But are libertarians and modern conservatives interested in caring for the whole of society or are they in fact rabid individualists (social Darwinists)? Medieval European kingdoms were collectivistic, of course, but they were also illiberal, more or less totalitarian dominance hierarchies (the conservative’s ideal, “traditional” states).
Liberalism emerges with Protestant individualism and modern, Enlightenment humanism. So modern conservatives coopt the rhetoric of liberalism/individualism for the purpose of re-establishing "traditional" societies (i.e. large-scale dominance hierarchies or reversions to mass animality).
I agree that we shouldn’t stereotype each other. Perhaps it’s hyperbolic to say that libertarians want to privatize every single aspect of society, since they inconsistently support the police and the military for national defense. But they want to privatize as many institutions as possible, including the prison systems and even the military (BlackRock, contractors, mercenaries).
So libertarians are extremists in rejecting the implicit humanistic social contract whereby we cherish everyone’s humanity and see the wisdom of pooling our resources in exercises of self-government via political representatives, to solve problems which no individual can solve and which are created by the libertarian’s wild (“free”) market. See, for example, unregulated capitalism’s destruction of the biosphere.
Your question assumes I’m a liberal or a socialist. On the contrary, I’ve written a lot about the inevitability of corruption from the concentration of power in governments and in corporations (links below). This is why dominance hierarchies are the natural defaults in the animal kingdom and why it takes virtually miraculous human creativity and will power to escape from them. Conservatives are there only to deny the miracle is possible and to pull us back into the primitive natural state (into theocracies, monarchies, dictatorships, plutocracies). That’s the effect of “conservative” policies, the conservative’s rhetorical schemes notwithstanding the least philosophical scrutiny.
