Libertarian Collectivists

Andrew Sullivan has a note on the libertarian characteristics of ants.

It's not their image but new research is showing a Hayekian bent to the little buggers:

"One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing."

The link is to a very interesting National Geographic article on Swarm Theory.

Sullivan is a libertarian, I think, which might account for his affection for this notion.

A closer look at the glue that makes this libertarian society work unveils the profoundly collectivist underpinning. The workers all share the queens DNA, and, having already sacrificed their own reproductive chances to the queen, all gladly sacrifice themselves for the colony. So apparently a libertarian society can work - if all the members are totally dedicated to the collective.

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