (And It’s Not Just the Obvious Stuff)

Being a libertarian in a statist world can be exhausting.

Trying to get your average normie to see the inherent and unfixable problems with government can feel like explaining color to someone who only sees in grayscale — or worse, who was born blind.

I’ll be clearly and calmly laying out the structural incentives, the data, the historical track record, and they nod politely before circling back to “but who will build the roads?” or “we need regulations or corporations will poison us all.”

It’s painful, and it happens way more often than it should if this were purely an information problem.

The surface-level reasons are real enough. Politicians lie constantly. On the campaign trail they promise one thing, then deliver the opposite once the checks clear.

The media and so called “academics” are mostly mouthpieces for the regime. They run cover: framing every expansion of state power as compassionate necessity and every attempt to roll it back as heartless extremism.

And the biggest and most heartless long con occurs in government schools, where kids are taught from the earliest ages that a massive, centralized authority is the only thing standing between civilization and chaos.

By the time they’re adults, the default assumption is baked in: without the state managing damned near every aspect of our lives, society collapses.

It’s hardly an accident. That’s the state-mandated curriculum.

But I think there’s an even deeper problem going on, and it’s not likely to be fixed with better arguments or snappier memes — that’s right, NOT EVEN SNAPPIER MEMES!

It’s long been an inside joke amongst libertarians: We’re all super-autistic. And there’s clearly some truth to the self-deprecating remark.

People who obsess about political theory and economics are probably not going to be super-social-oriented. I’d bet large sums that there are a larger percentage of libertarians “on the spectrum” then amongst the general public.

Let’s have more fun with the silly theory I’m about to propose: RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services has been linking maternal Tylenol use during pregnancy to higher rates of autism.

The evidence is associative at best and probably spurious in the causal sense. Plenty of studies push back, and correlation isn’t causation, but the announcement landed anyway — and besides, as I said: it’s fun.

If Tylenol during pregnancy really does nudge some kids toward the spectrum, and if libertarians are overrepresented among autistic-leaning thinkers (the stereotype exists for a reason: the systemizing brain that loves clear rules, consistent principles, low tolerance for bullshit signaling, and high tolerance for being told “that’s not how things work”), then maybe the recent rise in both is connected.

Causal or not, it’s an amusing correlation to play with while we wait for better data.

Now the more serious part: if libertarians are a bunch of (relatively) autistic folks, how on earth can they persuade people who aren’t wired like they are? Or, if we’re wrong, how can normies possibly persuade us?

What if the real barrier isn’t just bad information or childhood programming, but rather a mismatch in how different minds model other minds and, by extension, how they model society?

Libertarians tend to think in terms of incentives, voluntary exchange, emergent order, and individual responsibility. Normies (a loose but useful shorthand) tend to default to authority, collective provision, and claimed intent over systemic effects.

When these two groups try to communicate about the state, the signal degrades fast.

This isn’t new territory in psychology. Back in 1985, Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith ran the Sally-Anne test with three groups of kids: typically developing, kids with Down syndrome, and autistic kids.

The kids were shown a puppet show where Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves. Then Anne comes along and moves the marble to her own box. The kids are then asked a question: when Sally returns, where will she look for her marble?

Typically developing kids got it right — they understood Sally had a false belief. So did the Down syndrome kids, despite lower general intelligence.

Now, here’s the kicker: most of the autistic kids failed, even when their measured intelligence was higher.

Theory of mind — the ability to represent what someone else believes, even when it differs from reality — doesn’t come along with raw smarts. It’s more like its own subsystem.

“Theory of mind” is a fancy label, but the machinery involved is actually pretty crude. People (excellent poker players being an exception) mostly don’t build rich, separate models of you.

For efficiency and simplicity, they instead run their own mental simulation with your inputs swapped in.

This works great when the other mind is similar to yours. It fails, confidently, when it isn’t. You “know” what the other person must be thinking because that’s what you would think in their shoes.

Damian Milton’s “double empathy problem” sharpens this. Contra “normie” intuition, the communication breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people isn’t a one-way deficit inside the autistic person. Instead, it’s a mismatch that runs both directions.

In 2020, Catherine Crompton and colleagues tested it with a telephone game: a story passed down chains of eight people. All-autistic chains and all-non-autistic chains preserved the story about equally well. But with mixed chains, the story fell apart.

The communication problem lived in the gap, in the mismatch, not in either group alone.

Libertarians and normies are running a version of this mixed chain every time the conversation turns to government.

The libertarian is simulating a world of dispersed knowledge, perverse incentives, and unintended consequences. The normie is simulating a world where well-intentioned experts and officials mostly get it right if given enough power and resources.

Each side plugs the other’s inputs into their own machinery and gets confident nonsense back. “If you just understood the negative effects of minimum wage…” meets “But corporations will exploit everyone without rules.”

The story degrades in transmission.

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