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I can see what you're saying. But the tenor of the article is that you should value yourself higher... and honestly when I look around I just don't think most people's issue is that they hold themselves in too low regard.
I do think more libertarian fiction would do well to explore the perspective of the incapable. Not everyone can be a John Galt or a James Farber
more libertarian fiction would do well to explore the implications for the incapable
This would be interesting...and I imagine difficult to write about well. I wonder if there is any genre that has attempted to deal with this topic in a reasonable manner. The human experience of someone who is not particularly capable is probably not the most exciting subject for a story, though.
I think it would be hard to do well, but I don't think it would be boring. In historical and literary fiction, there are plenty of extraordinary stories told about ordinary people. In scifi and fantasy, the protagonists are usually extraordinary within their extraordinary worlds... but it does make me wonder: what are the best examples of scifi/fantasy which focus on ordinary people in extraordinary worlds?
I think in libertarian fiction there are lots of themes to explore regarding ordinary people: like, do they experience envy and how do they navigate it? And, if they live a minimalist ascetic lifestyle, how much room is there for the great capable people to accomplish great things? (So many great works through time have come at the cost of much human labor)
I see some of what you're saying and I think it takes a generous reading of the Prester John essay to interpret it in a way that makes sense, but here's how I see it:
There is something unspoken in this essay (or it's just a lens we need to add in order for it to make sense). As much as valuing your self means being willing to see how very much you can achieve, it also means knowing what you do not have a right to. It's a sort of knowing the right limits of your self. I'm probably being far too charitable in my reading of Prester John here.
But this is sort of what I was thinking about with The Dispossessed -- that when people really seriously sit down to think about what a sovereign individual looks like, the life often ends up looking fairly ascetic and minimal. A person who really understands that they are in charge of their own self and that they can call the shots about how to live their own life does not overestimate their value because they have been confronted with the sharp edges of their own failures.
With regard to Bitcoin, we expect that we have the right to transact with whomever we please on earth and that no one should intervene (intermediate) in our transactions...but we also understand that holding our own keys means we are ultimately responsible for their security and no one is going to come save us should our boat have an accident.
I feel that I'm still hamfisting this and that my words haven't been working quite right this morning, but if we ignore how bad a writer Rosenberg (and therefore Prester John) is, I think we can take this interesting concept out of the essay: the flip side of covetousness is something like dignity -- or perhaps knowing what you can earn?