I slightly supplemented the day before yesterday’s article with the response to Alexander Elesev. The supplement includes an advertisement for Alexander Litreev’s new project and a mysterious wish not to eat yellow snow.
I am also duplicating here from the article a mention of collecting ideas on applying the doctrine of deterrence to the state.
If you have fresh, interesting ideas regarding what non-violent threats and mechanisms for their implementation could be used by a citizen against government officials of various ranks, please share them in the comments or via private message. Authors of the most successful ideas can expect a reward in bitcoins.
Also, since the opportunity arose, I got to know the Dobroum project better, which turned out to be a quite interesting phenomenon, and I would like to tell you more about it.
Like my project, Dobroum is built around its own website, but it has significantly greater penetration into various social networks, of which the most developed and interesting is the YouTube channel (almost 20 thousand subscribers). The website states that Alexander was inspired to create the project by Freedomain Radio — a channel by Canadian blogger Stephan Molyneux, who is quite scandalous in the English-speaking world and is only occasionally mentioned by Mikhail Svetov in the Russian-speaking one. I am practically unfamiliar with the content of Molyneux’s ideas, except for a very laconic Wikipedia page, so I will not attempt to judge the continuity between Elesev and Molyneux in ideological terms.
Alexander himself pushes two main ideas in his videos and articles:
- The root of state violence toward people lies in domestic violence. As violence in families is phased out, violence in society as a whole also decreases. Therefore, it is extremely important to raise one’s own offspring in a non-violent manner and spread this idea as widely as possible.
- The rationality of society’s organization, its ability to develop and overcome prejudices, is directly linked to the average IQ in that very society. IQ, meanwhile, is far more determined by heredity than by education. Therefore, practices such as limiting immigration from disadvantaged countries, the absence of support for dysfunctional families, and encouraging birth rates among the intellectual elite are beneficial for society.
As his primary method, Alexander uses “reasoning from first principles,” in other words, deduction in the spirit of Rothbard. At the same time, as we see from the IQ case, he tends to trust research in the natural sciences and draw conclusions about the desired organization of society based on them, which is dangerously close to various scientistic social engineering practices so popular in the 20th century. Ideas of spontaneous orders and an evolutionary approach are not close to him, as far as I can judge.
Alexander lives in the USA, so this point should be kept in mind when he discusses Russian events. On the other hand, his videos concerning American problems specifically are very interesting.
In general, I subscribed to his YouTube channel, but I decided not to subscribe to the Telegram — there is too much ephemeral content there for my taste, and I am already close to the limit of my perception capabilities; I have to be very careful with subscriptions so as not to spend too much energy on scrolling. But of course, you decide for yourselves. In any case, among Russian-language channels, this is a fairly unique and quite pleasant example of such a slightly naive liberal-conservatism.