I have much sympathy for libertarianism and libertarians because of course healthy humans love freedom and dislike stupid rules, incompetent or mean bosses (or slave owners) who wield power over us, senseless laws, exploitive rents and taxes, stupid burocrats who waste our time and wield petty power. And we have seen the horrors of mobs and cults (but are often ignorant of their ecstasies). I agree that there is something sacred and important about human individuals, that freedom and happiness are the domain of the individual human, not of the cells inside a human body, nor of any higher level of organization of humans, such as a family, tribe, village, nation, the EU or United Nations. But individual happiness can sometimes be maximized by trading some individual freedom for the benefits that come from belonging to a family, a tribe or a village.
Libertarians respond to this challenge in two ways, either ontologically or based on a different calculus of ethics (I'm not going to categorize them in economic or political ways). The ontological libertarians deny that there is any reality to organizations beyond individual humans, that they are not more than the sum of the individual humans, that the only real thing is individual humans interacting (and possibly a separate God).. The opposite view is embraced by deep ecologists, who think that individuals are an invention of late stage capitalism and have no ontological reality, that individuals are always inextricably embedded in a family, tribe and ecosystem and can't exist without those. I disagree with both these views based on my understanding of emergence and evolutionary game theory (which I won't go into here), and think they are complementary not exclusive of each other. I understand how the both arise. The deep ecological view was the default before western civilization. The individualist view arises when people are so little dependent on others around them for goods and services, villages and tribes can't survive. Instead there is a dependence on abstract entities with a dubious independent (of us) ontological reality, like global markets and the military, money, an Abrahamic God, and large governments, all of whom supposedly bring goods and services from all corners of the globe to our local stores, giving an illusion of island individuals. Moreover these entities are more of a nuisance, convenience, protection, authority or a danger to us, than a source of joy and communion. The family, village and tribe provided a means for people to commune with each other (and the natural world), not just annoying transaction costs. They provided a set of traditions, values, boundaries (around the family, tribe or village, not around the individuals) where communion could be refined and concentrated. In such an environment libertarianism never arose. Instead there was the distributism of the Catholic church and village, the primitive communism of tribes and families, the mysticism and pantheism of individuals who know what it is to deeply belong to something bigger than their own individual selves.
Then there are the other kind of anarchist libertarians who love freedom and individualism above all else and won't trade it off for any amount of happiness, or maybe they just have never tasted the kind of happiness that can be had from deep communion with other people or nature in a supportive institutional environment. No social contract for them, except between individuals, no laws, but also no ecstasy or ego-transcendence. These folks acknowledge the reality of higher order entities/institutions than individuals, but see individual freedom as the highest value, never to be traded off with happiness, theirs or someone else's, and so these higher order institution seem evil to them, because they invariably impinge on individual freedom. Not only do they see the higher order institutions as evil (except the religious ones who don't see God as an entity to know and be part of but as an independent entity to fear, worship, obey), but the people who promote these institutions are sometimes seen as evil. They mistrust generosity or altruism or sacrifice of one's own (immediate) best interest for someone else's well being (except when Jesus does it). They are more interested in establishing boundaries than transcending them or allowing others through. They are more interested in taking personal responsibility than letting go of control. And they are correct in a limited, paradoxical way, and so are the collectivists, the cultists, the addicts (who long for ego-transcendence but can't achieve it within western individualist culture without their addiction), the artists, the great scientists, tribalists, deep ecologists, the co-dependents, the mystics, the distributists, the neo-primitivists, in that what they are all reaching for is part of the human experience, which is both individual and collective. They might even agree to a government that would be given (only) a policing and protecting power, as these would presumably maximize individual freedom. Happiness to them is an individual choice, despite much data that contradicts this claim, showing that happiness depends on community, family, stability, flow (aka grace), nature and other things not under direct control of individuals (see The Happiness Hypothesis by J. Haidt)
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