In my recent article on ideological diversity, I talked about how ideas of freedom spread and why this is better than direct missionary work within a single rigid doctrine. Now I would like to look at a related problem: what to do with ideas of un-freedom and their carriers.
Why are ideas of un-freedom attractive?
First, they are relevant to the current state of affairs. Today’s world is far from the ideals of freedom both de jure and de facto. Therefore, the desire to think within a realistic approach and not bother with utopias is quite natural. Understanding that the state was born as a purely bandit formation and then evolved into a modern corporate structure for the purpose of even more effective and stable suppression of the dissatisfied, seizing funds from subjects, and capturing new subjects from neighbors, will in no way help in communicating with state structures. What will help is studying the interconnections between these very structures, both formal and informal, making acquaintances with state functionaries, and other real topics that can bring money, influence, and a decent quality of life.
Second, there are many examples of the collapse of state structures and the transition of a territory to a failed state status—and every time it invariably turns out that the territory turns into a bandit enclave, and freedom in it can only be spoken of as the freedom to rob and kill without fearing retribution from the state, due to its absence. In other words, the state obviously curbs the rampage of private banditry, and therefore should be viewed as a blessing, and these “ideas of freedom” of yours shake the foundations, so please pay a fine for extremism and be thankful you aren’t serving a prison sentence.
Third, there is a simple and clear principle: if it works, don’t touch it. Supporters of the status quo will always prefer the current, more or less understood situation, and even if they clearly see the flaws of the system, they will prefer to put up with them rather than choose the uncertainty of the future. If a potential reformer does not have a clear, realistic, step-by-step plan with which the opponent fully agrees at every point, that opponent will always prefer to touch nothing.
How to work with this?
With supporters of living in the real world, everything is quite simple. As soon as they see real-world examples that some free technology effectively handles and withstands the blow of the state, they simply incorporate it into their picture of the real world. For instance, any realist knows for sure that nothing can be blocked on the internet; it is a simple, clear, and easily observable fact. And the realist will themselves laugh at the naive dreamers from some Roskomnadzor, in whose fantasy world adding a resource to the register of blocked resources immediately destroys the corresponding information or service. Similarly, for realists, it is beyond doubt that the state is unable to block Bitcoin transfers, and therefore they logically perceive the complex of anti-money laundering legislation as a set of poorly working spells that should not be taken to heart. So just feed them facts from life, and after some time, they will themselves ridicule the naive etatists who rely in any way on this pathetic seventeenth-century rudiment, the so-called state.
It is also not difficult to find an approach to the adepts of the “don’t touch what works” idea. In general, they are psychologically ready to support a concept such as “everything new is free.” They can be shown how a certain endeavor worked and developed wonderfully after its appearance, and then the state came along and started “fixing” what was working. After that, it usually started working worse. This applies to attempts at state regulation of the internet, the enslavement of the electronic transfer sphere, KYC regimes in banks and exchanges, and all sorts of platform services like Uber—everywhere the principle of “if it works, don’t touch it” was violated specifically by the state. In the same way, it tends to interfere in any voluntary transactions. Finally, one can provide numerous examples of how the state “fixes” already working mechanisms directly related to the functioning of the state. Citizens learned how to achieve a relatively honest vote count in elections—the state changes the election law, making it harder for citizens to control falsifications. A danger arises that a district might go to the opposition—the state engages in gerrymandering or removes the opponent from the election. In short, the state itself so actively violates the principle of not fixing what works that suggesting one should not touch the state because it works turns out to be, at the very least, inconsistent.
All that remains is to deal with the failed state argument. Here, the main counterargument is that this state arises not because people strove for ancap. A failed state always arises after a dictatorship. If the dictatorship ignored reality, made external and internal enemies, and accumulated critical vulnerabilities in the system, then eventually the state broke, leaving citizens poor, fragmented, and incompetent in matters of peaceful cooperation. This created the failed state situation, where people trust only the strongest social ties, the crudest arguments, such as the threat of weapons, and the shortest-term strategies, since under conditions of strong uncertainty, there is no point in long-term planning.
Accordingly, if citizens are already learning to trust weak social ties, plan for the long term without including state handouts in their plans, and do not base their wealth strategies on robbery—then the more of them there are, the less likely a failed state will appear when the next dictatorship collapses. A number of countries that failed to overcome their dictatorship nevertheless did not collapse into a failed state after the dictators died, but began to build something more decent. Spain and Portugal serve as good examples. It turns out that the more actively the supporters of the dictatorship uproot civil society in the country, even if it is disloyal to the dictator, the higher the probability that it will end in a failed state. So they are simply fighting the wrong battle.
