With this article, I would like to summarize the cycle of previously published notes concerning the NAP—from discussions on the relevance of the topic to various approaches to its dissemination in society. Most of the ideas are taken from Bitarch and have been thoroughly reworked. Links to earlier materials expanding on certain theses are generously scattered throughout the text; if desired, you can refresh them in your memory.
What is unsatisfying about the status quo? Without eliminating aggressive violence from the life of society, it is impossible for any somewhat libertarian model of the country’s socio-political structure to emerge (even healthy federalism, let alone ancap or panarchy). Furthermore, the habit of solving problems through violence creates powerful negative externalities in society—it reduces the quality of life and economic well-being, slows down scientific and technical progress, and even creates a risk of the extinction of all humanity.
What is the non-aggression principle (NAP)? There are many interpretations of the non-aggression principle, but we will limit ourselves to the most minimalistic version. Let us assume that the NAP prohibits only direct physical violence against a person’s body and property that is under their immediate physical control (for example, the house where a person lives and the phone in their pocket). According to this minimal interpretation of the NAP, the use of violence for self-defense is permitted only in the form of counter-violence against the aggressor at the moment they attack and only in the minimal amount sufficient to make them cease the aggression. To seek revenge, punish, or recover compensation using violence would already be going beyond such an NAP. Psychological influence, due to the ambiguity of perception, should also not be considered violence. Following the NAP in this form already ensures freedom of association, and further, within voluntary associations, additional rules can be used that are not derived from the minimal NAP but are convenient for the comfortable interaction of the association’s members. A violation of the NAP itself or the established additional rules within an association can be settled through conciliation procedures or simply lead to a refusal of further cooperation, whether temporary or lifelong.
Why this specific minimal NAP? It inherently corresponds to the notions of justice of the vast majority of people, even if they have no complex concepts of property rights other than those inherited directly from animal ancestors. There is a well-known study by biologist Konrad Lorenz, who described the evolutionary mechanism for the emergence of innate inherited morality regarding intraspecific non-aggression in many animal species, such as hedgehogs, porcupines, echidnas, venomous snakes, and insects. In those periods of human history when society lacked functioning institutions to counteract individual violence, natural selection quickly led to the recognition of the NAP in roughly this minimal form. A similar understanding of the NAP can also be found in international relations, that is, between states, especially developed ones capable of employing deterrent weapons.
Who will be responsible for maintaining the NAP in society? Volunteers. Look at the distribution of the Bitcoin network’s hash rate across mining pools. Bitcoin has existed for over 10 years, and there is still no global dominant pool. People do not spend their efforts gathering statistics and warning miners about the risks of centralization for no reason. It even reaches the point where mining pools that approach a dangerous threshold of dominance, under public pressure but without violent coercion, stop accepting new miners, voluntarily depriving themselves of potential profit. All these people perfectly understand the value of decentralization and that it is better to spend a little of their own effort or give up part of their profit than to have people lose faith in the reliability of Bitcoin during a “51% attack,” which would cause the coins to lose value and the losses to be far higher. The same will happen with the maintenance of the NAP. Volunteers will certainly be found for whom the opportunity to live in a society with a low level of violence and to “enjoy the freedoms we have” are not empty words, and who are ready to exert effort to maintain it.
The methods for fighting aggressive violence described below can be used by anyone and in any combination, depending on the preferences and abilities of the volunteers. Their effectiveness and, accordingly, the appropriateness of their application in each specific case vary. All described methods do not contradict the NAP and do not imply the use of aggressive violence even against the most hardened maniacs. The list is not exhaustive and leaves room for human creativity.
1. Moral pressure
This method involves expressing condemnation toward those who practice aggressive violence themselves, as well as toward all those who approve of it. People are uncomfortable when they are considered villains; they seek justifications for themselves, and the task of moral pressure is to debunk these justifications.
For instance, it is important to convey to people the idea that the state is a stationary bandit, and that political methods of management are, in essence, robbery. Justifying such things is either a manifestation of Stockholm syndrome or evidence of complicity in robbery, and therefore is also subject to condemnation. Few are capable of openly admitting they are a violent criminal and a robber; this is the lot of only a minority of people who see nothing wrong in it, while for others, the very concepts of violence and robbery are primarily associated with something immoral. Let a person first begin to state, even if only under public pressure, that they condemn state violence, and then grow accustomed to such rhetoric and believe in it themselves.
The more hardened the statist, the harsher the methods of criticism permissible toward them. They can be compared to pedophiles (a comparison that favors the pedophiles) and totalitarian dictators, for whom the price of a human life is zero. The strategy of Western fighters against homophobia and racism, utilizing the ostracism of such individuals, which has proven its effectiveness, would also be appropriate. All these methods can be amplified by proliferation through specialized online services.
A powerful strategy that is potentially possible is the use of existing left-wing activism to promote the NAP. The alarmist protest, the face of which became Greta Thunberg, succeeded because many beneficiaries of the agenda Greta transmitted were found within the establishment. Now, when many countries are shaken by protests against police aggressive violence, the idea of riding this theme and beginning to transmit a general refusal of aggressive violence looks quite realistic. The same corporations that sponsor this protest will fit into a new expanded discourse. The public loves apocalyptic predictions, and we have them.
2. Transparency
Psychological research shows: people, if they believe their identity is hidden, find it much easier to cause suffering and pain to others. Any situation in which people feel anonymous, when no one knows who they are or does not want to know, reduces the sense of personal responsibility and thereby creates an opportunity for atrocities. The violent effect of anonymization can be amplified by the effect of an upward spiral of emotional arousal, which creates a feeling of power. The Milgram experiment also showed that personal face-to-face contact increases the likelihood that people will not carry out inhuman orders from authority to cause suffering and pain. Anonymity promotes the commission of violence.
Accordingly, the threat of publishing unsightly facts always works as a deterrent to violence. To prevent people from resorting to this method of protection, proponents of aggressive violence usually use shame. You are told that “airing dirty laundry” is shameful. That informing is “snitching.” That the victim of violence, not the perpetrator, will be smeared because they were at fault. This is a serious obstacle that can be overcome precisely through the moral pressure described above. Never condemn the victim, even if it seems to you that they could have been less careless, more modest, or followed cultural norms that you personally like rather than their own.
Technically, it is not so difficult today to find all the data about a person, knowing their appearance, voice, or other clues. Big data is a powerful tool that can also work in the interests of civil society. De-anonymization services, hidden audio and video recording, trackers and the like are actively developing. If you know promising teams working on this—support them. If you know of ready-made useful products that help people uncover the identities of criminals—tell others about them.
3. Balancing the potential for violence
The more evenly the potential for violence is distributed in society, the fewer opportunities a potential aggressor has to commit violence for their own benefit. With a completely even distribution of the potential for violence, the attacker always receives exactly the same damage as the object of the attack. If, at the same time, the potential for violence is not only evenly distributed but also quite high, then even uniting ten people to attack one may seem like a bad idea: one-tenth of the damage received by the victim would be more than enough for each attacker.
Thus, there will be less aggressive violence in society the more evenly the potential for violence is distributed, the greater the potential for violence of the individual, and the more readily they are willing to use force for their own defense, that is, to practice the doctrine of deterrence.
In essence, the presence of a sufficiently large potential for violence in each individual makes an exact parity of forces redundant: it is enough to have the necessary minimum to inflict unacceptable damage on the attacker. A classic example of such a necessary minimum is a firearm: a standard rifled short-barrel weapon. With minimal skill and determination, it allows one to fight off a small group of aggressors or keep at a distance an ill-motivated crowd in which no one wishes to be the first victim. However, a pistol is simply an example of a convenient modern technological solution to the problem of balancing the potential for violence. As shown by the example of the technologically backward Senoi tribe, even blowguns with poisoned darts are quite sufficient to deter aggression, provided they are guaranteed to be used when aggression is directed at them.
One might object that individual self-defense works poorly against the state, but this assertion is refuted by practice. The well-known science fiction author Alexander Rozov expressed himself well on this matter in his blog:
“A completely different matter is in Sweden (with a comparable and very high level of economic well-being). There, a person is, in general, also powerless before the state. But this powerlessness affects almost exclusively the LAW-ABIDING person—he is easier to find and punish for something. But an armed bandit, although also powerless, is harder to punish (since he must first be found, and then detained—and he may offer armed resistance). Therefore, the Swedish police prefer to hunt law-abiding citizens.”
“A completely different matter is in Sweden (with a comparable and very high level of economic well-being). There, a person is, in general, also powerless before the state. But this powerlessness affects almost exclusively the LAW-ABIDING person—he is easier to find and punish for something. But an armed bandit, although also powerless, is harder to punish (since he must first be found, and then detained—and he may offer armed resistance). Therefore, the Swedish police prefer to hunt law-abiding citizens.”
Of course, the state can spend a disproportionate amount of resources on opposing a specific individual, inherently exceeding any of their spending on defense. An individual can oppose this with two tactics.
First, the price of an effective frontal attack by the state on a private person usually turns out to be several dozen times higher than the price the person spent to counter this attack; in other words, in an arms race, the defending individual has the advantage. Having firmly decided to sell their life dearly, they are capable of causing a lot of trouble even after death.
Second, transparency and moral pressure provide a very unfavorable background for large-scale state violence, whereas a large number of people may come out to defend the victim because they decide for some reason that it also concerns them. Despite the fact that the firepower advantage in such situations still remains with the state, mass civil disobedience is often enough for the state to hush up the conflict.
4. Non-violent upbringing of children
The most humane and unobtrusive thing a person can do to fight aggressive violence in the world is to pass values of non-violence to children. Of course, this means the need to act by personal example, that is, first and foremost not to apply violence to children oneself, so the task may not be easy. Nevertheless, the effort is worth it, for in the long run, this is the strongest means of influencing the world. A person who grew up understanding that they can trust people and not look for a catch, that people are benevolent and inclined to negotiate, will carry these values into adult life, and will react to stories about the realities of the beginning of the 21st century as we react to stories about public executions: with incomprehension and disgust.
Even if the state is not rejected by humanity for its inefficiency, being led by people who absorbed non-violent practices from childhood, it will become humane and unobtrusive in its methods, not even remotely resembling the gang of robbers from which it once grew.
Of course, when instilling values of non-aggression in a child, it is also important to instill a readiness to oppose it: starting from ways to nip a conflict in the bud through constructive negotiations, and ending with the use of means of self-defense, as described in detail in the previous point.
The idea of non-aggression leads directly to the idea of legal equality, so much attention will also need to be paid to instilling this idea. First of all, it manifests in the small things. For example, a society in which adults address children using the informal “ty” while demanding to be addressed with the formal “vy” is already instilling the idea of inequality. Meanwhile, there are situations of natural inequality of opportunities due to different ages and experience, and usually, it is more appropriate for adults not to participate in many children’s games on equal terms with children in order to preserve their dignity.
A good illustration of this thesis is the approach to adolescent sex. In Carl Sagan’s book “The Demon-Haunted World” (or “Science in Search of God”), the results of a statistical study by sociologist James Prescott are described, who compared the customs of hundreds of cultures in human history.
“…the fundamental differences relate to whether it is customary in that culture to hug children and whether premarital sexual intercourse is permissible for youth. He considers these parameters to be key and concludes that all cultures where children are hugged and adolescents are allowed to engage in sexual intercourse ultimately do without a pronounced social hierarchy, and everyone is happy. Whereas those cultures where certain social prohibitions prevent hugging children and a strict taboo is placed on premarital adolescent sex develop a strong hierarchy of dominance and wallow in violence and hatred.”
“…the fundamental differences relate to whether it is customary in that culture to hug children and whether premarital sexual intercourse is permissible for youth. He considers these parameters to be key and concludes that all cultures where children are hugged and adolescents are allowed to engage in sexual intercourse ultimately do without a pronounced social hierarchy, and everyone is happy. Whereas those cultures where certain social prohibitions prevent hugging children and a strict taboo is placed on premarital adolescent sex develop a strong hierarchy of dominance and wallow in violence and hatred.”
At the same time, as noted in the study, the prevalence of sex between adults and adolescents again proves to be a pretext for the development of dominance relationships.
Of course, if you practice non-violent upbringing of children, you will have to face violence from others directed toward them. You will have to be ready to counteract this, even if they are other people’s children; otherwise, you will simply instill in the child the idea that the main thing is personal well-being and it is better to turn a blind eye to everything else to stay safe. Depending on the situation, means of protection, public disclosure of facts of violence, and the creation of moral pressure may be useful here.
5. Freedom of Association
Modern people too often have to be part of various involuntary associations. This could be compulsory schooling, a conscript army, imprisonment, an orphanage, certain family-clan relations in archaic societies, and even the institution of citizenship itself.
It is precisely where leaving a community is impossible or associated with high costs that a phenomenon such as bullying appears, including the use of physical violence. Involuntary association with anyone develops in a person the ability to endure, to act covertly, hiding one’s interests and motivations, and sharply reduces empathy—in short, it makes them a rather unpleasant type. Spending energy on intrigues and survival in society, a person loses the opportunity for development and self-realization.
What can be done to develop freedom of association in society?
First, of course, it is important to recognize the problem itself, to speak publicly about its existence, calling things by their names: prison as prison, slavery as slavery, dependence as dependence.
In many cases, the exit from an involuntary association is not actually closed, and many people remain in them simply by tradition. Having found the exit, one should use it and learn to enjoy life in conditions of freedom, destroying with one’s own example the myths about the troubles awaiting those who leave the cozy cage. Thus, those who leave school for self-education will arouse envy rather than pity if they not only rid themselves of the pressure of the educational system but also achieve the life success for which the entire educational system is presumably built.
Similarly, it makes sense to flee abroad immediately upon the threat of criminal prosecution—or even simply in a situation where the political regime in the country becomes particularly unpleasant, and one can choose something less repulsive.
It is important to promote and publicly approve leaving toxic, abusive personal relationships—it is also desirable to provide support to victims of such relationships afterward so that they can find another support in life and not fall back into something similar.
Finally, it is not enough to know how to exit involuntary associations; it is important to learn how to enter voluntary ones, gaining pleasure, benefit, and security from this. This could be any interest-based group on social networks, membership in public organizations, or establishing a network of known service providers. Finally, one can simply become a regular at bars, clubs, children’s or sports grounds. Even such elementary habits as greeting neighbors in the building and talking with taxi drivers or hairdressers are already an important step toward building a civil society. When people evoke sympathy and interest in each other, it promotes the spread of the values of non-aggression.
6. Working with Heredity and Biochemistry
Biologist Konrad Lorenz proposed a model describing the appearance of innate morality of non-aggression toward representatives of one’s own species in many animal species (those possessing innate weaponry—hedgehogs, porcupines, echidnas, venomous snakes, and insects). The higher the ability of the species’ representatives to destroy their conspecifics, the faster the genes responsible for the tendency toward intraspecific aggression are washed out of the population during lethal conflicts. A strong animal may have a strong morality of non-aggression, and a weak one—a weak one. In its natural history, humans are very poorly armed animals. Therefore, in humans, instinctive prohibitions are initially weak, and natural morality is weak. Innate prohibitions in humans correspond to this state of affairs. However, reason has provided humans with the ability to significantly improve their tools for killing humans in timeframes that are negligible by evolutionary standards; therefore, an innate morality of non-aggression toward other humans never had time to appear in humans during natural selection.
It has been established that a tendency toward increased and pathological aggression can be either inherited or acquired (due to brain damage and hormonal imbalances). A single gene or even a precise list of genes responsible for the tendency toward intraspecific aggression has not been found to date, so this is a promising direction for applying effort if you specialize in the relevant biological disciplines.
Several approaches can be proposed for washing out the hereditary tendency toward intraspecific aggression from human society, which differ both in ease of application and in the speed of achieving results.
6.1 Forcing Natural Selection
When armed self-defense is available and welcomed in society, aggressors quickly exit the population. Thus, the implementation of the methods outlined in section 3 can ensure a long-term reduction of aggressiveness in society, although natural glitches and mutations will still not allow the complete and final elimination of intraspecific aggression; therefore, it will be necessary to constantly maintain a uniform BPN (Balance of Power/Non-aggression) so that pathological aggressors appearing by chance as a result of mutation are washed out of the population.
6.2 Sexual Selection
As historian Martin van Creveld said,
“the true reason for the existence of wars is that men have always loved to fight, and women have always loved warriors.”
“the true reason for the existence of wars is that men have always loved to fight, and women have always loved warriors.”
As women increasingly prefer caring partners over aggressive ones, carriers of genes with low aggressiveness get more chances to have offspring—after which aggressive individuals go off to squander their lives and manage perfectly well without reproducing.
In addition to these methods, which are suitable for application already now, the development of science may allow for more direct methods of influence in the future.
6.3 Embryo Selection
A DNA sample is taken from the fetus and analyzed for pathological hereditary diseases, including those related to a tendency toward aggression; in the event of a positive analysis result, the pregnancy is terminated. More obvious hereditary diseases, such as Down syndrome, are already fought in this way. Convincing a mother not to deal with problems she does not need and simply make another attempt at conception later is a solvable task, provided there are not too many cultural constraints in society prohibiting the termination of pregnancy.
6.4 Genetic Modification in Adults
A virus is created that integrates into human DNA and either switches off the genes responsible for the tendency toward aggression or reduces their expression. The technology of genetic modification itself has already been created and is actively developing, but exactly which genes and how exactly should be corrected still needs to be studied thoroughly. The direct switching off of genes most obviously linked to aggression so far leads to many undesirable side pathologies in experiments, so the technology is yet to be refined.
6.5 Genetic Modification at the Embryonic Stage
The method is the same as in the previous point, but it introduces changes into the genome that will subsequently be inherited. The task is much easier, since changes need to be introduced into literally one cell, rather than into an already formed organism.
6.6 Supportive Medication Therapy
Since the tendency toward aggressive violence is regulated by the hormonal background, it is not strictly necessary to delve into the genome if the hormonal background itself can be regulated. Currently, this is done with medications, but in the future, implanted hormonal regulators could be used for this purpose.
Some of the described methods can be practiced by everyone; some require qualification. In any case, speaking of methods 6.4 or 6.6, there can be no question of coercion. Even if someone committed aggressive violence under the influence of pathological tendencies, they should be left with a choice: ridding themselves of the pathology or bearing full responsibility for the act committed. In the latter case, this, again, should not be associated with violent punishments—only compensation for damages and restriction of communication opportunities.
Conclusions
Maintaining a low level of internal aggression in human society is a complex and multifactorial task. There is no single universal solution here; instead, there is room for initiative in a wide variety of directions, some of which are outlined above. It is important to realize the existence of the problem itself, not to hush it up, and to discuss it freely, as if it were a problem of cardiovascular diseases. One manifestation of strong intraspecific aggression in humans became such an institution as the state, with its tendency to sacrifice countless victims on the altar of its own greatness, or simply to poison people’s lives in peacetime. As humanity realizes the tendency toward violence as a problem, this toxic institution will go into the past—either completely, or it will transform into a harmless set of voluntary services. As ideas about the necessity of transitioning to non-violent interactions penetrate, they will find increasing support both in funds and volunteers, but for now, a great responsibility for its rooting in society lies with the few adherents of the idea.